Goals of this post
The goal of this blog post is to share my thoughts and opinions on doing a PhD in France. I'm often asked about my experience as a PhD student by master or bachelor students, or discussing with friends who have a biased idea of what conducting such journey looks like. This post is the occasion of summarizing everything at the same place for them to consult.
In this post, I will try to give an overview of what it is like in my situation, and talk about other situations that I know of through friends and colleagues. I will try to give my best advice if you want to start a PhD : how to decide if you should do a PhD, how should you prepare, what are the challenges ... and many other questions.
Context
Global context
This blog post is AI free. Opinions and views are my own, and in no way represent the policy, view or opinion of any colleagues or institution that could be linked to me. All the things mentioned below are linked to my experience or the experience of close friends, and are in no way to be considered as a representative sample or facts that precisely describe reality. Also, keep in mind that research is conducted in a specific field, at a given time in a given country and institutions. This context varies for everyone, and plays a huge role in the personal experience as a PhD student.
Personal context
At the time I am writing this post, I am starting my second year of PhD studies. I also did my master's degree internship on the same topic as my PhD subject so I have been working on this for almost two years now. For the context, in almost all master's degree in my country, a 3 to 6 month internship is mandatory, either in a research laboratory or a company. So far, everything is going really well for me, which is part of the reasons why I tend to have a positive view and experience of what going through a PhD is like.
Doing a PhD
What is a PhD ? Comparison to bachelor and master degree
In the current French higher education system, the hierarchy of diplomas (despite being really complex) can be summarized the following way :
- Bachelor : Acquire strong base knowledge and methodology in a global field and basic professional skills. After this first cycle of study, you should have enough knowledge, skills and professional capacities to enter the job market in executive positions or support functions (this can be debated because of France's implementation of the Bologna Process but here is not the place).
- Master : Acquire advanced knowledge and methodology in a precise field, and advanced professional skills. After this second cycle, you should be able to question established knowledge in a given context and have advanced skills and professional capacities to enter higher executive, engineering and decision making positions in industry.
- PhD : Acquire cutting-edge knowledge on your precise sub-field, question and produce state-of-the-art knowledge. After a PhD, you should be the world's best expert on your precise topic and be able to create new scientific knowledge on this topic. This includes broad but precise knowledge of your context, making new hypothesis and conducting experiments to prove them right or wrong. Surprisingly, doctors tend to struggle more with regards to professional capacities, which is a known problem that is (attempted to be) addressed in my country, but I will go back to this later
While the bachelor and master degree aim at making you a knowledgeable worker in your field, a PhD requires you to demonstrate your capacity to create new knowledge in your field while being supervised by established researchers. When trying to access an academic position later (either as a researcher or a teaching researcher), most people tend to enter Postdoc positions after their PhD. This last step aims at demonstrating your capacity to produce new knowledge while being unsupervised by other researchers (or way less supervised than previously), making you one step closer to a fully independent researcher.
This difference in degree goals is - in my opinion - one of the most important thing to understand to decide if you should start a PhD and what should be your goals if you go for it. One should not consider a PhD as the logical continuity if they have no idea what to do after a master's degree, but rather see it as totally different approach to their field and to knowledge in general. The gap in methodology and work is huge between a bachelor and a master's degree, but it is even greater when starting a PhD. You have to understand that the PhD makes you a different type of worker both in academia and in the private industry. A highly qualified worker with a master's degree is expected to lead projects and people to produce added value or have a specific technical skill or knowledge. A PhD worker is expected to lead its company or lab or research field into discovering new knowledge through experience leading. Those two complementary roles are very different and should be regarded as two different layers of systems that lead groups of people to innovation.
Should you do a PhD?
Reasons to do (or not) a PhD
You should do a PhD if you are curious and passionate about one precise field. It is necessary if you want to have a career in academia in almost all countries, but a career in the industry or public administration is also possible.
You should not do a PhD if you are interested in money, recognition and work-life balance, tough the latest is debatable (see below chapter).
Personality traits to do a PhD
In my opinion, you should commit to do a PhD if you are a curious and proactive person. The global philosophy of it is that you will spend three years or more digging a precise subject of interest for you. You should be able to explore things on your own, have a high creativity and be highly autonomous (or at least capable of becoming autonomous on the long run) on your work. You do not have to be the major of your master's degree. In fact, high grades do not automatically make you a good PhD student, but curiosity, pro activity and creativity do.
It's crucial to be aware of those "personality requirements" beforehand because it's really easy to start and to get lost from the beginning if you are not capable of jumping into matter really quick. You need to have your own ideas (even if they are bad, nobody wins a Nobel prize in their first years right) and explore hem, make your own experiments and experiences. So far, the best results I got during my work were "side-quests" for which I allowed myself to lose a few days of work, and turned out to be major advancements in my research.
I would strongly advice against doing a PhD if you need to be densely supervised to work. It is easy to be left autonomous by your lab and/or supervisors and ending up having made no advancement in several months because you procrastinated everything. You should be able to make progress even when no one is looking over your shoulder. In this regards, academia life is really different from industry. When working for a company, it's your manager job to make sure the advancements are made properly. In academia, making no advancement actually undermines you and yourself only, which makes it easier to self-sabotage if you are not autonomous enough.
It is also really easy to get lost into secondary tasks and never make major advancement in what actually matters. Therefore, organizing yourself during your PhD is of major importance and you need to be able to prioritize things not to drown into useless tasks. Those secondary tasks include useless reading, emails answering, sometimes giving too much energy into teaching or committing to tasks that are not yours to do.
What to expect
Two types of PhD
In France, you can either do a PhD in a lab or university, or in a company that does research. In the later case, the contract is a CIFRE contract, which is similar legally but implies a different PhD experience. Most of what I say in this section apply to the first case.
PhD duration
In France, in most field (every field except some social science fields) it is legally forced that you have a PhD contract (equivalent to time-delimited full time job). The PhD contract lasts 3 years, then extensions are possible but they need to be justified. In other countries, PhD are expected to be longer than 3 years, even when they are fully funded and expect you to work full time (in Germany it is more like 5 to 6 years for instance). In other countries, PhDs can be done part-time while working to finance daily life (common in Georgia for instance), which tends to put students in a difficult situation because they finish their PhD quite late (in their 30s or something like that) which is not an enjoyable situation.
Financing
I can only talk about the French situation in this section. When you get a legal PhD contract, the wage of the PhD student is fixed by the law. It was upgraded in 2021 during the last higher education law that was passed, and it is not planned to be increased in the next years yet. This amount is before taxes, so in reality its more like 1750€/months. The median wage in France in 2025 is 2150€.
There are two main ways to get a PhD contract funding.
University funding
Graduate schools within universities often offer a given number of PhD funding a year. To do so, they select a student with its subject when they are in their last semester of master's degree. This process is more or less selective based on the number of applicants and number of grants available. For instance, in computer science in Lille, we tend to have 10 to 12 candidates a year for 10 grants, but in biology its more like 20 grants for 200 students. The early selection implies that you need to be in contact with researchers early in your degree to apply to this kind of grants, because most of the time it's the researcher who will guide you and help you prepare for the selection process. It's important to know that the synergy between the student and their subject is also evaluated, so it's not only about having good grades during your previous degrees, it's also about convincing the jury that the subject is made for you.
Grant funding
Researchers who benefit from research grants (ANR in France, ERC in Europe etc) tend to have a given number of finance slots for PhD contracts and use them as they want. They decide who they recruit and on what criteria. It's honestly the most comfortable situation for a PhD student, because the PhD grant comes with additional funding for traveling and buying working stuff. It can sometimes feel like you entirely rely on the budget that was given to someone else. It is not entirely false, but keep in mind that they recruited you for a reason. Figuring this out is the first battle against the impostor's syndrome of your carrier.
Teaching
If you do a PhD in a University lab (so not a CIFRE contract), you may be allowed to teach. It is not mandatory in most positions, but is almost always required if you want to apply to an associate professor position afterwards. In France, you get additional wage for the teaching hours that you did during a year, even though the administration tends to take several months to pay you. The maximum amount of teaching a PhD student can do it 64 hours, which corresponds to one third of the teaching duty of an associate professor. Hourly wage varies depending on the type of class you give (lectures, driven sessions or practical sessions) but a good rule of thumb is that giving 64 hours of teaching will earn you an additional 200€ a month over one year (institutions tend to more and more make monthly teaching payoff instead of punctual payoff even if your classes were held on a tight schedule).
Advice to start (and end) a PhD
Your supervisor(s) is the most important factor to take into account. It's more important to have a good supervisor than a good subject. You will fine-tune your subject anyway, but you cannot change a researcher who has been in position for decades. Getting along with them is important for the work communication. Most importantly, you need to be supervised by someone who respect your boundaries, your work-life balance and you as a person. Many stories exist about harassment in academia and people being burnt-out because of their supervisor pressure, and I cannot say it does not exists as I'm witnessing colleagues suffer from this almost on a daily basis. I get along very well with both my supervisors which makes the PhD experience really enjoyable (and I cannot stress this enough, thanks to them for being amazing people) , but it is easy to see how painful it can become when supervised by the wrong person. It is also important to find someone who actually dedicates time to you and your work, as it makes a huge difference in the progress you will make.
Start writing things as soon as possible. Keep a journal of what you did everyday and your feeling, write small notes about the papers you read that summarize what you understood, keep track of your thoughts on the state of the art ... Document your progress on the way. It will make the final writing much easier. More generally, write things down in notes, do to-do-lists with deadlines, and write down your ideas. You need to create your own material to reflect on it.
Organize your life. Make sure you still have social and physical activities. Those are crucial to keep you grounded. It is really easy to have your mind fully taken by your PhD subject, do only this and forget about any other type of activity. Not only will you become depressed and suffer from health issue, but you will also become boring if the only thing you can talk about is your PhD subject. If often say to myself : "I need a non-exclusive intellectual relationship with my PhD thesis" and I think it summarizes it quite well.
Do sport. A lot of people struggle with mental health during their PhD. Personal opinion here, but I think mental health cannot go without physical health. Go for a run, do biking or walking or whatever. It will help you flatten all the noisy ideas that cripple your mind and help you make actual advancement. It took me a while to figure this out, but when I started doing physical activity things really changed as my working output became significantly higher. Also, I see people with three kids and who work 50 hours a week do one hour of sport everyday, so "not having time" really means you're not taking time and finding excuse, but when you start and experience the benefit of it there is not turning back.
One of the most unspoken advice is : go talk to people. Scientists can be intimidating, but keep in mind that 95% of the time they are just shy persons with really specific interests who are super grateful when someone is genuinely interested in what they do. Go small-talking, ask to share a coffee or just send an email with a question. Unlike dating, the real worse thing they can say it no. Going to this random talk you received an email about, skipping class to attend the local conference or asking this silly question that you are afraid to ask to a professor can really be the entry point of a nice working story. Otherwise, people would not bother organizing such social events nor pay for participants to get free coffee. Personal anecdote here : all the masters student I currently work with (for internship or master thesis) are people who came to ask questions about my work. I did not publish any offer, or even planned to recruit anyone in the first place. I did not even have a look at their grades before accepting to supervise what they do, because what really matters is the will of people to develop their knowledge about something, and not their capacity to memorize a given set of knowledge. As far as I witnessed this process, exactly the same thing happens when recruiting PhD students.
Social bullying
Doing a PhD basically means that you will be a student until you're at least 27 years old. Even if things change when you start to get a wage, you need to have a mind that when your finish, you will be old enough to start wanting to do grown-up things, such as buying a house, have kids or whatever. You need to know beforehand (and in the optimistic case in which you get a position before 30) that you will not have the money, time and freedom to do so until later. This academia integration bullying, combined with the low wages, results in a social bullying of young researchers that make the careers in academia hard to commit to. If you want none of the things mentioned above and just want to be paid a survivable wage to work on your specific interest, it is worth making the effort of getting a position.
Administrative bullying
Academia and universities in general are a pain when it comes to paperwork, especially in France (but I know from reliable sources that it's far worse in Germany). It took my supervisor and I six months of paper work to register me as a PhD student, even tough I did my bachelor and master degree in the very same university and did a six month internship in the very same lab. I cannot imagine how painful it must be for international students. Academia also takes several months to pay or reimburse you for almost anything. Various administrations will require paperwork from you that will make you lose tremendous amount of time, only to fulfill their specific fantasies, and will be ultra picky about how you fill their super abstract and endless forms. Sometimes, administrative tasks will give you the feeling that they were made as a test to assess how compliant you can be with stupid instructions. It's not a test. The craziest thing that comes to my mind is a step of the registration in PhD where the website lets you download a PhD document that you should not edit or sign, and asks you to re-upload it on the very same page without refreshing. More generally, administration will test your mind and resilience, and make Franz Kafka appear as a romance writer.
Conclusion
Doing a PhD is long and difficult, but can be really enjoyable if done in the right context. It is a necessary step to get a position in academia, but you can decide to work for the industry, create your own company or whatever when you finished. Getting a permanent position is really hard and not financially comfortable in France, but you get to choose your working time and your subject. Once you get a permanent position, it is almost impossible to be fired. Other countries offer differently paid positions with hardest entry requirements. For instance, when comparing to the US, its much harder and longer to get a position there but its also paid twice as much when adjusted for cost of living.
I would recommend to start a PhD if you find the right opportunity at the right moment, and are curious enough to commit to one topic for three or more years. Never hesitate to ask questions, contact the former students of your future supervisor(s), and read the papers of someone beforehand.
The experience of doing a PhD is personal and this blog only reflects my view as second year PhD student, so feel free to disagree and debate with me during conferences or in my social medias. Also, feel free to contact me if you are a student and want any additional information : the essence of academia is to answer any question.