About 15 percent of post-docs and PhD students lack the motivation to continue working since the lockdown due to covid 19. Some 40 percent find themselves not productive or hardly productive at all. Permanent employees suffer much less from this.
This is evident from a recently published survey of social well-being within the LHCb collaboration. In an open survey, two hundred participants answered questions about their lives during the corona pandemic. That has seriously deteriorated, says Suzanne Klaver of Nikhef. She is connected to the LHCb experiment and is one of the authors of the study (including Valeriia Lukashenko from Nikhef).
Klaver: ‘Half of the PhD students, 45 percent of the post-docs and 20 percent of the permanent staff report a deterioration of their mental well-being. That’s a very worrying signal.’ She points out that one-third of the participants report that they do not get enough support with their problems.
PhD students and students living abroad have a particularly hard time, survey results among LHCb researchers show. They lack a network of friends and family and, because of the lockdown, a social life. As a result, there is often no longer a balance between life and work.
According to Klaver, the outcomes are certainly not typical for LHCb. She is particularly concerned about the lack of social environment for foreign PhD students and post-docs. ‘Especially when people have started somewhere during the lockdown, they have nothing or no one.’
The researchers argue for more informal meetings for young researchers and an accessible opportunity to talk about work-related questions. At LHCb, since the beginning of this year there has been a short questionnaire with which students and postdocs can assess their well-being. This includes feelings of loneliness, job satisfaction and, for example, sleep.
The results and recommendations of the study will be discussed in more detail at CERN and at conferences in the near future. ‘This is a problem that everyone needs to be aware of,’ says Klaver.
Nikhef announced Wednesday that because of relaxed corona rules, more staff members are welcome in the building again. “With this additional space in the occupancy, we want to give first of all the PhDs and postdocs the opportunity to come to Nikhef again and to their supervisors to meet with them at Nikhef,” said director Stan Bentvelsen.