Opinion Post-PhD trauma: We are treated as an ‘overqualified’ but ‘inexperienced’ lot. This must change
Transparent hiring practices, accountability in recruitment, recognition of doctoral research as professional experience, and institutional support for post-PhD transitions are necessities
Outside universities, a PhD is rarely recognised as work experience. Completing a PhD is often described as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. What is spoken about far less, especially in India, is what comes after it. For many, the period following the doctorate is not a smooth transition into professional stability but a prolonged encounter with uncertainty, invisibility, and quiet humiliation. I call this phase “post-PhD trauma.” Some people refer to it as Post-Dissertation Stress Disorder (PDSD), but that term is usually used in a different context. Here, post-PhD trauma names a condition that is neither individual nor accidental, but structural.
I returned to India after completing my PhD in the UK with a sense of purpose. This decision was shaped by political and ethical commitments rather than nostalgia. I wanted to join a university as a faculty member, to teach, and to contribute to making higher education more inclusive, particularly for students from rural, vernacular, and marginalised backgrounds. Having navigated academic spaces not designed for people like me — Dalit and Adivasi scholars — I felt a responsibility to reflect on how institutions fail students, how exclusion is normalised, and how knowledge production might be reimagined to become more democratic.
During my doctoral years, my research moved across cinema, caste, representation, and cultural labour, attempting to situate film studies within lived social and political realities rather than narrow disciplinary frames. What followed my return, however, was a long stretch of unanswered job applications, opaque hiring processes, and deeply unprofessional encounters. In one instance, I was invited to an interview at very short notice and later learned, through informal channels, that the position had already been filled. The interview functioned only as a procedural requirement.
These experiences are not anomalies. They are symptoms of an academic system increasingly organised around gatekeeping rather than demonstrable academic labour and networks. For scholars from marginalised backgrounds, the cruelty of this system is amplified. A foreign PhD raises expectations — within families, communities, and peer groups — that employment and stability will follow. When this does not happen, the silence becomes heavy. Months of unemployment turn into economic pressure, social shame, and mental exhaustion. For me, this period was marked by profound distress and isolation, with moments when survival itself felt uncertain.
Outside universities, a PhD is rarely recognised as work experience. When scholars attempt to move into other sectors, they are told they are overqualified yet under-experienced. The doctoral degree, once associated with expertise and depth, is treated as excess baggage. Many are pushed into poorly paid positions, negotiating their worth downward despite having invested years of intellectual effort and emotional toll. What is repeatedly framed as individual inadequacy is, in fact, systemic. Indian academia is deeply stratified, continuing to privilege caste-based advantage. Spaces intended for intellectual exchange frequently operate through informal hierarchies, where visibility, recognition, and recall function as forms of capital.
For those positioned outside established academic elite networks, this demand is exhausting. It requires continuous emotional regulation and social calculation, shifting attention away from sustained intellectual work toward performative visibility. This volatility is not evenly distributed. Dalit, Adivasi, and other marginalised researchers face fewer safety nets and greater scrutiny. Even academic excellence is often met with suspicion, filtered through assumptions about reservation and accompanied by unsolicited instruction that disguises hierarchy as guidance.
Indian academia urgently needs reform. Transparent hiring practices, accountability in recruitment, recognition of doctoral research as professional experience, and institutional support for post-PhD transitions are necessities. More fundamentally, we must acknowledge that knowledge production cannot thrive in ecosystems that systematically exclude those without social and cultural capital.
Post-PhD trauma is not a personal crisis. It is a collective warning. When scholars trained to think critically, ethically, and creatively are left without pathways, we are impoverishing the future of higher education itself. The question is no longer whether the system is broken, but whether we are willing to listen to those it continues to break.
The writer is a researcher specialising in caste and cinema
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