The Flexible PhD
On working from home, academic trust, and why good science doesn’t require constant surveillance.
During my PhD, my supervisor let everyone in the lab work from home whenever they needed to, no questions asked.
There was no formal approval process, elaborate justification, and or awkward conversation where you had to convince him that your reason was worthy. If you had a doctor’s appointment, needed to be home for a repair, had a long stretch of writing to get through, or just knew you would work better somewhere quieter that day, you could send a quick message and work from home.
At the time, I knew this was a good thing, but I don’t think I fully understood how rare it was until I started hearing more stories from other PhD students. Within a few months of starting my PhD, I had heard from so many other students that they were constantly monitored, questioned, second-guessed, and overworked in their labs.
I was very lucky that this wasn’t my experience because my supervisor was supportive, caring, and treated the people in his lab with immense respect. He didn’t act like a PhD student’s commitment had to be measured by how often they were physically in the building. He didn’t assume that someone working from home was secretly doing nothing.
And I think part of the reason he understood this so well was because he applied the same logic to himself. He would work from home when he had a lot of writing to do and needed a quiet place without interruptions. He would work from home if he had a doctor’s appointment, or if someone was coming to fix something in his house, or if it was just too cold that day and he didn’t want to make the journey to the lab.
So many academic environments still treat that kind of flexibility as something dangerous. There’s this underlying fear that if students are given too much freedom, they will immediately take advantage of it, stop working, disappear, or fall behind on their research.
But I think that fear actually says more about the culture of the lab than it does about the students. Because in our lab, the flexibility didn’t make people careless. If anything, it made us all feel even more responsibility to step up to our obligations. We knew we were lucky to have that level of trust from our supervisor, and we didn’t want to abuse it.
So everyone in the lab published, collaborated, helped each other, prepared talks, wrote papers, ran analyses, planned experiments, and actually had the energy to do all those things without burning out. There were high standards, but those standards were attached to the quality of the science, not to whether someone could be seen sitting in the same building every single day.
When you’re reading papers, analyzing data, writing thesis chapters, preparing figures, debugging code, revising a manuscript, or thinking through a result, that doesn’t need to happen under fluorescent lights in a university building. I know for me personally, I wrote almost all of my thesis either at home or at a coffee shop.
Of course, there’s work that needs to happen in person. Labs need people there for experiments, meetings, training, equipment, collaboration, etc. But there’s a difference between needing people present because they genuinely need to be there and expecting them to be there even when it isn’t necessary or is actively detrimental to their productivity or energy.
I know the supervisors who don’t give this level of trust to their students genuinely believe they’re maintaining standards, building resilience, or teaching students what science requires. But in many cases, I think it actually has the opposite effect.
When you’re treated like a capable adult, you usually become more careful with the trust you are given. You don’t want to waste it or take advantage of it. You understand that the freedom exists because the expectations are real, and because someone believes you can manage yourself without being constantly monitored.
This environment asks you to develop judgement that you take with you the rest of your career. It helps you determine what kind of work requires collaboration and what kind requires solitude. It encourages you to think deeply about your time, energy, responsibilities, and the standards of your field to balance it all. It teaches you to truly become independent instead of just learning how to survive under someone else’s control.
And isn’t that supposed to be the point of a PhD? A doctoral program is meant to train someone into an independent researcher. You can’t tell students to become self-directed thinkers while also policing every hour of their day as if they’re children trying to skip school.
If you want students to become independent, you have to give them opportunities to practice independence. If you want them to make good decisions, you have to let them make decisions. If you want them to take ownership of their work, you have to stop treating accountability as something that can only happen under surveillance.
I don’t want to pretend like my PhD experience was a walk in the park, because no PhD is. There were hard periods, stressful deadlines, failed analyses, confusing results, and a lot of times when I wanted to give up.
But when I compare my experience to what many others went through, I know the culture of my lab made an enormous difference. The hard parts of my PhD were because of the work itself, not because I needed to constantly navigate someone else’s insecurity or need for control.
My supervisor taught me that high standards and humane leadership are not opposing forces. It showed me that people can be ambitious without being watched, productive without being controlled, and committed to their work without organizing their entire life around being seen.
A good PhD environment does not have to be built on surveillance, suspicion, or constant proof of commitment. Sometimes it really is as simple as trusting people to do their work, and letting them have a life while they do it.
If I were in your shoes...
If I were a PhD student trying to decide which lab to join, I would pay attention to how the supervisor talks about time.
The project, publications, funding, or where previous students ended up all obviously matter, but it’s important to learn what daily life in the lab actually feels like. Are students allowed to work from home when their work can be done remotely? Do people take holidays without guilt? Are appointments treated like normal parts of life?
So before joining a lab, I would try to speak to current students without the supervisor present and ask very direct questions. What time do people usually leave? What happens if someone needs a day at home to write? Does the supervisor care more about progress or physical presence? Do students feel comfortable being honest when they are overwhelmed or stuck?
I would also try to determine if people answer carefully or freely. If every student sounds like they are choosing their words very carefully, that probably tells you something.
If I were already in a PhD, I would try to be realistic about what kind of flexibility is actually possible given the nature of the work I was doing and the style of my supervisor.
Then I would make requests in a way that makes it easy to say yes. Instead of vaguely asking, “Can I work from home tomorrow?” I would say something like, “I’m going to work from home tomorrow so I can finish the analysis section and revise the figures without interruption. I’ll send you an update by the end of the day.”
And if your supervisor is very controlling, I would try to find ways to make it more bearable. Maybe you bring noise-cancelling headphones to the office while you write, and put on some background noise of a coffee shop to imagine you’re elsewhere. Or take a 5 minute walk once every hour to get some fresh air and a change of scenery. And keep reminding yourself you won’t be there forever.
In My Orbit
I just finished watching an action-thriller this week starring Bruce Willis and Sarah Jessica Parker called Striking Distance. I thought the movie was really well done, and had a great twist ending. I thought I guessed it a few minutes into the movie, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.
The movie was also full of real live action scenes, and of course no CGI. It’s honestly amazing to look back at older movies and see what they used to do, and in my opinion it looks a thousand times better. Definitely one I would recommend to add to your list!