After Two Years, I’m Finally Writing My First Blog Post

I didn’t really think my first blog post would be about this topic. For the past two years, I kept thinking I should start writing something, but I never actually got around to doing it (and honestly, even this post got delayed way more times than I want to admit). There were two main reasons. First, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write about. Second, this constant feeling of anxiety and uncertainty just slowly killed my motivation to write anything.

Now I’m in the last few months of my PhD study, and I feel a bit more calm than before. So I want to use this post (or maybe a series of posts) to look back at the past 10 years since I entered university as a freshman, both what happened in my life and what I was thinking about during these years. And also to figure out where I am right now.

When I started writing this post, it was November 21, 2025. It was 2 days after NVIDIA released their one of the strongest Q3 2025 earnings report (NVIDIA Q3), and 1 day after the UK government announced the biggest immigration reform in almost 50 years (UK GOV). Today the temperature dropped to almost 0°C (DTG Weather). Edinburgh was so cold and windy, but still no snow. And the Christmas market on Princes Street was already up and running.

Black Friday sales had already started, and I bought a few things online like I usually do. On the surface, nothing looked dramatically different from before. Stock markets kept going up, the Nasdaq just hit a new all-time high. The AI bubble still hasn’t burst (and maybe it never will). Politics keeps moving more to the right. Cost of living is still high. It was just an ordinary day in an ordinary week. And this is the background when I’m writing this post.

This post won’t talk much about my specific PhD research. If I still feel like writing more later, I might do a separate post about my research work.

In Final Year of My PhD, I Started to Face “What Comes After”

This autumn, my PhD officially entered its final year. Like many PhD students who are close to graduation, I had to start thinking more seriously about a question that’s been bothering me for several years now: what should I do next, and where should I go?

I say “more seriously” because this question isn’t new. For the past two or three years, it’s been there in the background like constant noise. I keep refreshing job postings, looking at other people’s career paths, trying to figure out at which stage I’ll probably get filtered out and how to make myself more competitive. These thoughts just keep going in circles, using up a lot of my energy and keeping my mental state pretty low.

After talking with several colleagues in the Uni, I slowly realized something. In the UK and Europe, this kind of anxiety might not even be seen as a “problem”. Gap years and work-life balance are pretty common here (No offence, but they’re kind of like privileges that come with certain backgrounds, especially considering almost all my colleagues in St Andrews are white). A lot of people just take a “things will work out” approach to graduation. Some people don’t worry about their future at all. In the system they know, life actually has much more room for mistakes.

I’m not sure if I just worry too much, but this is a big problem for me and I do worry about it a lot. More precisely, this isn’t just some abstract “anxiety”. It’s very specific constraints: age, passport, research area, visa category, funding trends, and career paths themselves. When you put all these variables together, they create a real boundary that’s hard to ignore.

Approaching 30: Age, Identity, and the “Curse of 35”

I’m 28 now, and I’ve been in the UK for almost six years. If I count from the start of my undergrad in 2016 to my expected PhD graduation in 2026, almost a whole decade of my life has been spent in different kinds of “higher education institutions”. Before that, my life was roughly split between Japan and China. I personally think I have at least some “overseas experience”, but when I compare it with my time in East Asia, I have to admit something:

In the UK, I still find it really hard to become part of “local community”. And the differences between East and West in culture, job opportunities, and how people think about life are way bigger than I thought when I first came here.

At the same time, time is moving toward a very serious number: 30. In today’s Chinese job market, 30 is already close to the warning line for what people call the “curse of 35”. There are articles about this in The New York Times and CNN. Most people think it mainly happens in industries like high-tech companies. But in recent years, age requirements have also started showing up in some academic job postings (not everywhere, but they do exist). Things like “under 30 preferred” or “no PhD graduates over 30” actually appear in some job ads. Some local policies even say PhD graduates must be under 28 when they graduate. This means that just based on my age, I’m already excluded from those opportunities.

When I mentioned these things to career advisors at Uni, I usually got responses like “I’ve heard of that happening in some limited areas, but you shouldn’t worry too much about it.” I get tired of explaining things in detail every time, but this shows how different our information environments are. When something only exists in certain countries, you can’t really expect specific advice about it from a system where it doesn’t exist at all. (Still, St Andrews is a special place. Surprisingly, there is no professor or lecturer from China in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, and I can barely find anyone to have a useful discussion with about this situation.)

The reason behind this age curse is pretty simple and brutal: when there are way more people than job positions, age becomes the easiest and cheapest way to filter people out.

More PhDs, Fewer Positions

None of this is really surprising when you think about it. But when it actually happens to your generation, the impact feels very real.

Take South Korea as an example. From the 1980s to the 2000s, higher education expanded really fast and university enrollment rates kept going up. For a long time, the idea that “better education = better job and better life” actually worked. But when everyone makes the same choice, degrees start losing their value. Master’s and PhD degrees are not rare anymore. Recent numbers show that almost 30% of PhD graduates in South Korea can’t find jobs that match their qualifications. Companies responded by caring more about your “first degree” (where you did undergrad). The 수능 (CSAT, their college entrance exam) became even more important, and the 학원 (cram school) culture got popular.

China’s path over the past ten years or so has been pretty similar. Once a bachelor’s degree doesn’t give you much advantage anymore, taking the entrance exam for master’s programs becomes the most realistic “way up”. (An important note: in China, most master’s students still need to pass a really competitive entrance exam to get in, not just apply like in Europe or US.) Because of this, the number of graduate students grew really fast, and PhD enrollment expanded too. The number of PhD students went from around 300,000 in 2013 to over 600,000 by 2023 (Nature news). After COVID, this expansion got even more obvious. Starting from 2020, master’s programs expanded a lot. In 2022, 4.57 million people registered for the master’s entrance exam, that’s a 21.3% increase. You can see the data in Nature (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications) and the National Bureau of Statistics.

With this many students, the number of STEM PhDs has also been growing really fast. In 2025 alone, China produced more than 77,000 STEM PhD graduates (CSET). Meanwhile in 2024, the US awarded about 57,000 to 58,000 doctoral degrees across ALL fields, according to Forbes and NSF SED rankings.

And the expansion keeps going. Public information shows that some top universities now admit several thousand PhD students every year. Let me give you an example with just two leading universities: Tsinghua University admits about 3,000-4,000 PhD students per year, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University admits around 4,500. Even if we assume 20% of them don’t finish PhD study, the number of PhD graduates from just these two schools in five years will be close to or more than the total annual PhD output from the top ten research universities in the US (based on NSF SED rankings).

I’m not trying to make people panic with these numbers. I just want to show a simple fact that China’s higher education institutions are producing more highly educated people. But on the other hand, the number of high-level stable long-term jobs is not growing at the same speed. So eventually, most of the PhD graduates are facing the same situation in South Korea that they can’t find a qualified job.

In this situation, age naturally becomes a “cheap and easy” way to filter people out. Not everyone wants to admit this, but if you look at enough job postings and policies, you can see that many of them are already doing exactly this.

Age Limits, Up-or-Out, and Being a “Three-Without PhD”

The Nature news I mentioned earlier already covers part of the problem: too many people, too few positions. When it gets to the implementation stage, the tools are pretty simple:

  • Put an age limit directly in the job posting
  • Put “up-or-out” tenure-track conditions in the contract
  • Set age limits for “early-career” research funding

Take China’s research system as an example. For many early-career researchers, the first grant they try to get is the Young Scientists Fund from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). This is basically an “entry ticket” into the funding system. But it has an age requirement: male applicants must be under 35, female applicants under 40. For people who started their PhD later or took some detours, they lose this opportunity just because of timing.

Even if you’re lucky enough to get through the hiring process and get a university position, the “up-or-out” system will filter out another big group of people in the next few years. And then grant applications filter people again. At every step, the system keeps emphasizing being “young”, “highly productive”, and having the right titles. Missing any of these can be seen as a risk.

From my own point of view, it’s easy to put a label on myself: a “三无博士” (three-without PhD), or you can just call it a mediocre PhD:

  • Without connections (I didn’t do my Master’s and PhD in China)
  • Without high-impact papers (and they need to be first-author papers)
  • Without “hats” (no national talent titles or grant applications)

On top of that, my research area, Bayesian statistics, is also not really mainstream in China. Compared to more visible fields like AI or quantitative finance, there are fewer teams and fewer clear positions. This is easy to see if you do Bayesian research and go to conferences like the ISBA World Meeting (International Society for Bayesian Analysis) or BNP Conference (Bayesian nonparametrics). Researchers from mainland China are still pretty rare (Actually, I didn’t see a single researcher from mainland China at either ISBA 2024 or BNP 2025). When you do see Chinese faces, they’re usually from institutions outside mainland China.

In a group like this, I have a pretty clear feeling: if you put all of us PhD graduates in a row, I wouldn’t really stand out at first glance. I don’t think I’m dumb or anything, I used to be a star student too. But the world never runs out of talented people, especially in China where the population is so big. There are just so many smart people, and I’m just a nobody in this crowd.

Staying in the UK: Visa Uncertainty, Funding Cuts, and Subtle Discrimination

Staying in the UK academia is a whole different story. First, there’s the immigration status issue. After graduation, I need to apply for a new working visa. The Graduate visa (also called PSW visa) got cut down recently, which makes things more complicated. But that’s another long story on its own. I can still consider the Global Talent visa or other options.

Then there’s the bigger problem: positions and research funding here in the UK are also very limited and very uncertain. For example, after Labour came into power, they basically cancelled the £1.3 billion tech/AI investment that Sunak promised during his time. BBC reported that they redefined this money as an “unfunded commitment” which is a very British way of saying “we’re not actually going to give you this money.” The promise gets rewritten through careful wording, so they don’t have to deliver it. (Although they finally decided to provide the money in June, but under Starmer’s name now, haha, politics.) Similarly, other research budgets are also getting cut or delayed. When funding becomes uncertain, universities become more careful about hiring, especially hiring people who need visa sponsorship.

Looking at the current trend of UK policy, staying here probably isn’t really a good idea for people like me. I’m not from Europe and I’m not white. I have an Asian face, so people can immediately tell I’m on some kind of immigration status. And even though I have a legal immigration status, I can’t guarantee that the boundary between legal and illegal immigration will always be clear in people’s minds. The general public gets influenced really easily. Their emotions can be manipulated by news and politics. When politicians start talking about “controlling immigration” or “protecting jobs for British workers,” the line between legal skilled migrants and other categories starts to blur in public discourse.

I have to mention first that most of the people I’ve met here in Scotland are really nice and friendly. But still, I’ve noticed this subtle shift in how people treat you in a more right-leaning way. Sometimes it’s small things or just a slightly longer pause when you mention you’re on a visa, or the way someone asks “what’s your plan after graduation” or “how long are you planning to stay in the UK?” There’s this underlying assumption that you’re temporary, that you don’t really belong here and will never be part of the local community. And with the recent changes in immigration rules: the salary thresholds going up, the restrictions on dependents, the uncertainty around visa renewals. It all adds up to a feeling that the UK is not exactly welcoming to people like me anymore.

Plus, there’s the practical side. Academic positions in the UK are already super competitive, even for British citizens. When you add visa sponsorship requirements on top, you’re basically adding another filter. Some job postings explicitly say they can’t sponsor visas. Others don’t say it explicitly, but you can tell from how the process goes. And even if you get the job, you’re always aware that your visa is tied to your employment. If the funding runs out, if the project gets cancelled, if the department decides to restructure, you don’t just lose your job, you lose your right to stay in the country, and then you go back to the Chinese academia job market, now even older and with several years spent on a path that didn’t work out.

Four Years Later, Still Asking “Why?”

I might just stop writing here for today. But to be honest, I’ve been thinking a lot lately - I spent almost 4 years on my PhD, plus 1 year in a gap year. Was it really worth it?

I mean, 5 years ago I had a master’s degree and a couple of decent job offers, like data analyst positions and autonomous driving algorithm jobs. But I chose to stay in the UK and look for PhD opportunities, without even having a scholarship secured at that time. Now I’m close to finishing my PhD in the same area, still in statistics, but it’s much harder to find any good job opportunities. (I’ll talk more about this in the next post.)

If I could go back to 2021 when I finished my master’s, would I choose to go straight back to China instead of staying here for a PhD?

Was that a wrong decision? I’ve written many versions of self-reflection on this, and I’ve deleted many paragraphs too. These thoughts are still too personal for me right now. I’m not ready to share them completely. But when I look at it from a longer historical view, I also know this: this is not something that “only happens to me.” South Korea already went through credential inflation and PhD oversupply. Germany also had various hidden age barriers for job seekers in the 20th century. When you put these phenomena in their economic and demographic context, you can usually find a “relatively reasonable” explanation. But when the same logic lands on you as an individual, it’s hard not to feel powerless. Because you have almost no leverage to change the structure.

The world is shifting from left to right. And with the rise of generative AI and large language models, entry-level positions are getting fewer and fewer, while there are more and more graduates. What can we actually do? I’ve been thinking a lot about this, but I still don’t have very clear answers. I guess I might have some rough ideas, but I’m pretty sure things will keep changing in the next few years.

References

  1. NVIDIA announces financial results for third quarter fiscal 2026. (n.d.). NVIDIA Newsroom. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-third-quarter-fiscal-2026

  2. Office, H. (n.d.). Biggest overhaul of legal migration model in 50 years announced. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/biggest-overhaul-of-legal-migration-model-in-50-years-announced

  3. DTG Weather on Friday 21 November 2025. (2025, November 21). https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/weather/daily-text.cgi?2025-11-21

  4. Li, Y. (2023) No job, no marriage, no kid: China’s workers and the curse of 35 (published 2023), The New New World. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/business/china-jobs-age-discrimination-35.html

  5. Wang, B., & Yeung, J. (2023, August 26). The ‘curse of 35’: In China, millennials are already too old for some employers. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/26/china/35-curse-unemployment-discrimination-intl-hnk

  6. Statista. (2025, November 29). University enrollment rate South Korea 1980-2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/629032/south-korea-university-enrollment-rate/

  7. Desk, S. A., & Desk, S. A. (2025, March 3). In South Korea, nearly 3 out of 10 PhD graduates can’t find work. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3300833/south-korea-nearly-3-out-10-phd-graduates-cant-find-work

  8. Kwon, D. (2025). How many PhDs does the world need? Doctoral graduates vastly outnumber jobs in academia. Nature, 643(8070), 16–17. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01855-w

  9. Lin, S., Zhang, K., Liu, J., & Lyu, W. (2024). Credential inflation and employment of university faculty in China. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03653-7

  10. 国家数据. (n.d.). https://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=C01&zb=A0M0D&sj=2021

  11. CSET. (2023, June 9). China is Fast Outpacing U.S. STEM PhD Growth. Center for Security and Emerging Technology. https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-is-fast-outpacing-u-s-stem-phd-growth/

  12. Nietzel, M. T. (2024, February 19). Number of doctoral degrees awarded in U.S. rebounds to All-Time high. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/02/05/number-of-doctoral-degrees-awarded-in-us-rebounds-to-all-time-high/

  13. National Science Foundation. Rankings by earned doctorates. https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=drf

  14. Kleinman, Z. (2024, August 2). Government shelves £1.3bn UK tech and AI plans. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyx5x44vnyeo

Published on 22 November 2025