Raising a glass to the Four Friends Doing Science journal club

Chasing the best scientific career opportunities often means leaving behind homes, universities and friends. This happened to the four of us when we began our PhDs.

We first met in 2013 during the first weeks of our biology undergraduate studies at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and quickly bonded over interesting scientific discussions. Soon after, we became inseparable. We met before each exam, bouncing ideas and possible questions off one another to boost our confidence before the exam day. We were on the same path, pursuing the same academic goals.

This changed when we started our separate PhD studies in 2019. One focused on plant pathogens at Ghent University in Belgium, another on gene therapy at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, another (J.K.) studying bacterial biology at the University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium and one (M.T.) researching biophysics at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. We pushed each other to follow our passions and pursue PhDs in the fields that excited us most, but our connectedness with one another faded, with each of us having our own goals, scientific areas of study and ambitions. At first, our differences felt like a challenge, but soon, we realized that they made our conversations more insightful.

The birth of the journal club

We were often informally catching up about our day-to-day experiments, new techniques we had learnt and papers we had read. It was during one of these chats, early in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, that someone suggested: “Why not formalize our discussions into something more structured?” And so, our journal club, playfully named Four Friends Doing Science (FFDS), was born.

We set up monthly online meetings, in which we would take turns bringing a paper to the group, sometimes from our field, sometimes outside it. We learnt about the new methods, dug through the supplementary data and questioned the conclusions of the papers. Each of us occasionally presented our data and work, including the short- and long-term goals of our PhDs. It was just like back in the undergraduate days — us studying together.

Collection: Career resources for PhD students

Every meeting we had also gave us the opportunity to talk about how we were navigating the ups and downs of our PhDs, each of us working in different systems and countries. We shared our frustrations with failed experiments, strategies for dealing with supervisors and excitement over fresh collaborations. What started as a way to stay engaged with the latest research became something we all looked forward to: an opportunity to learn, support and grow together.