Orange cover with the words “Across Borders, Into Research”, two illustrated women (one holding a microphone, one writing on a tablet), and the EU, Participate, and Learning Planet Festival logos.

Research careers are sometimes imagined as linear: a clear path, a stable setting, and quiet progress over time. The session “Across Borders, Into Research” offered a more realistic picture. It showed research as something that happens inside real lives, shaped by mobility, language, administrative barriers, and family responsibilities, as well as by ambition and collaboration.

The event took place as part of the Learning Planet Festival, a global programme that brings together educators, researchers, civil society, and institutions to share initiatives that can strengthen learning, participation, and social cohesion. Within that wider context, Across Borders, Into Research created space for early-stage researchers to speak plainly about what it takes to build evidence that can be used.

Introduced by Parents International’s director Eszter Salamon (Parents International, MSCA supervisor), the session featured four doctoral candidates from the MSCA Participate doctoral network:

Luca László, from Parents International
Meghmala Mukherjee, from the Dublin City University
Anastasiia Petrova, from the University of Turku
Kainaat Maqbool, from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Their conversation moved through four shared questions: why they chose a PhD, what has been hardest, what impact they want their work to have, and what they would say to young women considering research.

MSCA and Participate: the framework behind the conversation

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) support doctoral training through international networks. Beyond funding, they provide structured supervision, joint training, and a cohort-based environment that connects researchers across institutions and countries.

Participate is an MSCA doctoral network focused on bullying and cyberbullying, with particular attention to the role of parents and other adults, and to the ways family and school environments shape children’s experiences and behaviour. Eszter’s framing was practical: a PhD is a milestone, not an endpoint. Research careers can continue in universities, public institutions, civil society, and practice-oriented routes. What matters is that evidence is strong enough, and clear enough, to inform decisions and improve real-world responses.

With that context in place, Across Borders, Into Research turned to the four shared questions.

Question 1: What motivated you to start a PhD?

Turning international project work into research

Luca came to the PhD after working on European projects in a highly international, people-centred environment. For her, Participate was not a change of direction. It offered a way to deepen her work through a structured research framework and a cohort of peers.

Her research examines how adults, especially parents and teachers, shape children’s bullying behaviour. A central line of inquiry is how harmful experiences with adults can influence peer behaviour, including whether being bullied by adults can contribute to a child later bullying others. The attraction, in her account, was the combination of social relevance, methodological structure, and a network designed for collaboration rather than isolation.

Digital life, wellbeing, and children’s rights

Meghmala completed her education in India, including an MPhil in forensic psychology, and described the decision to pursue research as a personal choice rather than a family expectation. Her earlier work on digital technology and wellbeing evolved into a long-term interest in how digital environments affect young people’s lives.

Encouragement from her supervisor to look abroad, including MSCA opportunities, helped her aim for an international PhD. Based at Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre, she focuses on parental digital mediation and how young people navigate digital environments, including how they understand and experience their rights online.

Choosing purpose, not only technical work

For Anastasiia, the idea of a doctorate was familiar early on because her mother and aunts all hold PhDs. She initially resisted, but her trajectory shifted once she began working as a research assistant during her undergraduate years, often on topics connected to migration and bullying. That experience made research feel applied and socially grounded.

After her master’s degree, she tried the private sector as an analyst. The work was technically interesting, but she found it difficult to connect to meaning. When she saw the Participate call, she recognised the topic immediately. Now based at the University of Turku in Finland, she studies gender diversity in parental involvement, including what advice parents give children who experience bullying and cyberbullying, and how this varies across groups, currently with attention to immigrant parents in Finland.

Giving long-term advocacy academic weight

Kainaat came into the PhD with years of industry-based research and advocacy experience, particularly on migration, racialisation, and youth experiences. The doctorate appealed to her, but only if it matched her values, used youth-centred and co-designed approaches, and offered a supportive consortium rather than solitary academic work.

Participate met those conditions. Based in Athens, her research explores how Afro-descendant youth in Greece experience racialisation, racial bullying, and cyberbullying, including in the context of growing up as migrants or children of migrants. She also described a strategic dimension: for non-European researchers who want to work in European policy and advocacy settings, doctoral credentials can strengthen credibility in environments where non-Europeans often feel they must be “extra qualified” to be taken as seriously.

Question 2: What has been the hardest part so far?

Mobility has a cost: visas and uncertainty

For Meghmala, Anastasiia, and Kainaat, international mobility brought recurring administrative pressure. Visa applications were described as time-consuming, expensive, and unpredictable, especially when travel for conferences, meetings, and secondments depends on approvals that can change without clear reasoning.

They described coping through informal support networks: sharing practical advice, comparing timelines, and checking in on each other when processes stalled. This did not remove structural barriers, but it reduced isolation.

Eszter Salamon added a supervisory perspective: if MSCA networks recruit globally, then equal opportunity must be real in practice, not only written into programme descriptions. Bureaucratic barriers fall unevenly on non-European candidates, and that unevenness should not be treated as normal.

Integration under time pressure

Kainaat described arriving in Greece without speaking Greek and needing to build a professional and academic network quickly. This meant finding participants, building partnerships, and navigating institutional systems on tight timelines. The work requires persistence and initiative, and it is not distributed equally across researchers who begin from different starting points.

Anastasiia highlighted another pressure point that is easy to underestimate. Doctoral networks offer many opportunities: trainings, conferences, secondments, collaborations. The challenge is not only doing more, but learning how to prioritise. Part of the PhD becomes learning what to say no to.

Parenthood during the PhD

For Luca, the most significant shift came when she became a mother halfway through her doctorate. She spoke about travelling with her baby, joining meetings while care responsibilities continued in the background, and relying on flexibility from both family and supervisors.

Her point was not that it is simple, but that it is possible when planning, support, and reasonable expectations are in place. The broader lesson is clear: research environments that treat candidates as whole people are more likely to retain talent.

Question 3: What impact would you like your research to have?

Across the four projects, impact was described in practical terms: tools, guidelines, policy change, and evidence that can be used outside academic circles.

Evidence that can shape school policies

Luca noted interest from school leaders and organisations who want to replicate her quantitative work. Their goal is to better understand how adult behaviour influences student behaviour, and how those insights could improve school policies and everyday practice.

Toolkits that families and institutions can use

Meghmala highlighted that Participate places real weight on practical deliverables, including toolkits for parents, teachers, policymakers, and potentially the tech sector. Her research on parental digital mediation and children’s rights is intended to feed directly into usable guidance for families navigating digital life.

Making practice-oriented doctorates feel normal

Anastasiia noted that many research environments still treat journal articles and conferences as the only outputs that “count”. Participate, by contrast, treats practice-oriented outputs as central. Her hope is that this becomes more common, and that doctoral work can be rigorous while also being designed for real-world use.

Evidence that speaks to decision-makers

Kainaat described a clear target: institutions with power to change systems. That includes education ministries, anti-bullying initiatives, and bodies responsible for schooling and teacher training. Her aim is to make research findings legible and actionable, especially where current responses fail to meet the needs of Afro-descendant and migrant youth.

Question 4: What would you tell young women considering a PhD?

Their advice was direct and based on their own experience:

You belong in the room

Anastasiia spoke about the intimidation of academic environments that can appear older and hierarchical. Her message was simple: being young and being a woman does not make research less valid. Belonging is not reserved for senior figures.

Claim your space, build community

Luca encouraged young women to apply, speak up, and take their professional space seriously. She also stressed mutual support: collaboration, co-authorship, and peer networks. Careers are built in relationships, not only in individual output.

Do not minimise achievement

Kainaat spoke particularly to women and people of colour in majority-white contexts. Recognition does not always arrive automatically, and structural barriers are real. Her message was to acknowledge achievements openly, and to resist pressure to make oneself smaller to fit expectations.

Trust the work, keep the long view

Meghmala’s message was steady. Confidence is not arrogance. The path is demanding, but long-term pride in the work is a reasonable expectation, and a legitimate motivation.

Closing: why “Across Borders, Into Research” matters

In closing, Eszter Salamon widened the lens. Participate is unusual in its gender composition, with women across almost the entire network. That matters, and it is worth recognising as progress: research environments have not always offered women the same access, visibility, or support, and this kind of space can make a concrete difference to who enters and stays in research.

At the same time, she stressed the importance of balanced opportunities. If some education and research pathways are now seeing boys and men increasingly underrepresented, that is also a problem to take seriously. Strong research cultures depend on diverse participation, and diversity includes women and men as well as people with different backgrounds, experiences, and routes into the field.

She also returned to the role of evidence in policy. Policymaking is rarely purely evidence-based, but it can be evidence-informed, and the quality of evidence affects how effectively researchers and organisations can argue for better support in schools and families. The clearer and more robust the research, the easier it becomes to advocate for practical solutions.

Within the Learning Planet Festival, Across Borders, Into Research offered a grounded picture of international doctoral life: opportunity and ambition, but also visas, integration work, opportunity overload, and family responsibilities. It showed what a strong network can enable when it supports not only research outputs, but also the people producing them.