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If we were to liken the long, intense doctoral journey to a battle, a strategy for winning can start from understanding well and then setting the right expectations about modern supervision. We need to ask whether doctoral learners’ expectations are aligned with their supervisors’ expectations. With the wide and evolving roles of PhD supervisors, we focus only on three key areas: (1) academic conventions, (2) psychological well-being, and (3) career development. Using a hypothetical scenario for each area, we compare doctoral learners’ perspectives with their supervisors’, which highlights the need for greater understanding and connectivity between both parties. This leads to our discussion on how appreciating these areas has practical implications for doctoral learners and supervisors. Drawing mainly on UK-based examples, we raise useful ideas that can help promote a holistic doctoral journey and increase doctoral learners’ chances of winning the metaphorical “doctoral battle.”

This study aims to advance the understanding on individual variations in PhD candidates’ personal interest in their doctorate and supervisory and research community support, and several individual and structural attributes potentially having an impact on the profiles.

The authors explored the interrelationship between personal interest – social support profiles, and nationality, gender, research group and study status and the risk of dropping out. A total of 768 PhD candidates from a research-intensive university in Finland responded to a modified version of the cross-cultural doctoral experience survey. Latent profile analysis was used to explore the individual variations in PhD candidates’ interest and support from the supervisor and research community.

Three distinctive PhD interest-social support profiles were detected; the high interest–high support profile (74.4%, n = 570), the high interest–moderate support profile (18.2%, n = 140) and the moderate interest–moderate support profile (7.4%, n = 56). The profiles exhibited high to moderate levels of research, development and instrumental interest. Individuals in the high interest–moderate support and in the moderate interest–moderate support profiles were more prone to consider dropping out from their PhD than in the high interest–high support profile.

The results indicate that by cultivating PhD candidates’ interest and providing sufficient supervisory and the research community offers a means for preventing candidates from discontinuing their doctorate. Hence, building a supportive learning environment that cultivates a PhD candidate’s personal interest is likely to reduce high dropout rates among the candidates.