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This paper explores variation in the events or activities Education doctoral students describe as contributing to their feeling of being an academic or belonging to an academic community as well as difficulties they experience. The results (drawing principally on students in a Canadian research‐intensive university though with some in a UK university) demonstrate a rich variation in multiple formative activities that are experienced as contributing to a developing identity as an academic, with many lying outside formal and semi‐formal aspects of the doctorate. Yet, at the same time students report tensions in the very sorts of activities they often find significant and positive in the development of their identity. We see this analysis as offering much‐needed insights into the formative role of cumulative day‐to‐day activities in the development of academic identity.

This article is intended to contribute towards furthering the understanding of researcher development as demonstrated by doctoral students' learning within scholarly communities. The article does this by reporting the findings of a study that explored the students' key learning experiences during their doctoral journey.

The 19 participants were natural science doctoral students from a top‐level research community in Finland. The data were collected through interviews that were qualitatively content analysed.

The participants emphasised the significance of participation, development as a scholar, developing specific research competences as well as learning to balance between doctoral research and other institutional tasks. They situated the key learning experiences in collaborative academic contexts such as research activities, taking courses, and academic meetings. The participants generally perceived their experiences as positive and enhancing.

Significant learning experiences identified by natural science doctoral students themselves are rarely studied. The results of the study reported in this article may be used by doctoral trainers, supervisors and students to create environments that foster students' learning and researcher development through their participation in scholarly communities.

This paper aims to explore the support experiences of 381 PhD students within the humanities and social sciences from three research-intensive universities in Denmark (n = 145) and Finland (n = 236). The study investigates the cross-cultural variation in the researcher community support and supervisory support experiences, factors associated with their support experienced and the perceived support fit.

The study used a mixed methods design, both quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses (open-ended descriptions) were used.

The results showed that students in both Danish and Finnish programs emphasized researcher community support over supervisory support. The Danish students, however, reported slightly higher levels of researcher community support and experienced lower levels of friction than their Finnish counter partners. The results also indicated that the only form of support in which the students expressed more matched support than mismatched support was informational support.

The results imply investing in a stronger integration of PhD students into the research community is beneficial for the students’ progress. Building network-based and collaborative learning activities that enhance both instrumental and emotional support and a collective form of supervision could be further developed. The possibility of Phd student integration in the scholarly community is likely to lead to more efficient use of finacial and intellectual resources in academia and society more broadly.

This study offer a unique contribution on doctoral students’ academic and socialization experiences in terms of explicationg the sources of support, support forms and support fit among Danish and Finnish doctoral students. Both invariants and socio-culturally embedded aspects of support experience among the students were detected.

During the lengthy process of PhD studies, supervisory changes commonly occur for several different reasons, but their most frequent trigger is a poor supervisory relationship. Even though a change in supervisors is a formal bureaucratic process and not least the students’ rights, in practice it can be experienced as challenging. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how doctoral students experience a change in supervisory arrangements.

This study highlights the voices of 19 doctoral students who experienced at least one supervisory change during their doctoral studies.

The findings were structured chronologically, revealing the students’ experiences prior, during and after the changes. In total, 12 main themes were identified. Most of the interviewed students experienced the long decision-making processes as stressful, difficult and exhausting, sometimes causing a lack of mental well-being. However, once the change was complete, they felt renewed, energized and capable of continuing with their studies. It was common to go through more than one change in supervisory arrangements. Further, the students described both the advantages of making a change yet also the long-lasting consequences of this change that could affect them long after they had completed their PhD programs.

The study fulfills an identified need to investigate the understudied perspective of doctoral students in the context of change in supervisory arrangements. A change in the academic culture is needed to make any changes in supervisory arrangements more acceptable thus making PhD studies more sustainable.

As online education proliferates, little attention has been given to understanding non-cognitive success factors, such as wellness, in online graduate student success. To begin to address this gap in understanding, this paper aims to explore the experiences of doctoral student wellness within the context of online distance education. Doctoral students, and their instructor, in an advanced qualitative research course sought to use collective autoethnography to address the following questions: How do the authors perceive the wellness as doctoral students engaged in distance education, and how do the authors understand the influence of the doctoral program cultures on the perceptions of the own wellness?

This paper emerged from a 12 week advanced qualitative research course where students opted to engage in a poetic arts-based collective autoethnography to reflect on and analyze their experience of wellness as doctoral students taking online courses. Data collection included the use of reflective journaling, creation of “My Wellness Is” poetry, and weekly group debriefing. Journals and poems were analyzed individually, then collectively. First and second cycle coding techniques were used, with the first cycle including process and descriptive coding and second round coding involving pattern coding.

Through first and second round coding, three primary themes emerged: positionality as an element of wellness, the role of community in maintaining wellness and awareness and action regarding wellness.

Due to the inherent nature of qualitative research, and specifically autoethnographic methods, the findings of this study may be difficult to generalize to the broader online graduate student population. Future research on this topic may use the experiences explored in this study as a basis for the development of future quantitative studies to measure the extent of these findings in the broader population.

This paper includes implications for the development of interventions that may support wellness in graduate students in online environments including support interventions from faculty advisors, leveraging academic curriculum to promote wellness, and suggestions for building community among online graduate students.

As technology advances, online education is quickly becoming a leading mechanism for obtaining a graduate education. Scholarship in this discipline has primarily focused on academic outcomes of online students and has largely focused on undergraduate populations. This paper broadens the conversation about online education by illustrating a non-cognitive dimension of the student experience, i.e. wellness, through the perspective of graduate students.

This paper addresses a gap in the current understanding of online graduate student experiences and outcomes using methods that provide vivid illustrations of the nuanced experience of online doctoral students.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how doctoral students experienced mentorship in their supervision context and how the mentorship they received impacted their well-being.

An interpretive phenomenological methodology was selected to frame the research design. This research approach seeks to study the individual lived experience by exploring, describing and analyzing its meaning.

The findings revealed three different quality levels of mentorship in this context authentic mentorship, average mentorship and below average/toxic mentorship. Doctoral students who enjoyed authentic mentorship experiences were more motivated and satisfied, students who reported average mentorships needed more attention and time from their supervisors, and students who had below average/toxic mentorships were stressed out and depleted.

A limitation of this study is the lack of generalizability owing to the small sample size typical in qualitative studies. Another limitation is that this research did not include students who quit their programs because of dysfunctional supervision experiences.

Students and supervisors can use the findings to reflect on their beliefs and practices to evaluate and improve their performances. Also, authentic mentors can benefit from the findings to create a positive culture for all students to receive support. Finally, current supervisory policies can be reviewed in light of this paper’s findings.

The findings show the nature of mentorship in an authoritative context, and how it can be toxic when power is misused.

This study provides new knowledge in relation to the different types of mentorship experiences that exist in doctoral supervision, and how each type can influence students’ well-being differently. Additionally, it reveals that doctoral students can graduate, even in the face of toxic mentorship, but at the expense of their well-being.

The aim of this paper is to explore doctoral students' engaging and disengaging experiences among a group of students whose doctoral processes had been prolonged for more than seven years.

The participants were 16 doctoral students in the behavioural sciences. The data were collected with interviews employing a visualisation of their doctoral journeys, and were content analysed qualitatively.

The results suggested that the students described their engagement in doctoral work in terms of dedication, vigour and occasionally absorption. In turn, disengagement was described in terms of insufficiency, cynicism and sometimes exhaustion. Interestingly, the source of engagement was typically a sense of belonging in the scholarly community, whereas the students often reported a lack of autonomy and a lack of belonging as sources for disengagement.

Further longitudinal studies are needed to explore the development of engagement in doctoral work among students from different contexts.

In terms of developing more engaging learning environments, the findings imply that by enhancing students' sense of belonging to their scholarly community and their experiences of autonomy within it their engagement in doctoral work, and further, development as researchers can be fostered.

This study extends the understanding of what may engage or disengage students from their doctoral studies and the essential relationship between the sense of autonomy and that of belonging in doctoral student engagement, in particular in the context of prolonged doctoral studies in the behavioural sciences.

Doctoral students’ ill-being in terms of stress, exhaustion and high levels of mental health problems has been well documented. Yet, the well-being of doctoral students is more than the absence of these negative symptoms. The number of studies exploring the combination of positive and negative attributes of doctoral students’ well-being is limited. Therefore, this study aims to focus on exploring individual variation in doctoral students’ experienced engagement and burnout across two distinct socio-cultural contexts in Finland and in South Africa.

A total of 884 doctoral students from Finland (n = 391) and South Africa (n = 493) responded to the cross-cultural Doctoral Experience Survey. The data were quantitatively analyzed.

Altogether four distinctive engagement–burnout profiles were detected, including engaged, engaged–exhausted, moderately engaged–burnout and burnout profiles. Differences between the Finnish and South African students were identified in profile emphasis. The profiles were also related to several study progress attributes such as drop-out intentions, time-to-candidacy and satisfaction with study.

This study provides new understanding on doctoral students’ well-being by focusing on both positive and negative attributes and exploring doctoral students’ discrepant profiles with a cross-country design.

The purpose of this study is to examine how intersecting oppressed identities shape the socialization experiences of Black women doctoral candidates in agricultural disciplines at historically white institutions. This paper addresses a gap in literature examining the experiences of Black women within the context of higher agricultural sciences education.

This study uses narrative inquiry to examine the experiences of five Black women doctoral candidates through a set of three interviews per participant.

Three themes regarding participants’ socialization experiences were identified. Themes are presented according to its site of socialization: lack of trust in advising relationships, departmental belonging and negative interactions with department faculty and isolation and exclusion at conferences.

This study adds to the small body of research on Black women in higher agricultural sciences education. Further, this study contributes to the larger body of socialization research and the minimal research on socialization for marginalized populations in higher agricultural sciences education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore educational researchers’ online literature searching and sourcing strategies.

Adopting a multiple-case study approach, the authors conducted interviews and compared strategies employed by three groups of researchers: less-experienced doctoral students, experienced doctoral students, and junior faculty.

The results showed that the three groups differed in four searching strategies and two sourcing strategies. The former included: using and modifying keywords, doing advanced searches to narrow down or expand results, chaining, and networking to retrieve literature, while the latter consisted of: evaluating and selecting multiple-source articles, and self-monitoring the multiple-source searching process. The findings also revealed that the experienced doctoral students and junior faculty were able to adopt searching and sourcing strategies flexibly and simultaneously for the purpose of determining more relevant and useful sources. The findings suggest that these researchers, especially the less-experienced students, need specialized training to acquire sourcing strategies in order to critically evaluate relevant information or scholarly work to fulfill their research purposes.

Information seeking, an essential part of scholars’ work, has been widely examined across disciplines. However, few studies have explored scholars’ searching and sourcing behaviors for online academic literature. This study fulfilled the research gap.