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The purpose of this paper is to examine the racial and ethnic aspects of the doctoral socialization to provide a meaningful insight into the belief systems and decision-making processes related to academic success and degree completion. This paper addresses a gap in literature focusing on the racial and ethnic aspects of the doctoral student experience as they relate to student agency.

This narrative research of four doctoral students uses a postmodern active interview method to foreground the role of a doctoral agency as manifested in the ways students make meaning of their experiences as members of the science, technology, engineering, agriculture and math academic community. A dialectical approach to the traditional socialization models provides the framework for understanding the meaning-making processes within a critical context of academia.

Findings present the intrinsic foundations for a doctoral agency and forces that shape key decision-making processes for doctoral students.

Implications for research and practice provide guidance for faculty, graduate school administrators and organizations interested in supporting degree completion for historically marginalized doctoral students.

This study examines doctoral socialization as a meaning-making process of racial/ethnic students in engineering and agricultural programs. Narrative research design provides depth into the individual experiences and the role of racial/ethnic histories in students’ socialization (meaning-making) processes in a predominantly White academic environment.

The purpose of this study is to examine how student agency influences career decision-making for doctoral students in biological sciences. The authors address the following questions: How do biological science graduate students navigate career indecision? And how does agency relate to their experiences with career indecision?

The authors analyzed interview data collected from 84 PhD biology graduate students. Researchers used a grounded theory approach. After open codes were developed and data were coded, code reports were generated, which were used to determine themes.

More than half of the sample had not committed to a career path, and undecided students were bifurcated into two categories: Uncommitted and Uncertain. Uncommitted graduate students demonstrated agency in their approach and were focused on exploration and development. Uncertain students demonstrated less agency, were more fearful and perceived less control and clarity about their options and strategies to pursue career goals.

Findings suggest some forms of indecision can be productive and offer institutional leaders guidance for increasing the efficacy of career development and exploration programming.

Research on doctoral student career decision-making is often quantitative and rarely explores the role of agency. This qualitative study focuses on the relationship between student agency and career indecision, which is an understudied aspect of career development.

Market forces and other external pressures have significantly transformed higher education over the past four decades. Research on the influence of cross-sector permeation on doctoral education has primarily focused on preparing and socializing students for academic careers that involve entrepreneurial activity. Conversely, PhD student agency involving cross-sector engagement and the pursuit of individual values and goals in ways that span the boundaries of academia have been overlooked. The purpose of this study is to qualitatively explore how a sample of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) students in Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering (STEM) programs recognized, made sense of and navigated cross-sector permeation relevant to their individual passions and commitments to climate change alleviation.

The authors conducted an embedded case study that qualitatively explored how 16 STEM PhD students recognized, made sense of and navigated cross-sector permeation relevant to their individual values and goals and commitments to climate change alleviation. Data were collected through individual interviews that probed the participants’ engagement and agency in cross-sector permeation.

The authors identified three themes that frame the role of PhD students as boundary spanning agents. The themes involve students placing their values and goals over specific positions and career paths, aligning their values and goals with cross-sector conditions and creating opportunities through cross-sector engagement.

Recommendations are provided for fostering and enhancing the agency PhD students have over the pursuit of their individual values and goals and their engagement in boundary spanning activities and strategies.

Cross-sector permeation is framed relevant to PhD student agency and boundary spanning. The findings introduce the role of PhD students as boundary spanning agents who intentionally pursue their individual values and goals in ways that extend beyond traditional academic career pathways.

The purpose of this study was to explore how graduate students demonstrated agency after having oppressive or invalidating experiences based on their socially constructed identities during graduate school and the effects of leveraging agency.

This study used critical constructivist qualitative methods (i.e. interviews and visual methods) to explore how 44 graduate students across an array of disciplines and fields at two public research institutions in the USA demonstrated agency after having oppressive or invalidating experiences targeting one or more of their socially constructed identities.

In response to oppressive or invalidating experiences related to their socially constructed identity, participants engaged in self-advocacy, sought/created support via community, conserved their psychological and emotional energy and constructed space for identity-conscious scholarship and practice. Although participants leveraged their agency, the strategies they used were often geared toward surviving environments that were not designed to affirm their identities or support their success.

This study highlights the need for additional research to complicate educators’ understandings of how graduate students respond to oppressive or invalidating experiences and the nature of bi-directional socialization processes.

The findings of this study reinforce the need to foster equitable and inclusive graduate education experiences where students may use their agency to thrive rather than to survive.

Few studies examine graduate students’ agency during their socialization to their disciplines and fields. This study adds complexity to researchers’ understandings of bi-directional socialization processes in the context of graduate education.

This article's purpose is to report the findings and implications of a study that explored factors promoting and hindering international doctoral students' academic engagement.

An empirical study sought data through a questionnaire from international students registered for doctoral study at the University of Helsinki. Open‐ended and Likert‐scale survey data were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed.

The students commented most frequently (41 per cent) on the scholarly community as a factor in promoting their studies. Departmental issues had the largest proportion of hindering factors overall (34 per cent). Promoting factors related to the supervision they received and private domain factors were positively related to students' satisfaction with their studies. Considering dropping out was significantly associated with hindering factors related to their supervision and to departmental issues. Also, peers and colleagues were not significantly associated with students' satisfaction with their studies or with their contemplating dropping out.

The article addresses key issues that will be of interest and benefit to universities who wish to retain and attract overseas research students. In particular, it discusses the importance of wider scholarly communities in providing international doctoral students with a favourable study experience which may be enhanced by performing departmental tasks as an important part of enculturation within supportive scholarly communities.

This paper offers a novel way of understanding early career researcher development, as illustrated by doctoral students' academic experiences. It also taps into the under‐ examined area of international doctoral students' study experiences.

Globally, traditional and online doctoral programs face difficulties with student persistence and progression. An online doctoral school implemented a first-year program sequence taught by a cadre of 20 specialized faculty members who engage in best practices to assist students in persisting and progressing toward program completion.

This qualitative program assessment using content analysis examined the program effectiveness of one online doctoral program's first-year program sequence. Two research questions guided this program assessment, they were: RQ1. Based on online doctoral students' perspectives, what motivators contribute to online doctoral student persistence and progression in an online doctoral program? RQ2. How do online faculty contribute to online doctoral student persistence and progression? Data collection included myriad of program metrics: content area meetings (CAMs); closing the loop assessment data; faculty and student end of course survey data; and faculty and student semistructured interviews.

The resultant themes indicated that students are motivated by support from family, friends and religious beliefs; and students persist based on support from fellow doctoral students and faculty members. Additional themes revealed that faculty members motivate students through building faculty–student relationships, individual coaching, providing university resources and through clarification of program requirements; and faculty members perceive that face-to-face doctoral residencies greatly contribute to student persistence and progression through interpersonal interaction and through improved clarity.

Implications of this program assessment have far-reaching impact on how doctoral granting institutions can structure small cadres of faculty to develop interpersonal relationships with doctoral students with focus on support and development.

There is an identified need in higher education research for methods which have the capacity to generate conceptual insights grounded in concrete local practice but with wider applicability in understanding and facilitating research-based change. This chapter outlines an intermediate approach to qualitative data analysis which can support theoretical knowledge advancement from practice-based research, which I call the difference-within-similarity approach. It involves a particular way of conducting dialogues with our data: of interanimating similarities and differences within our qualitative datasets. The approach outlined involves first identifying a similarity, then systematically examining differences within that similarity to generate theoretical explanations. Drawing on sociocultural theorising, particularly dialogic theory and cultural–historical activity theory, the approach is based on the idea that new meanings arise from a comparison of multiple perspectives on the ‘same’ phenomenon. The tensions between such perspectives are seen as a key driver for change in educational practice. Therefore, articulating and examining such tensions in our data gives an opportunity to simulate the possibility of change in our analysis and, hence, develop insights which can inform change beyond local settings. Important here is that the differences examined are bound together by an analytically productive similarity. Through multiple research examples, the chapter identifies and illustrates a range of ways of articulating productive analytical similarities for comparison in our data: through theory/literature, through forward and backwards processing of data itself and through a process termed ‘weaving’.