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1 – 10 of over 58000As an international PhD student studying the internationalization of higher education, my personal experience was inherently related to the circumstances that I was researching…
Abstract
As an international PhD student studying the internationalization of higher education, my personal experience was inherently related to the circumstances that I was researching. The personal and the cognitive encouraged each other. This chapter discusses the interrelated nature of the affective and productive aspects of my PhD experience by focusing on three major influences on that experience. It further explains how those affective drivers defined not only the subjective experience of my PhD but also the direction and structure of the PhD itself. As such, I intend to make explicit what it means to complete a PhD as an international student in Australia – at least, what it meant for me.
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Syeda Hina Batool, Amna Farzand Ali and Muhammad Safdar
This study aims to investigate social sciences PhD scholars’ research experiences through a qualitative lens. Researchers explored the doctoral students’ research conceptions…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate social sciences PhD scholars’ research experiences through a qualitative lens. Researchers explored the doctoral students’ research conceptions, supervision-related expectations, reasons to join PhD, key learning areas and advantages of PhD in this study. Education sector is rigorously seeking PhD faculty and simultaneously offering a number of research degree programs and scholarships to boom the research culture. The amount of time, energy, finance and dedication involved in it urges researchers to investigate this phenomenon holistically.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative research approach, phenomenology (semi-structured interviews) is used to conduct this research, and interpretative phenomenological analysis technique is used to analyze the collected data.
Findings
Findings have been reported comprehensively through interpretative phenomenological analysis. Respondents had a number of expectations from supervisors and viewed this journey as challenging and at the same time beneficial for their professional and personal life.
Originality/value
This study is unique in nature, as it depicts research conceptions of doctoral students, benefits of PhD, challenges in pursuing PhD and supervision expectations from a developing country perspective. This study’s outcomes have impressions for policymakers, researchers and supervisors. The findings have insights for educators to produce more constructive researchers and scholars.
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Isabelle Skakni and Lynn McAlpine
This study aims to examine how post-PhD researchers construct their identities through significant work experiences as they endeavour to develop their research independence and a…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine how post-PhD researchers construct their identities through significant work experiences as they endeavour to develop their research independence and a distinct scholarly profile. The authors were especially interested in how they made meaning of their important work experiences, the ones that were emotionally salient.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a narrative approach, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from a large cross-national mixed-methods research project about early-career researchers’ identity development. The sample included 71 post-PhD researchers from the UK who completed an online survey. Ten of whom were also interviewed through a semi-structured protocol.
Findings
Post-PhD researchers considered work experiences to be significant when those experiences helped them to gauge whether their self-representation as researchers was coherent and a further research career was practicable. The same type of significant event (e.g. publishing in a prestigious journal) could hold different meanings depending on who experienced it. Positive experiences helped to maintain their motivation and made them feel that they were consolidating their identities. Negative experiences tended to challenge their sense of identity and their sense of belonging to academia. Whereas positive feelings towards a significant experience appeared to persist over time, negative feelings seemed to fade or evolve through self-reflection, but ultimately had greater saliency.
Originality/value
Few previous studies have been conducted on how emotionally powerful work experiences influence post-PhD researchers’ identity development. Besides highlighting how emotions and feelings, often-neglected aspects of identity development, influence the process, this study offers a constructive – and, in some ways, alternative – view of the impact that negative experiences have on their identity development.
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Jenna Mittelmeier, Divya Jindal-Snape, Bart Rienties, Kate Yue Zhang and Doris Yakun Chen
Supervisors and other academic staff can provide PhD students with invaluable professional support and opportunities for advancing their careers. This stems from the strong…
Abstract
Supervisors and other academic staff can provide PhD students with invaluable professional support and opportunities for advancing their careers. This stems from the strong academic and networking provisions often offered to PhD students by nature of the supervisory mentorship. Although this professional relationship is highly beneficial in itself, many PhD students also wish to develop social and more personal friendships with their supervisors, in addition to academic connections. In this way, PhD students may seek a space to comfortably share their personal lives, identities, and experiences with supervisors and develop a working and personal relationship that extends beyond their doctoral program.
In order to better support how and why PhD students build social and personal relationships with their supervisors, this chapter draws upon evidence from an international collaboration across three institutions in the United Kingdom and China related to doctoral students’ social transition experiences. Building on our experience using an innovative mixed method combination of social network analysis, longitudinal diaries, blogs, and in-depth interviews, we explore the complex, dynamic, and, at times, turbulent social relationships between PhD students and supervisors. Specifically, this chapter provides tips for PhD students to manage and maintain social relationships with their supervisors in order to build lasting connections. This includes advice for establishing personal acquaintanceships between students and supervisors and bridging the gap from supervisor to colleague to friend. Altogether, readers will consider actionable steps for developing socially meaningful and sincere relationships with supervisors or other mentors.
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Theresa Mercer, Andrew Kythreotis, Carol Lambert and Gill Hughes
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the significance of student‐led initiatives in PhD development.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the significance of student‐led initiatives in PhD development.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study is presented utilizing Kolb's model of learning from experience to identify with student‐led research training within the PhD process.
Findings
The experiential role of the student in the development of their personal doctoral training and the resultant social interactions thereof, remain as important as the more structured supervisor‐student relationship and other forms of doctoral training within the PhD research process.
Originality/value
This paper contributes new insights into the process of how PhD students can become more empowered by the process of “doing” a PhD, rather than being confined to their own specific discipline, whilst offering future recommendations for students embarking upon PhD research.
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Although more than half of the PhD graduates do not take up traditional academic positions, the little we know of how they navigate into the non-academic workforce is somewhat…
Abstract
Purpose
Although more than half of the PhD graduates do not take up traditional academic positions, the little we know of how they navigate into the non-academic workforce is somewhat conflicting. This study aims to contribute to our knowledge by examining over time the experiences of post-PhD social scientists who went into non-academic careers. It examines how post-PhD social scientists in non-academic careers characterize their experience of the PhD; how they imagine their post-PhD careers during the degree and how this influenced their doctoral activity; and to what extent their intentions changed over time and how agentive they were in managing challenges or disappointments.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a longitudinal qualitative narrative approach to examine the experience of eight post-PhD social scientists beginning during their degrees through their initial years after graduation outside academia.
Findings
The analysis highlights variation in clarity of career vision, strategic career thinking and action, knowledge of career opportunity structures and changes in career intentions over time. Still, for all individuals, the PhD was considered a powerful learning experience which continued to influence their lives.
Practical implications
Overall, the results make clear that post-PhD trajectories are best built from the beginning of the PhD, a conclusion that has curriculum implications.
Originality/value
This study incorporates the career question into the development of junior researchers highlighting the need to attend not only to objective measures of career success but also subjective intentions, investments, choices and assessments. Further, the constructs developed within an academic work context to understand career trajectories proved robust in analyzing non-academic work experience.
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This paper aims to examine graduate student learning experiences and perceptions of quality and the extent to which these learners were living the intended experiences that…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine graduate student learning experiences and perceptions of quality and the extent to which these learners were living the intended experiences that academic programs are seeking to foster.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a multiple case-study design, a three-stage interview protocol used with six PhD candidates across three faculties as well as 25 institutional, provincial and national documents served as principal sources of data. A within-case analysis was performed for each case and compared via a cross-case analysis.
Findings
The four principal factors that characterized the PhD candidate learning experience emerged as the significance of intentional individualized guidance; the importance of social interactions and community; becoming an independent scholar; and the transformative nature of learning. Gaps were identified between institutional intent and the learner experience. Recommendations are made regarding the adoption of indicators of quality that focus on student learning and notions of transformation.
Originality/value
This investigation attempts to tell distinct and shared stories of the highly contextualized and complex phenomenon of quality in PhD student learning. With limited information regarding how programmatic development is lived by students, this study’s comparison of institutional characterizations and student perceptions of quality sheds light on existing strengths to leverage, and gaps to invest in, at the institutional and program levels.
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Erika A. Mosyjowski and Shanna R. Daly
The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways engineering doctoral students draw on prior experiences to inform their doctoral research. This study includes the experiences of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways engineering doctoral students draw on prior experiences to inform their doctoral research. This study includes the experiences of “returners” – those who have worked as practitioners for five or more years before entering a PhD program – who have distinct experiences from “direct-pathway students,” which may inform how they engage in doctoral research. This study also explores the traits that distinguish varying levels of sophistication in the ways PhD students think about the research process and how prior experience may contribute.
Design/methodology/approach
This study draws on interview data from 52 returning and direct-pathway engineering doctoral students. A thematic analysis of this interview data highlights the primary ways participants’ prior professional, academic and life experiences inform their doctoral research. In addition, the authors conducted an iterative analysis process to sort participants’ responses about their management of a hypothetical research scenario into emergent categories of research thinking sophistication to understand what characterizes varying levels of sophistication in research thinking and explore how experience may contribute.
Findings
Participants identified past experiences as shaping their research, related to how they identify a research problem, considering what needs to and can be done to address the problem, identifying an appropriate research approach, managing unexpected challenges, responding to critical feedback, determining their comfort taking risks and using intuition to lead a project.
Originality/value
Outcomes of this research can inform how graduate education supports students throughout their degree by identifying key experiences that may contribute to students’ research approaches.
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Solveig Cornér, Kirsi Pyhältö, Jouni Peltonen and Søren S.E. Bengtsen
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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
The study used a mixed methods design, both quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses (open-ended descriptions) were used.
Findings
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.
Practical implications
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.
Originality/value
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.
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