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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the significance of student‐led initiatives in PhD development.

A case study is presented utilizing Kolb's model of learning from experience to identify with student‐led research training within the PhD process.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall, the results make clear that post-PhD trajectories are best built from the beginning of the PhD, a conclusion that has curriculum implications.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to study the research experience of PhD students of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and factors influencing this experience.

The information was gathered through a questionnaire which has been developed based on PREQ questionnaire. The statistical populations of this study consist of those PhD students whose research proposal had been approved by the educational council of their faculty or had defended their dissertation. By using random sampling method, 118 questionnaires were collected.

The findings showed that there is a significant relationship between all of the research experience factors and significant differences between overall satisfactions of the students on their research experience. Variables such as sex and different stages of research have positive and significant impact on the research experience of the respondents.

The outcomes of this study suggest that among the PhD students of Ferdowsi University, there is a relative satisfaction with factors making up the research experience.

This study aims to examine how PhD students with diverse profiles, intentions and expectations manage to navigate their doctoral paths within the same academic context under similar institutional conditions. Drawing on Giddens’ theory of structuration, this study explores how their primary reasons, motives and motivations for engaging in doctoral studies influence what they perceive as facilitating or constraining to progress, their strategies to face the challenges they encounter and their expectations regarding supervision.

Using a qualitative design, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from an instrumental case study (Stake, 2013) about PhD students’ persistence and progression. The focus is placed on semi-structured interviews carried out with 36 PhD students from six faculties in humanities and social sciences fields at a large Canadian university.

The analysis reveals three distinct scenarios regarding how these PhD students navigate their doctoral paths: the quest for the self; the intellectual quest; and the professional quest. Depending on their quest type, the nature and intensity of PhD students’ concerns and challenges, as well as their strategies and the support they expected, differed.

This study contributes to the discussion about PhD students’ challenges and persistence by offering a unique portrait of how diverse students’ profiles, intentions and expectations can concretely shape a doctoral experience.

This study aims to explore different themes related to impostor phenomenon, as experienced by graduate students and postdocs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Open-ended survey responses from 120 US-based participants from 40 states and Washington, D.C., describing an occasion when they felt like an impostor, were analyzed thematically.

Following content analysis, three themes emerged: occurrence, attribution and identity. While impostor-like feelings were experienced as early as high school or college, the majority experienced it during PhD application, on being admitted to a PhD program and throughout PhD training. The people experiencing impostor phenomenon attributed their achievements and success to others (other’s name, prestige, or connections, other’s mistake, other’s lies or misrepresentation, or other’s kindness) or self (self-inadequacy, pretense, luck or self-doubt) rather than their own hard work or ability. Gender-based and race/ethnicity-based identity also shaped the experiences of the impostor phenomenon.

Open-ended survey responses varied in length and level of detail. Responses provided a one-time snapshot of a memory related to impostor-feelings that stood out, not indicating if the feeling persisted or evolved with time. The findings are not generalizable over a larger population.

This study identified multiple themes related to the impostor phenomenon not investigated before, enriching existing research while also providing methodological rigor for the development of follow-up studies.