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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.

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.

This chapter examines the experiences of Ghanaian PhD graduates from various universities across the globe. A qualitative research model was therefore designed and used to explore factors that motivated the PhD graduates to pursue their programs, challenges they faced in the course of their study, effects of these challenges on them, and how they dealt with the challenges. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were employed to select 20 participants for the study. The theoretical focus of the study was on human capital theory. The data were analyzed using a thematic approach. It emerged from the study that job placement and security, the academic environment, family aspiration and expectation, personal desire to stand out to be visible, and availability of scholarships were factors that motivated Ghanaian PhD graduates to pursue their programs. The findings also revealed that Ghanaian PhD graduates lost most of their acquaintances deliberately, missed their families and social life, and had difficulty managing supervisor/student relationship, battling with theories, data management, and analysis. It became obvious that as part of PhD students’ orientation, they should be made to understand that uncertainty, doubt, and disappointments are parts of the PhD experience and they should not be derailed by those conditions. Universities running PhD programs should provide counseling centers and programs that are tailored toward reduction in stress factors accompanying PhD programs.

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.”

Studies of inequality in higher education on both undergraduate and graduate levels have rarely examined experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs). In this study, we focus on the experiences and outcomes of API students in doctoral education. More specifically, we examine socialization experiences and research productivity of three groups of students: domestic API, international API, and domestic white students. The results, based on a national cohort of PhD students in biology, reveal notable differences in experiences and outcomes of domestic and international API students. Although variation in socialization experiences explains differences in research productivity in the first year, that is not the case in the second year of doctoral study. In the second year, international API students have publication productivity comparable to their white peers, despite less favorable socialization experiences. Domestic API students, however, have lower research productivity than their white peers, even though they have comparable socialization experiences. Given the presumption of APIs’ success, especially in the STEM fields, findings for domestic API students are surprising and not aligned with the model minority stereotype. Contributions to research on API students, doctoral education, and socialization theory are discussed.

Among all the pieces of work I have written, this is most likely to be a chapter with the deepest meaning at a personal level. Being invited to the symposium on MSU Contributions to Research in International Business and Innovation held on May 7–9, 2008 at Kellogg Center on the beautiful Michigan State University (MSU) campus in East Lansing, MI was a big honor for me to start with. Secondly, it gave me the opportunity to reflect back on my days at MSU which both my family and myself remember with great joy and excitement. Lastly, but most importantly, it was a lifetime chance to pay partial gratitude to my mentor, Prof. Tamer Cavusgil, as well as my professors and colleagues at the Department of Marketing at Eli Broad College of Business, the International Business Center (IBC) – home to MSU CIBER, and University Apartments Residence Life (UARL) at MSU.