The same starting line? The effect of a master’s degree on PhD students’ career trajectories

ABSTRACT

Research on the career trajectories of doctoral recipients often assumes that all PhD students begin in roughly the same starting position. Consequently, the impact of pre-programme experiences remains understudied. This qualitative study draws on 59 interviews with PhD students studying in mainland China and Hong Kong to explore the influence of learning experiences during the master’s degree programme on planned PhD career trajectories. Using identity-trajectory theory, we find that students with a master’s degree had greater research expertise, a more prominent research profile, more established academic networks, and greater familiarity with the requirements of the academic profession and academic job market. This enabled them to adapt to institutional expectations and have a better-informed motivation for pursuing a PhD to become an academic. Based on these findings, we argue that having a master’s degree gives PhD students a competitive advantage over peers without master’s degrees. Our findings have implications for the importance of research training in master’s education and the relevance of master’s programmes for PhD admission policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral students
• postgraduate training
• PhD career
• master’s education
• academic socialisation
• research supervision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One cause of this phenomenon, according to several interviewees, is that many provinces offer provincial universities extra funding, so they may be selected as new ‘double-first class’ universities.

2 Intertextual networking during master’s studies also affected students’ career thinking, but as it intersects closely with the intellectual strand, we decided to present it in Theme 3.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee of Hong Kong SAR, China [grant number: 17604119], and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number: 71974004].