Normalizing Struggle: Dimensions of Faculty Support for Doctoral Students and Implications for Persistence and Well-Being

ABSTRACT

Faculty mentoring is a durable structure of doctoral education that facilitates intellectual growth, professional socialization, and progressive independence. We must more deeply understand, however, professors’ role in supporting doctoral students’ persistence and well-being, especially for students from groups who have been historically excluded and marginalized in their fields. This study strived for such understanding by evaluating findings of a phenomenology of faculty support in 4 high-diversity science, technology, engineering, and mathematics PhD programs at 2 research universities. I found that holistic faculty support has academic, psychosocial, and sociocultural dimensions, which faculty enact through specific behaviors. Students reported meaningful experiences with faculty that normalized struggle and failure by promoting a growth mind-set, validating student competence and potential, and opening discussion about racialized and gendered dynamics in academia. Collectively, these activities may prevent students from misconstruing the difficulty of graduate school with their ability to succeed. The article discusses how the findings may advance future higher education research and faculty professional development.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral education
• equity
• faculty
• gender
• graduate education
• mentoring
• persistence
• race
• STEM
• well-being

Notes

1. One could choose to critically analyze these expectations themselves as foundations of inequity in the academy, considering, for example, how they may intersect problematically with cultural values of communities that are underrepresented in the academy; however, such critique is beyond the scope of this article. Rather than calling into question the culturally embedded expectations on doctoral students, this analysis aimed to plot faculty behaviors that enable students to persist under their weight.

2. An emerging literature has highlighted divergence in the norms and activities for which doctoral students are trained and the full range of careers that PhDs eventually assume (see, e.g., Cassuto, 2015).

3. Other sources of support mentioned included: peers (mentioned at least once in 93% of focus groups /interviews); department structures or informal practices (71%); institutional structures such as fellowships, career center, and writing center (64%); family (50%); and administrators (including office staff, department chair, and ombudsperson; 43%).