The struggle to get a PhD: the collaborative autoethnographic accounts of two ‘journeymen’

ABSTRACT

The PhD is the ultimate indicator of academic excellence. The journey is familiar to most University academics and is a journey the majority have successfully completed. Yet, just as it is said history is written by the victors, so most accounts written about doing a PhD, are written by those who have succeeded, not by ‘journeymen’, such as the narrators of this account. There is a need for narrative accounts that both acknowledge the difficulty of the journey and also show how some candidates have battled, to achieve their PhDs. Such stories have the power to inspire those who may be struggling on their own PhD journeys. Academics can share these accounts with their own PhD students and thus hopefully improve completion rates and change practice. The authors of this narrative have adopted a collaborative autoethnographic approach to their PhD journeys. The parallel narratives are in four interdependent sections. The narratives start with both authors’ unsuccessful attempts to get a PhD and end with how they, after completing their PhDs, started collaborating on research. From the authors’ first attempts, their respective PhD journeys took 20 to 30 years to come to completion. The accounts show that personality features such as resilience, motivation and grit, as well as the appearance of supervisors and partners i.e. allies of help at the right time can make the difference between success and failure. Both, now in their sixties, they are looking forward to many more exciting years of joint research.

KEYWORDS:

• PhD
• autoethnography
• academic resilience
• motivation journeymen
• grit

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Professor Torsten Norlander. We are also grateful to the support of our partners, Irene and Cheryl and from Jerome, for the continued mentorship of Professor Kevin Gournay. We are indebted to Professor Mark Cropley from the University of Surrey, who agreed to be the external examiner for Mats.

Disclosure statement

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

Authors’ contribution

Both authors contributed equally to this paper.

Consent for publication

Yes.