Doctoral induction: Sociocultural context and the transition to the research degree

ABSTRACT

Commencing study for a PhD or other higher degree by research (HDR) constitutes a significant educational transition. To date, little research has been undertaken on the orientation or induction experiences of commencing HDR candidates and there is little guidance for HE providers of induction. This paper reflects upon understandings of student transition within the HE literature highlighting the role played by the sociocultural context surrounding research in shaping commencing candidates’ expectations. The paper argues that candidate expectations at the point of transition into the research degree reflect prevailing sociocultural norms about what it means to be a doctoral student. We also share a pedagogical strategy that can be used at induction events to reveal and to engage candidates in an exploration of the underlying experiential templates they bring to their upcoming degree experience.

KEYWORDS:

• PhD experience
• doctoral transition
• doctoral supervision
• ideal supervisor
• research degree orientation

Introduction

The move into a higher degree by research (HDR) involves a significant transition, the success of which is integral to the quality of the research degree experience. While the step from secondary education to tertiary education can be challenging, both are relatively structured and involve an engagement with existing knowledge and its application. Research degree students however are responsible for structuring and driving their own learning and are supported in doing so through a unique pedagogic relationship with a PhD supervisor. The transition from coursework graduate to research degree student, and ultimately to successful research degree graduate also involves moving beyond being a student of extant knowledge to becoming a knowledge producer as an academic peer within one or more disciplinary areas of study. Institutional responsibility for supporting research degree transition into the research degree has been recognised in national codes and guidelines for over two decades (ACGR Australian Council for Graduate Research, 2023; QAA Quality Assurance Agency, 2004, 2018), with institutions providing orientation or induction activities of various sorts at both central and local area levels to support HDR transition from the point of entry.

However, by comparison with the significant body of literature on undergraduate student transition into higher education, there is little literature that considers what is involved in HDR transition to inform institutional induction for higher research degrees. Gale and Parker’s (2014) review of the undergraduate-focused literature notes that transition has most commonly been understood in terms of students’ success in understanding and identifying with institutional norms, procedures, and practices, with many highlighting the importance of the institution’s role in supporting the transition of students from diverse backgrounds to enable them to succeed in their studies. Little is known about how research degree students understand doctoral study and the relationships that underpin it prior to entry into the research degree, or about how this understanding is likely to shape their response to it. This lack of interest may be explained by the assumption that, given their success as undergraduates, postgraduates are already well adapted to HE and do not need significant induction, other than into discipline cultures and the importance of an independent approach within research and supervision (Tobbell & O’Donnell, 2013; Tobbell et al., 2010). Yet the shift to HDR study involves unfamiliar communication styles, higher order engagement with existing literature, new research methods, procedures and norms, working in supervisory teams and with other research partners, and a complex positionality as not-quite student, not-quite academic, and is, therefore, a significant departure from previous tertiary education experience.

There are numerous studies on doctoral student expectations, but these largely reflect the perspectives of candidates who have finished, or who are well into their studies. The Australian Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire [PREQ], 2023) and the UK’s Postgraduate Research Experience Questionnaire (Postgraduate Research Experience Survey [PRES], 2023) capture the views of later-stage research students who are asked to reflect on their studies in hindsight from a position of success. Most research on the HDR experience involves post-hoc reviews of an already completed (or largely completed) process and/or approach the issue from a ‘tabula rasa’ perspective in which students are assumed to arrive at the point of entry to a doctoral degree without prior expectations. The tabula rasa assumption does not engender a two-way approach to induction which could engage with candidates’ pre-existing perceptions at the point of entry, and it does not consider the role of the sociocultural context surrounding research in shaping those perceptions. The absence of research on the perceptions of incoming research degree candidates which could inform better institutional support of transition led the authors to undertake two previous related studies on this subject (Bastalich & McCulloch, 2024; McCulloch & Bastalich, 2023). Our understanding of what ‘transition’ into HDR study entails was both challenged and deepened by what we found, giving rise to this paper in which we reflect upon what doctoral transition entails and how institutions can support it.

Our aim in this paper is specifically to trouble an understanding of transition as a process in which students arrive without preconceptions, to be successfully, or unsuccessfully, inducted into a rational set of institutional expectations that support a stable and functional journey to research success. Rather, we suggest that ‘transition’, the experience of adapting to higher level study, involves the navigation of a range of, sometimes competing or contradictory cultural discourses about what it means to be a doctoral student and an academic, reflected in a set of institutional practices which too often create personal and emotional crises that actively impede success. We hope to contribute to understandings of transition by focusing on the role of research culture, and specifically on ways of imagining doctoral and academic subjectivity and the supervisory role on doctoral candidate perceptions of their future study. We suggest that reflection upon sociocultural understandings of the doctorate and the supervisory relationship can facilitate a better understanding of induction and the means by which to support a positive doctoral experience and outcome. The paper shares a methodological strategy that proved to be useful in our previous research in revealing the kinds of experiential templates that underpin higher degree students’ sense making on commencement. We suggest here that the same tool could be used in induction events to actively engage incoming higher degree students in an exploration of different ways of understanding what it means to be a doctoral researcher and their impact upon research success. However, we conclude that, ultimately, successful transition within HDR study will depend upon governments and institutions improving support structures and messaging and reducing systemic pressures within research education.

The first part of the paper explores three contested understandings of transition in higher education, each of which shapes how the experience of transition is understood, as well as how institutions approach supporting it. The section ends by highlighting the role of socio-cultural discourse in shaping transition experience. The second part extrapolates on how the use of metaphor within a fun and engaging induction activity can assist in surfacing socio-culturally derived templates about doctoral study in the discourse of students commencing HDR study. The paper closes with a summary of incoming doctoral researchers’ perceptions based on previous research, linked to reflection on cultural imaginaries surrounding doctoral research and the role of supervisors in research education.

Conceptual underpinnings: Induction, development, and becoming

Within the undergraduate focused literature, the process of transition into university has been understood in three ways: induction, development, and becoming (Gale & Parker, 2014). The first perspective, ‘induction’ (often also referred to as ‘orientation’), is concerned to introduce commencing students to the institution, and (if necessary) to the country and/or locality, and to the services and resources offered at local and central university levels. Induction is also concerned with ensuring that students are aware of and fulfil any legislative or regulatory requirements pertaining to their own and to the institution’s rights and responsibilities.

A second way of understanding transition – ‘development’ – is concerned with introducing students to the nature and practice of study. While ‘induction’ occurs as a staged series of one-off processes, involving a transfer of information, ‘development’ is understood to manifest in a permanent shift from one identity to another, perhaps involving ‘critical incidents’, leading to changed attitudes and practices regarding learning and study (Gale & Parker, 2014). A development perspective might be seen in the common understanding within the research education context that transition involves an identity shift from passive learner of knowledge to independent producer of knowledge, and to the taking up of an identity of independent scholar. Within the research education context independence is viewed as an essential property or internal condition of being, and the achievement or outcome of a deliberative sovereign agent within the research process. Doctoral students are often seen to be relatively dependent upon supervisors at entry and to develop greater independence as their research progresses, being, at the end of their degree, capable of independent research thereafter. This is somewhat different from the understanding that subjectivity is a cultural performative, such that, for instance, the emphasis upon achieving an independent mindset within the research process is a continually repeated cultural discourse whose repetition signals to oneself and to others that one has become the right kind of academic subject, and not that an essential academic self has attained a permanent state of being.

The third, less common, understanding of transition within the undergraduate literature according to Gale and Parker (2014) is ‘becoming’ which sees students navigating multiple narratives and subjectivities simultaneously and in a more fluid manner than is envisaged in the previous two perspectives. In the becoming perspective, in contrast to the emphasis on students’ assimilation to the institution in induction and development perspectives, there is more of an emphasis upon the need for institutions to transform themselves to better accommodate students. In a more recent piece on undergraduate transition, Taylor and Harris-Evans (2018) support Gale and Parker’s (2014) view that ‘becoming’ is a more useful way to understand transition, using Deleuze and Guattari to extend the concept. Taylor and Harris-Evans (2018, p. 1257) utilise a ‘rhizomic logic’ that:

Recognises meaning-making as immanent, situated, located, embodied; it opens a way of working with data in its nuances, differences, singularities, contradictions and difficulties; and it emphasises that we can only ever produce accounts which are indeterminate, incomplete and more open-ended.

Taylor and Harris-Evans (2018) suggest that students’ transition experience is not neatly captured in either the paradigm of the empty vessel awaiting institutional input to facilitate success, or as a pathway marked by clear developmental milestones. Taylor and Harris-Evans (2018) argue that the transition experience is multiple and singular, spilling rhizomatically beyond transition conceived of as a student/institution transaction, and is tangled up with existing contexts and relationships in students’ lives. Taylor and Harris-Evans (2018, p. 1265) call for the need to ‘inaugurate new transition events, happenings and instances which help students navigate an increasingly market-driven and competition-oriented higher education landscape’.

Both Gale and Parker (2014) and Taylor and Harris-Evans (2018) highlight difference, diversity, and singularity in student experience. The approach allows us to think ‘outside the false dichotomy between a student-focused set of enablers or a university-led set of enablers’ (Taylor & Harris-Evans, 2018, p. 1265). Tobbell and O’Donnell (2013, p. 136) argue that the challenges of postgraduate transition need to be understood within a socio-cultural theoretical framework which takes in the impacts of micro (immediate or face-to-face), meso (family and work), exo (factors over which candidates have little control), macro (cultural and societal practice) and chrono (time and change) dimensions of postgraduate transition. Such an approach is receptive to the uniqueness of student experience within data rather than reading it through transition paradigms, and it resituates the transition experience in the space-time of student’s lives, a process that neither begins nor ends at institutional induction or examination points.

For our purposes, what the ‘becoming’ perspective also usefully brings into view, but does not explore in-depth, is the social or discursive context, both within and external to the university, within which knowing, or students’ expectations, arise. Our understanding of the transition to the research degree also draws on Gravett et al. (2020) who use Lyotard’s idea of ‘grand narratives’ to explore common themes in the transition literature. These themes include risk; students as being in deficit, something which ‘often evolves around supporting “aspirational” or “non-traditional” students’ (Gravett et al., 2020, p. 2); and, ‘homogenous, linear journeys’ (Gravett et al., 2020, p. 3). They conclude that ‘much of the thinking which informs current practice surrounding transition falls within a normative and unquestioned paradigm of transition which may not fully acknowledge the complexity, and multiplicity, of students’ lived realities’ (Gravett et al., 2020, p. 3). Gravett et al go on to encourage:

This growing shift towards ‘doing transition anew’, to explore both the complexity of students’ experiences, and to look more closely at the environments within which that learning takes place.

In addition to the generative world of real becoming, Deleuze and Guattari, like other Critical and postmodern social thinkers, have been concerned with how the sociocultural field shapes, interprets, enables, silences, and obliges thought and action, often truncating new ‘lines of flight’. Pre-existing concepts fix our sense of what is real, disallowing the objects of our perception to continually unfold within specific contexts and suggest to us new lines of action. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) argue that the hidden parts of human consciousness retell pre-coded stories as well as seeking out new, plural, and contradictory possibilities of interconnection, expansion, and production. These productions do not come from within, but are taken up, dropped, and mutated by a promiscuous play of external cultural meanings. A ‘becoming’ perspective might also then consider that the sense-making process students engage in as they undertake their research does not arise in an empty cultural space, nor is it only informed by individual space-time life contexts, but is read through a variety of available discursive lenses and norms of conduct surrounding and within the research environment. An advantage of reflecting on the impact of socio-cultural context on experience is a more explanatory or generalisable picture of the transition experience since culture is (to different extents) shared and relatively stable and can illuminate collective elements of experience.

There are, then, several ways of understanding transition – transition as something the institution tries to make happen; transition as developmental change or an identity shift intrinsic to academic being; and transition as a uniquely situated experience in the real world of becoming in Deleuzian terms. Transition is itself then a discourse that positions students in particular kinds of ways within induction or socialisation. What emerged as particularly salient in our previous work on student expectations at induction, captured within a metaphor activity at a doctoral orientation event, was the extent to which student expectations and perceptions reflect prevailing historical and cultural conceptions of what it means to be a doctoral candidate and a doctoral supervisor. We agree with commentators on ‘becoming’, but would add that conceptualisations of transition need to acknowledge the importance of cultural imaginaries about the doctorate, what it means to be an academic, and the supervisory role in constituting the expectations of incoming students, expectations which overlap in predictable ways.

The implications arising from reflection on transition paradigms in general, and on the role of the socio-cultural field within transition in particular are several. Successful transition involves more than identifying resources and supports, and more than inculcating candidates into an explicit set of institutional norms and expectations to support their developmental trajectory. Like other academic workers, doctoral researchers are exposed to a changing and complex research culture shaped by political, economic, social, and cultural forces which themselves carry ambiguity, tension, and risk. Enabling a positive transition is more complex than providing commencing candidates with information and inculcating them into an apparently seamless and unified set of academic norms of conduct. Transition experience needs not only to be released from its paradigmatic constraints, and to be enabled and celebrated in its singularity and multiplicity. The socio-cultural context that precedes and shapes experience and perception also needs to be acknowledged and, in some aspects, interrogated in order to support a positive HDR experience.

An orientation exercise

These observations first arose from our reflection upon the responses of commencing HDR candidates to a metaphor exercise designed to facilitate peer networking within a full-day orientation event. The exercise aimed to facilitate a relatively risk-free and non-threatening atmosphere in which commencing candidates could get together to make sense of their new situation. This was deemed important because the ways in which candidates understand themselves, their supervisors, and the nature of doctoral study is integral to a successful research endeavour. Centralised orientation events are mandated in policy and good practice guidelines, but they are also important because they support a vibrant research culture and can facilitate a sense of belonging at the university-wide level. In many cases, cross-university peer networking supports fruitful engagement around shared research foci, methodological perspective, professional or practice context, or other research-related interest or process. By building contacts among researchers from different disciplinary areas, university-wide events can also contribute to mitigating the isolation that too often undermines research success and well-being.

An invitation to participate in the orientation event was issued to commencing students from across all disciplines. Most had recently commenced their study, but a few had been enrolled for varying periods of up to six months. The session in which the metaphor activity took place followed a morning comprised largely of presentations addressing research ethics and integrity, authorship policy, and researcher safety, and the services and support available to research candidates.

In the metaphor activity, commencing students were asked to spend time in groups of three-to-four discussing their thoughts on four metaphorical prompts, and to then respond in writing to each of them. The four prompts on the sheet were:

1. My PhD is like … . because … …

2. If a film were to be made of my PhD experience, my ideal supervisor would be played by … . (insert actor’s name) … . because … …

3. In this film of my PhD experience, I (the research student) would be played by … . (insert actor’s name) … . because … …

4. I think my supervisor expects me to …

   1. … .

   2. … .

   3. … .

   4. … …

The activity was deemed metaphorical following previous studies (e.g. J. Haynes, 2009; McCulloch, 2013; Nacey, 2023) in doctoral education which suggest that metaphor is a powerful tool that ‘works by bringing into cognitive and emotional relation any two separate domains, using language appropriate to the one as a lens for seeing the other’ (F. Haynes, 1975, p. 275). In this characterisation, the first three prompts are metaphorical in nature: the first because it asks students to think about their research degree as being like something it is not, without boundaries being placed around what that comparator might be; and the second and third questions because they ask students to think about their research degree as being like a film (and hence bounded), and then which actor they would like to have play their supervisor and themselves in that film, and why. The justification for the choice of actor requires extrapolation on the sort of experience anticipated, the sort of person one might need to be, and the sort of person an ‘ideal’ supervisor would be.

In asking commencing candidates to imagine their experience in advance and to imagine their ideal supervisor in metaphorical terms, we found we had uncovered hopes, fears, perceptions, and interpretations of the coming doctoral experience and the roles played by the two key actors―candidate and supervisor. What was most interesting was that the evocative and emotionally loaded metaphors students offered reflected prevailing cultural understandings of the research education context. This is not surprising since as Lakoff and Johnson (2003, p. 3) observe:

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. … Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities … what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.

The orientation metaphor activity captured an immanent, emotional, existential, non-essential, social, normative, and discoursal doctoral experience. Exploring expectations via an open-ended metaphor activity also helpfully positions the candidate at the centre of their own narrative as an actor, decentring accounts of student experience read through transition paradigms in which, for instance, the student is viewed in terms of being ‘at risk’ by virtue of socio-economic or other social marker, as being possessed of a potential ‘deficit’, or as being ‘alien’ by virtue of being a student. What was evident in student responses to the exercise was not the singularity and multiplicity of experience, or any deficit of understanding of research expectations, but students’ expert reproduction of what Gravett et al. (2020) might term grand social and institutional narratives about the doctorate.

Sociocultural context and student discourse at induction

Unlike the emerging ‘becoming’ transition literature the metaphor activity revealed dominant metaphors or themes of meaning across individualised experience, enabling generalised conclusions about the transition experience of the cohort. Our 2022 paper which was based on student responses to the metaphor activity reported on how commencing students view the ‘ideal supervisor’. We found that students’ metaphors reflect historical views of supervision as an apprenticeship relationship with a Master, who was attributed apparently supra-human abilities and capacities enabling them, on their own, to handle every aspect of the research process and to ensure a successful outcome. Students positioned themselves as distant and subordinate (child to adult, novice to master) in relation to the more exalted position of the supervisor. There were few references to the professional functions of supervision, nor of support and networks available to the student, such as peers, discipline community, industry partners and local and central structured supports and resources. There was also an absence of consideration of power hierarchy or potential conflicts of interest with supervisors. The ‘ideal’ supervisor could not only ‘play any role’, without the need for outside input or networks, but would ideally provide a warm and personally supportive relationship.

This focus on the supervisor as the author of student success is not a misunderstanding of institutional norms but reflects the message universities give to incoming research students about the role of the supervisor, and is reflected in the structure of research education, as well as in the burden of responsibility institutions and the HE sector place on individual academics within research education. Since supervisors are seen to be the single most important reason for success, or failure, outside of student characteristics, interventions designed to improve outcomes have almost solely taken the form of increased administration, surveillance, and training of supervisors. What is not considered are the structural conditions within which supervisors work, and the responsibility of institutions and of governments to ensure that the conditions within which research is conducted are conducive to successful outcomes.

The emphasis upon the supervisor as the agent of quality outcomes in student discourse reflects traditional academic discourse about the all-knowing, all-capable supervisor, the ‘Master’, able, through a deft blend of neglect and ‘magisterial disdain’, to encourage an independent mind set in the candidate (Johnson et al., 2000). Things have changed, particularly in the past two or more decades. There is a new lack of tolerance for the slow completion times and high drop-out rates that went along with traditional arrangements. Supervisory neglect is no longer considered to be an appropriate means by which to foster an independent mindset, and supervisors are expected to provide significant support to candidates. This more recent discourse about the supportive or engaged supervisor was also readily reproduced by research degree students at commencement (Bastalich & McCulloch, 2024). The commodification and corporatisation of universities has seen the dominance of discourse about students as customers whose satisfaction must be ensured, and of supervisors as persons in need of regulation, to ensure productivity, quality, and efficiency.

The context within which higher degree research is conducted has also radically changed in the past two or more decades in many parts of the world. Candidates and supervisors are now subject to significantly higher expectations regarding publication rate and quality and the impact arising from their research, and they face a more demanding, competitive, and insecure academic job market. The massification of the doctoral degree and shrinking resources across the sector means that supervisors carry significantly higher supervisory loads than has been the case historically. Taken together this means that supervisors are likely to struggle to provide the quality of support candidates are given to expect, and that both research students and supervisors work in a more competitive and stressful environment. A slew of research has come out in the past decade documenting the poor mental health of research students relative to the wider population (Barry et al., 2018; Casey et al., 2022; Crook et al., 2021; Evans et al., 2018; Levecque et al., 2017; Milicev et al., 2021). Among the factors that have been identified as contributing to poor mental health among the doctoral cohort are high expectations and workload, isolation, resource issues, worry about future employment and precarious employment. Mental health problems are also high among the factors linked to discontinuation of higher degree studies (Larcombe et al., 2022). Many of the issues that undermine doctoral candidates’ mental health and subsequent drop out are systemic in nature, and they are the same factors that undermine the well-being of supervisors and of academics in general.

Institutional discourse about the centrality of the supervisor to successful research outcomes is problematic because it could lead students to downplay the importance of developing their own networks and alternative sources of support. The emphasis placed on supervisory ‘quality’ in research outcomes, within the context of pressurised academic working conditions, creates potentially unrealistic standards, and sets the stage for supervisor stress and burnout, and for student ‘disillusionment’ or disappointed expectations.

Our second paper (McCulloch & Bastalich, 2023), which also reports on the data arising from the induction metaphor activity, reflected on how students perceived themselves within the research process, and on what it would require of them. What we found was that commencing students are well-aware of the expectation that they should be independent and innovative within the research process. They emphasise the level of difficulty of the doctorate and portray themselves as responsible for its success or failure. Again, participant commentary reflected widely available historical perceptions of research as a lonely journey and an initiatory trial whose success depends largely on the qualities of the individual student, particularly their autonomy, hard work, intellectual ability, maturity, and capacity to dedicate time to research over other life priorities.

We also detected a Calvinist emphasis within responses in which the pleasure of doctoral work is largely absent or downplayed, and again there is little to no mention of systemic conditions in research, or of the importance of wider networks and supports beyond supervision. The pleasure derived from research was largely projected into a future moment in which the goal is achieved. Hard work, stamina, research productivity, and self-control, as opposed to pleasure, fun or community were the key themes. As Hughes (2011) observes, this reflects longstanding associations of learning or education with difficulty, and of pleasure with the failure to learn, or with a lack of self-control. The prospect of the difficulty of the task ahead was typically met with both anxiety and self-confidence. The importance of the independence and self-responsibility of the student again reinforces an individualistic outlook. This could lead candidates to blame themselves, to avoid seeking help and network building beyond supervision, and again enable institutions and governments to assign responsibility for the negative effects of ongoing systemic issues in research education to supervisors.

Johnson et al. (2000) observe that the subject of research within traditional research imaginaries is a particular kind of ‘independent’ masculine subject who likens relationality to femininity and ‘dependence’, underplaying the relational and inter-textual nature of academic work. A metaphoric and discursive independence/dependence binary constitutes independence as a condition of being demonstrable in distancing oneself from a weaker, dependent, feminine other, that is to say, from a more networked, interpersonal and supported/supportive way of being. This way of understanding what it means to be an academic and a successful doctoral researcher may explain lingering associations of research as an inevitably lonely process in which success rests solely on the individual strength of character of the researcher and of the supervisor Master (Hughes, 2011). As Johnson et al. (2000) observe, the traditional or ‘Oxbridge’ model of research education engenders widespread abjection among the doctoral cohort. It seems that, although much has changed, much remains the same for doctoral candidates. Unless these historical imaginaries are surfaced the main burden of responsibility, and punitive correction for poor doctoral outcomes can be placed upon supervisors and candidates.

Norms of personal hardship, isolation and of masterful supervisors sit alongside newer norms of efficiency and competition in higher education. Educator agendas which stress the importance of research and peer networks and of educational supports are often drowned out by an older discourse about independence and the sole reliance of research education on supervisors. ‘Transition’ then involves interpreting new and old, often competing, discipline and institutional narratives about what it means to be a good doctoral researcher within what too often become impossible conditions for the players in the research education drama. In practice, doctoral candidates are more likely to enjoy, to complete in good time, and to find employment when they lean on peer and discipline networks beyond supervision. Understanding the complex pressures at play within the research context is also likely to prevent them putting blame and pressure on themselves or their supervisors when things don’t go as expected.

Conclusion

In this discussion we have sought to show that experience and expectations are grounded in a complex cultural and discursive field, and that practices are embedded in both historical and more contemporary discourse about what it means to undertake a HDR programme and to be a doctoral supervisor. We have also wanted to share a metaphoric tool that we found to be useful in accessing the dominant constructs underpinning the research education space and in encouraging student reflection on HDR study. In the sphere of doctoral education, this discussion suggests the need to move beyond approaching transition simply as a process of introducing students to information about institutional services, resources and regulations. Nor is transition into a research degree best approached simply by restating well-rehearsed norms about the centrality of the research supervisor/s in successful research outcomes, and the need for students to be independent within the research process. Finally, successful transition depends on more than the personal or social resources or preparedness of students from different backgrounds.

We applaud work which seeks to escape constructions of student experience in transition paradigms to reveal singularity and difference in student becomings within transition. At the same time, it is important to consider the negative or contradictory impacts of discourse about what it means to be a doctoral researcher and a research supervisor on both supervisor and student becoming. We found that the metaphors candidates produced were evocative of the social field surrounding research, and consistent with institutional messaging and practice, but not necessarily supportive of the networked approach to research that is associated with successful outcomes. To assume that candidates and supervisors can and should succeed largely on their own is neither a rational nor a factual reflection of reality in the research context.

Rather than see doctoral students as already prepared for doctoral study by virtue of their undergraduate experience, or as possessed of a deficit of appropriate expectations, or even as more or less well-prepared for doctoral work by virtue of their personal and social capital, the approach advocated here redirects attention to research training as a social and educational practice. One more immediate implication for institutions, supervisors, and others in the research training space who seek to facilitate doctoral transition could be to invite doctoral students to critically reflect on the competing array of imaginaries within the academic environment and on the real systemic pressures at play within it. Orientation activities that use metaphor to surface and explore experience provide a useful and fun way to do this. Induction could for instance involve asking students to reflect on norms about doctoral study, academia, the supervisor’s role, and the research process, and to reflect on the possible tensions and effects these imaginaries could invoke within the research process, at the same time facilitating guidance about how institutional tensions and candidature might be efficiently and successfully navigated.

Ultimately however successful transition will require more than encouraging thinking and talking among HDR candidates and those who aim to support their success. Successful transition requires critical reflexivity on the part of institutions and the HE sector more generally to ensure that new modes of student and supervisor becoming and well-being are supported. Critically this means a greater focus on resources and supports for student-supervisor relationships, active promotion of and support for research networks, resisting the degradation of academic working conditions, and easing punitive forms of regulation, surveillance and administration of both students and supervisors.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy Bastalich

Wendy Bastalich is a Lecturer in Research Education. In addition to work on research degree student transitions, her current research focuses on university-wide doctoral curriculum, supervision, and the impact of institutional and policy atmospheres for doctoral education and social science and humanities disciplines.

Alistair McCulloch

Alistair McCulloch provides development for research degree students and their supervisors. Recent publications address research degree student transition, the disciplinary status of doctoral education, motivations for commencing a PhD, part-time PhD students, and the PhD and work. He is also convenor of the Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR) conference.