From “Bitch” to “Mentor”: A Doctoral Student’s Story of Self-Change and Mentoring

For about the last 40 years the attrition rates of doctoral programs in America have been estimated to be between 40-50% (Lovitts, 2001). These rates differ among disciplines, departments, and universities (Golde, 2005; Janson, Howard, & Schoenberger-Organ, 2004; Lovitts & Nelson, 2000). While the body of evidence on undergraduate persistence and attrition is modest and guided by some theoretical frameworks (see Tinto, 1993), doctoral education has been described as largely overlooked (Lovitts & Nelson, 2000), poorly understood (Golde, 2005), and utterly lacking in theoretical frameworks (Liechty, Schull, & Liao, 2009). Golde (2005) provides three reasons why it is important to understand doctoral student attrition: (a) we currently cannot explain the low doctoral graduation rates, (b) high attrition may be a signal of departmental, university or societal problems, and (c) the significant economic and human capital costs of high attrition rates. Researchers who have studied doctoral student persistence and attrition have tended to look at personal characteristics of doctoral students (e.g, intelligence, learning styles, motivation), the environment (e.g., faculty, department, university), or the interaction between the two (e.g, academic and social integration, relatedness, faculty-student relationship; Lovitts & Nelson, 2000; Terrell, Snyder, & Dringus, 2009). Emerging from this line of inquiry have been the challenges posed by the faculty-student or dissertation chair-student relationship and the dissertation process itself (Tierney & Hallett, 2010). The dissertation may be considered a "major challenge" (Lovitts & Nelson, 2000) in the progression towards degree completion. Moreover, the style of writing required for a dissertation can cause even bright, emerging scholars significant delays and problems (Liechty et al., 2009). In order to identify global policies and solutions to the issues of high attrition, problematic interpersonal relationships, and satisfactory writing, researchers could use interpretive approaches that study local contexts with penetrating depth (Pascale, 2011) and vivid, concrete experiences. Although a few research studies (Grant & Simmons, 2008; Heinrich, 2000; Tierney & Hallett, 2010) have presented "narratives" of the experiences of students or mentors during the doctoral/dissertation process, overwhelmingly the research on doctoral student persistence has been guided by traditional research methods that follow the typical scientific, passive (Ellis, 2004), and realist (VanManen, 1988) style of writing. Even these narrative approaches have relied more on analyzing and subsequently telling a story, rather than showing a story by emphasizing emotion (Ellis, 2004), multiple interpretations, and dialogue in order to create a "messy text" (Smith & Sparkes, 2009). Resources exist to support faculty and doctoral students through the challenges of doctoral education and the dissertation, such as: advising guides by experienced dissertation chairs (Gordon, 2000) or a group of faculty within a specific department (e.g., social work) (Liechty et al., 2009), and articles from doctoral students about their experiences of doing doctoral education (Janson et al., 2004), and the dissertation (Riebschleger, 2001). Yet, we still lack a candid, thick, and rich description of what is happening from the perspective of both graduate student and committee chair during the dissertation process. While researchers have noted that the dissertation process can be non-linear and messy work (Gordon, 2000), the entire body of literature has failed to capture and describe this significant slice of reality. What are the doctoral student and the committee chair thinking, feeling and doing during the dissertation process? What are those possible barriers or facilitators to persistence? This study proposes to address this gap in the literature by examining the case of one doctoral student and his committee chair by explicitly showing a story of the dissertation process (Smith & Sparkes, 2009). …