The Part-Time Doctoral Student Experience

Although scholarly interest in doctoral education has increased dramatically over the last two decades, much of this attention has focused on the experiences of doctoral students who are enrolled full-time in their programs. This study explored the experiences of 10 part-time doctoral students in different disciplines. Through semi-structured interviews with these students, we found that many of the issues surrounding these part-time doctoral students involved concerns related to balance, support, and fitting the mold of a “traditional” doctoral student. Importantly, while some of these issues are consistent with the experiences of full-time doctoral students, the experiences of part-time doctoral students are more complicated and required sustained and flexible efforts to adequately address. We conclude by suggesting both institutional and empirical efforts to better understand the complicated experiences of part-time doctoral students as well as to develop multi-faceted initiatives to support the experiences of this growing doctoral student population.

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