Establishing Academic Identities Through Professional Socialisation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Doctoral Student, Institutional Member, or Early Career Researcher?

Abstract

AbstractWhile higher education institutions promptly responded to the transition to online or blended practices as a result of COVID-19, there is limited current understanding of how first-year PhD students committed themselves to various online networking experiences during their initial stage of professional development. By drawing on Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, this chapter elicits two first-year international PhD students’ professional trajectories of forming our professional identities in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite engaging with different professional socialisation activities, we both underwent three transformative stages which we classify as acquiring knowledge, establishing networks, and gaining validation. Our findings indicate that our dynamic and consecutive professional identity formation transitioned through three stages: a doctoral student, an institutional member, and an early career researcher. This chapter reveals how this linear three-stage process respectively unfolds for different international doctoral students. In this regard, relevant implications are proposed for current and prospective international doctoral students and their institutions to refer to in better facilitating international doctoral students’ professional identity development during and beyond COVID-19 pandemic.KeywordsInternational studentsDoctoral studentsPhD studentsProfessional socialisationProfessional identityExperiential learning cycleCOVID-19