Abstract
With an increase in precarity globally, there is a need to emphasize proactive self-management of the PhD process for international doctoral students. They may better manage their PhD training journeys if approached as a quest for life career construction. This chapter contributes to research that situates PhD training experience in self-construction of career. The author highlights the self-work that international doctoral students undertake as they construct life careers through a PhD process. She concludes that international doctoral students begin to design their careers from the PhD application process and continue throughout the space and span of the training. She recommends that the counseling field explore different ways to use self and career design approaches to develop self-management orientation resources for international doctoral students.
TopMethod
This work is a synthesis of my journal reflections drawn from informal conversations with peers during my PhD journey and my thoughts about how I experienced myself as a career construction agent. I present the journey as a story because to describe a course of action is to tell a story: This time, the story reflects the multi-layered agentic plots enacted by IDSs (Cochran 1997). This synthesis is justified because reflexivity is a crucial tool for developing a professional identity (Dixon & Chiang, 2019) and an essential tool for implementing lifelong self-construction (Guichard, 2005). I do not present the stories in any particular sequence or importance because they reflect daily-lived encounters. I write from the positions of an ‘actor’ and a ‘witness’ in the plot. I integrate existing literature, personal experiences, and reflections about both because these all serve as tools for personal meaning-making while passing through the PhD journey.
Conceptual Framework
This chapter draws from Savickas’s (2005) career constructivist theory. Savickas proposed that individuals manage their career development journeys by the way they interact with their environments, make meaning of these interactions, mobilize personal agentic resources and act on their “behaviors related to work-life, in the context of their environments and experiences with others” (Lytle et al., 2015, p. 4). I focus on the career adaptability construct (Savickas, 1997, 2013). Savickas’ adaptability includes “degree of concern about the future, the ability to take control of their vocational planning, curiosity about different roles they might adopt, and the confidence to pursue their goals” (Lytle et al., 2015, p. 4). I argue that IDSs who begin their programs with adaptability skills will be more likely to actualize their desired end plots. This framework fits the current work because it has been used extensively in counseling and career development research to explore life and career construction design issues (Guichard, 2005; McIlveen & Patton, 2007).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Career Adaptability: Career adaptability is a psychosocial construct that denotes an individual’s resources for coping with current and anticipated tasks, transitions, and traumas in their occupational roles that alter their social integration to either a large or small degree (Yang, Feng, Meng, & Qiu, 2019, p. 3).
Dialogical Self: “The dynamic multiplicity of I-positions in the mind space, where the self can move from one position to the other and can imagine granting a separate voice to each position” (Bokus, Bartckzak, Szymanska, Chronowska & Wazynska, 2017, p.85).
Self-construction: “This involves all the factoring and processes (social and individual) enabling an individual to direct his or her existence and thus try to fulfill what is his vision at a given moment) (Guichard, Huteau, 2007, p.108).
Career Construction: The proposition that “individuals construct their careers by imposing meaning on their vocational behavior and occupational experience” (Savickas, 2005, p.43).
Image Norms: This refers to “the belief that individuals must present or possess a certain image, consistent with occupational, organizational, or industry standards, in order to achieve career success” (Giannantonio & Hurley-Hanson, 2006).