Typical and Individual Doctoral Processes and Lifecourses: The Types of Narratives of the Project Manager, the Survivor and the Seeker

Abstract

One task of the doctoral education is, globally as well as nationally, to produce and renew the highest expertise and knowledge in a high quality and efficient way. Even though in this global time the high-quality knowledge and skills are a competition factor which the success of the societies is expected to be able to lean on, also the doctoral students and their individual factors are significant. The accelerating global change is strongly reflected at the individual level: an attempt is made to respond to the changing expectations and to prepare individually and diversely. The individual doctoral students and the graduating doctors come from different everyday lives and contexts. The graduating doctors' expertise and skills are individually colored during the individual doctoral processes. Often the doctoral students' and the graduating doctors' individuality is ignored – even though individuality in other contexts is identified more clearly than before. In this article I examine the lifecourse experiences and stories of under-40-year-old female doctoral students with a family and form three different types of doctoral student on the basis of the material. The examination concentrates on the areas of the lifecourse; the family, doctoral studies and work as well as on the dynamic wholeness formed by them in the temporal continuum of the lifecourse. The objective is to make the generalized doctoral process more comprehensively intelligible.