The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how international doctoral students matched with their faculty advisors, what types of advising experiences they had, and how these interactions influenced their first-year success in their doctoral programs. We applied the lens of developmental advising to situate the advising experiences of our sample due to the framework’s emphasis on holistic student support. We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with 21 international doctoral students attending a large research-intensive university in a Southeastern state.  Our findings revealed that students were often matched with an interim advisor. While most reported a positive advising experience, the data revealed concerning differences in the type of advising experiences and support reported based on academic discipline. This study contributes to the body of literature by studying advisor-advisee matching among international doctoral students, who are less frequently studied, and by further analyzing how advising experiences shape international students’ academic transitions.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how international graduate students in their first-year of doctoral study selected their faculty advisor and how this selection process influenced their advising relationship. Our results found that a majority of students in our sample were assigned to an interim advisor and most reported a positive advising experience. However, disquieting patterns emerged from the data: low frequency of advisor-advisee interaction, occurrences of mismatching between advisor-advisee, and an unknowingness of how to engage with one’s faculty advisor. Our study adds to the literature focusing on international students by shedding a light on nuanced advising experiences of first-year international doctoral students and by providing recommendations for faculty advisors and directors of graduate studies on ways to improve and systematize their advising practices so as to encourage retention and success among international doctoral students.

Faculty around the world shares some underlying commonalities by virtue of sharing a profession, but we cannot draw informed parallels because culture, style and history of higher education, and faculty socialization play a significant role in how the faculty life is lived and experienced. We know quite a bit about faculty working in developed and developing nations, but the current snapshot lacks perspectives from academics living in transitional nations. This in-progress study will survey faculty employed at the University of Sarajevo, located in Bosnia and Hercegovina, to establish a baseline of their demographic profile and to describe their job satisfaction using Hagedorn’s conceptual framework. This study will test the applicability of Hagedorn’s framework in non-US settings and expand our understanding of the causes and outcomes related to faculty satisfaction.

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