ABSTRACT
Graduate education, especially at the doctoral level, provides students with opportunities to learn, grow, and gain independence as scholars, as well as gives rise to a certain degree of stress. The stress level that the program itself generates as a matter of course scales up with additional challenges for some graduate students, including deficient academic engagement or, in some cases, poor relationships with their supervisors. Other additional stressors can be counted, like a reverted work-life balance, financial difficulties, a lack of permanent employment, the pressure to publish in high-impact journals and participate in conferences or congresses, and the feeling of an uncertain future. This chapter is a collaborative autoethnographic study seeking to explore the authors experiences as international doctoral students leading transnational lives in Canada. They are three international Turkish, Chinese, and Vietnamese doctoral students in a Joint Ph.D. in Educational Studies program at a Canadian university. Acknowledging the diverse demographic backgrounds-including gender, race, ethnicity, and class-the chapter aims to situate the collaboration in a critical discussion on different challenges the authors faced and resources they used while learning and sustaining doctoral studies amidst a global crisis, which are emerging themes in their findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)