Understanding the Unique Factors Affecting South Asian International (SAI) Student Transitions into PhD Programs in the US: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Abstract

International students comprise over 50% of the graduate student population in the life sciences in the US, over 70% of whom are Asian. Research that aims to understand international students’ experiences has often treated Asian students as a monolith, discounting significant cultural and historical differences between regions in Asia that may affect students’ motivations for pursuing graduate degrees, their experiences in graduate school, and their identities as scientists in training. To begin to understand the experiences of SAI students as they transition to PhD programs in the sciences, we conducted an exploratory study in which we interviewed 10 SAI students and 12 US native students during the first six months of their doctoral programs. We performed a content analysis of the interview data with the aim of identifying factors that shaped students’ doctoral transitions. We then selected factors that were distinctive to SAI students. Finally, we carried out an interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand and describe the following factors that SAI students experienced as influencing their doctoral transitions: prior exposure to research; opportunities for networking; challenges with and affordances for acculturation; attitudes toward and understanding of mental health issues; financial affordances and constraints of pursuing a PhD, and barriers to communication. The results of this work have the potential to be useful to graduate programs seeking to ease SAI students’ transition to doctoral programs.

Plain Language Summary

This study aims to understand the unique factors that affect South Asian international students’ ability to transition into doctoral programs in the US. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative methodology, to describe the experiences of 10 South Asian international students. We also interviewed 12 native US students to help us identify factors unique to the South Asian students in our sample. We have identified six factors that affect South Asian international students’ transition experiences: Prior exposure to research, opportunities for networking, challenges with and affordances for acculturation, financial barriers and affordances, communication barriers, and attitudes toward and understanding of mental health issues. This research was limited by the relatively small sample size, an artifact of qualitative research, and the relatively short period of time studied for transition due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This research has implications in program design and findings can be used to ease the acculturation process for South Asian international students.

Keywords

IPA South Asians international students graduate education mental health research training

Introduction

Graduate education helps to create a highly skilled and innovative workforce to solve today’s pressing issues. In recent years, the United States (US) has seen an increase in graduate enrollment, with the National Center for Education Statistics reporting 3.1 million students attending graduate school in 2019, with 33.9% being international students (Arbeit & Yamaner, 2021). There has been significant research on issues faced by international students, such as the stress associated with living in a new or different culture and the challenges of developing language fluency (Akram et al., 2020; A. Li & Gasser, 2005; S. Li & Zizzi, 2018; Ravichandran et al., 2017). Little if any of this research aims to understand how graduate students’ experiences are shaped by their national or cultural origins (Alsahafi & Shin, 2017), which can lead to one-size fits all approaches to providing support. The sparse literature that does exist suggests that students from non-western countries can face more barriers when moving to the US than students from Western countries (Leong, 2015).

Although individuals from across the globe seek graduate training in the US, over 65% of international graduate students are from the Asian continent (IIE Open Doors/Fast Facts, 2021). Furthermore, South Asian students make up a sizable portion of this population, with Indian students alone making up over 17% of all international students (Arbeit & Yamaner, 2021). Prior research has explored issues experienced by Asian international students as a group, including language barriers, difficulty with acculturation, and lack of social support (Bastien et al., 2018; A. Li & Gasser, 2005). Much of this research treats Asian international students as a monolith despite their differing economic, social, and historical experiences (Frey & Roysircar, 2006; Rahman & Rollock, 2004).

In this study, we aim to elucidate the unique aspects of South Asian International (SAI) students’ transitions to natural science doctoral programs. We have chosen to study natural science doctoral programs given that their structures are similar to each other but different from other programs in other disciplinary domains, such as humanities and social sciences. Furthermore, the demographic make-up of the graduate student population is also relatively similar. So they naturally lend themselves to being studied as a group (IIE Open Doors/Fast Facts, 2021).

South Asia is a geographically and ethnically diverse region, encompassing modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. However, some commonalities motivate our interest in considering South Asians as a group. First, the languages used in the region (i.e., Hindi and Urdu) are mutually intelligible and have similar grammatical structures, likely because they both emerged from the now defunct language Hindustani (Shackle & Snell, 1990). Second, South Asian countries have been heavily influenced by British colonialism (Bose & Jalal, 2017) and thus are home to many English speakers and similar school systems characterized by English instruction. Indeed, previous research indicates that South Asians experience fewer language issues than other Asian populations (Kainth, 2021; Lyken-Segosebe, 2017; Xiong & Yang, 2021), yet they still struggle with acculturation (Frey & Roysircar, 2006). Acculturation, in this case, is defined as “the dual process of cultural and psychological change that takes place as a result of contact between two or more cultural groups and their individual members” (Berry, 2005; R. A. Smith & Khawaja, 2011). Indeed, research suggests that SAI students experience unique issues with loss of identity due to changes to their socioeconomic standing and reduced contact with loved ones (Amin & Pant, 2018). In addition, SAI students are the least likely among international students to access support resources (Rahman & Rollock, 2004). These results combined with low attrition rates for SAI students (Crede & Borrego, 2014; Espinosa et al., 2021) led us to ask: what unique challenges do SAI students face in transitioning into PhD programs in the natural sciences, which may have been overlooked in the literature?

To answer this question, we studied a group of SAI students during their first 6 months of entering a science PhD program. We defined this as the “transition” period in which graduate students join research groups and begin the process of defining their dissertation research. Research indicates that the first several months of an international sojourner’s experience in their new country and culture are crucial to how well they ultimately adapt to their new environment (Ramelli et al., 2013)—in this case, their graduate degree programs. There are understood to be two different forms of adaptation: psychological and sociocultural. Psychological adaptation entails personal well-being and good mental health, while sociocultural adaptation refers to the individual’s social competence in managing their daily life in an intercultural setting (Berry, 2005; Berry et al., 2006, p. 306; Pacheco, 2020). The sociocultural adaptation process is two-pronged, requiring SAI to overcome both cultural distance and logistical difficulties in order to acculturate.

Specifically, we interviewed 10 SAI students and 12 US native students during the first 6 months of their doctoral programs. While previous research has differed on how to define the period of transition, ranging from the period of coursework to the first year of a doctoral program (Cornwall et al., 2019; Levecque et al., 2017; Sverdlik & Hall, 2020), we chose to focus on the first 6 months as this is the period in which most students join and settle into their research groups. We had initially intended to interview participants throughout the first 2 years of their PhD program, which would have allowed us to gain some empirical understanding of what should constitute a transition period. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that the situation had changed so dramatically that perhaps our results would not what would be considered a “normal” transition experience. Hence, we decided to focus this study on the first 6 months.

Native students were included to provide insights into the factors that reflect graduate students’ transition experiences more generally, thus enabling us to identify experiences unique to SAI students. For instance, prior research has shown that native students experience numerous stressors as they transition to PhD programs, including time pressure, uncertainty about doctoral processes, financial pressures, and lack of a sense of belonging in scholarly communities (Cornwall et al., 2019). Furthermore, stresses associated with doctoral students’ transition experiences negatively affect students’ mental health (Jackman et al., 2021). To explore whether similar or distinct factors were experienced by SAI students transitioning to science PhD programs, we first a performed a qualitative content analysis of the interview data. We then selected factors reported by SAI students alone, which we then characterized using interpretative phenomenological analysis to understand and describe the distinctive ways that SAI students experienced their doctoral transitions. To our knowledge, this is the first qualitative study focused on the transition experiences of SAI students in the US. We report our findings here.

Methods

Research Design

This study was designed to explore the factors that affect the unique lived experiences of South Asian International Students during their transition to a PhD program. We selected Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as our methodology to make meaning of events and experiences from the perspective of the person experiencing the events. Where IPA differs from traditional phenomenology is in its idiographic focus, meaning its emphasis on the individuality of the participant, and its double hermeneutics, through which the researcher makes sense of the participant making sense of their personal and social world (J. A. Smith, 1996, 2004). Thus, IPA affords authors an active role in understanding and interpreting participants’ descriptions of their lived experience. In the context of this study, IPA helps us recognize that while we present the unique experiences of SAI students, all of our findings are filtered through the lens of the experiences of the authors analyzing the transcripts.

We interviewed both native and international students because we believed the experiences of the native students would help us understand the uniqueness of SAI experiences. We realized that most of the analysis was done by foreign students, and there was a potential blind spot about native student experiences, due to which it would be difficult to differentiate which SAI experiences are unique to them and which of the issues are more general issues faced by the larger graduate student population. By including native student experiences, we were able to solve this potential issue in our analysis. This study was reviewed and determined to be exempt by the University’s Institutional Review Board (protocol #STUDY00000979).

Participant Recruitment and Selection

We recruited respondents by emailing points-of-contact for doctoral programs in the natural sciences from five universities (three urban, two rural) in different regions of the US (Northeast, Midwest, South, West Coast) that varied in their enrollment of international students, as we reasoned that those institutions with large international student populations would have more support mechanisms in place than institutions with fewer international students. We asked these individuals to distribute study information, including a screening questionnaire (see Supplemental Material), to first-year PhD students in their programs. Participants provided written informed consent when agreeing to participate in the screening questionnaire. We also asked our respondents to share the study information with others they knew who met the selection criteria for the study (i.e., first-year doctoral student in the natural sciences).

We selected 22 respondents from seven universities (five public, two private) to interview from the 35 who completed the survey. The screening survey was designed to only allow completion by participants who were in the first 6 months of their doctoral program. Complete survey responses were manually inspected by the first author, and participants were selected to maximize representation from different nationalities and ethnic/racial backgrounds within two groups: South Asian International and native (i.e., US born and raised) (see Table 1). Participants were selected in the order in which they responded while accounting for their ethnic and national groups. Participants were asked to share study information with friends and classmates who fit the study criteria in order to increase the number of participants.

Table 1.

Demographic Information of Interview Participants.

	Male	Female
South Asian International Students	4	6
Bangladesh	0	2
India	3	3
Pakistan	1	1
Native US students	5	7
South Asian	3	2
Hispanic	0	2
White	2	3

Data Collection

We collected data using a single, 30 to 60 min, in-person or video-conference interview of each respondent to gain detailed insight into their transition experiences; interviews are useful for understanding complex social processes or interactions that have yet to be uninvestigated (Fontana & Frey, 2000). We used a semi-structured approach to elicit relevant information from our respondents in a consistent manner while following the natural course of conversation and allowing for digressions when appropriate to collect additional relevant information. We constructed the questions to gain an in-depth understanding of each respondent’s motivations and expectations for their doctoral programs because we expected motivations and expectations to influence students’ transition experiences (see the Supplemental Material for interview questions). For instance, we asked respondents about their research interests, how their interests developed, and why they chose to pursue a PhD. For international students, we also asked them about their decision to move to the US. We then questioned students about the positive and negative factors they perceived as affecting their transitions. We also queried respondents about any potential effects of their transition, positive or negative, on their mental health and the extent to which socioeconomic or religious factors such as family monetary support for the former and access to religious community for the latter may have affected their transition.

We queried students on the effects to their mental health due to the mental health crisis known to exist in graduate students in the US (Allen et al., 2020; Evans et al., 2018). We wanted to see how the transition experience might affect students’ mental health. We queried students about their access to religious community as we recognized that most South Asian students were likely to belong to minority religions in the US, and this could be a factor that affected their ability to find like-minded people to build community.

The first author conducted all interviews for consistency and to ensure that any cultural references made by South Asian students could be understood because he is a South Asian international graduate student. Each interview was then transcribed verbatim for analysis by the transcription service Rev.com. All participants chose to do their interviews in English. Still, and those interviews were transcribed by the authors themselves. All names used here are pseudonyms chosen to reflect the ethnic origin of the respondent. All participants received a $25 gift card upon completion of the interview.

Data Analysis

We performed three rounds of analysis on the interview data to understand each participant’s transition experience and identify the unique transition experiences of SAI students. For our first cycle coding, we employed in vivo coding as described by Saldaña (2013). Specifically, the first author began by carefully reading and identifying distinctive codes in the first six transcripts, creating an emergent system of codes that reflected the motivations, expectations, and factors affecting the transition of SAI students. The second author separately coded the same transcripts and generated his own system of codes. The first and second author discussed their coding of sets of 2 to 3 transcripts with the aim of coming to a consensus and refining the codebook. After a unified codebook emerged through discussion, it was used by both coders to code all of the transcripts (i.e., structural coding). After coding each transcript separately, the first and second authors discussed the coding until they reached a consensus. The first author also created analytic memos, which were revised after coding each transcript to briefly define each code based on the corresponding quotes.

During our second round of analysis, we further analyzed the analytic memos to group codes into themes and identify codes unique to each of our populations: SAI and native students. We did this by performing pattern coding, a form of second cycle coding (Saldaña, 2013). For example, codes that reflected students’ motivations to enter a PhD program were grouped and separated from codes that reflected students’ expectations of their PhD experience. This allowed us to form distinct themes that could be analyzed further. After coding was completed, all coded segments were reviewed to ensure they related to the overarching research goal of understanding SAI students’ transition experiences. For example, there was a code where a SAI student explained that her mental health had been affected by the lack of sunlight in her room. While this had only affected an SAI student in her sample, it was conceivable that this was an issue any student could have been affected by, regardless of their national origin.

We followed that with further fine-grained analysis of the quotes associated with codes unique to each population from the perspective of how the researcher understood the data according to the guidelines of IPA (J. A. Smith, 2004). This was possible since the first author was also a South Asian International graduate student who did his undergraduate in the US. His unique experience enabled him to interpret and analyze responses from both our population sets (Hechanova-Alampay et al., 2002). In conjunction with the second author, who had also lived in both South Asia and the US, the authors were able to draw on their personal experience in navigating cultural boundaries between South Asia and the US by discussing how they understood the experiences described by the respondents and find analogies with their personal experiences to be able to gain a nuanced understanding of the perspectives of the respondents in order to analyze the data. The first and second authors analyzed the themes generated from the second round of coding, sorted similar themes together into “factors,” and ultimately identified six factors that were unique to SAI students, which comprise the results.

Results

We identified six factors that SAI students described as influencing their transition experiences: prior experience doing research, opportunities for networking, financial affordances and constraints of pursuing a PhD, barriers to communication, attitudes toward and understanding of mental health issues, and challenges with and affordances for acculturation. Examples of how we derived these themes from the initial coding are shown in Table 2, and detailed descriptions of each factor and how it affected SAI students as they transitioned into their PhD programs are described below.

Table 2.

Example Codes and Quotes for Each Factor SAI Students Described as Influencing Their Experiences Transitioning into Science PhD Programs.

Factor	Code	Quote	Source*
Prior experience doing research	Undergrad research experience	I started doing research as an undergraduate my freshman year … The graduate student who was overseeing my work gave me a lot of responsibility and I got really, really excited about the project. … I was able to transition into leading an undergraduate team.—Allison	Native student
	Access to facilities	This lab is really big with few people, but it’s lots of facilities…I always wanted to be in a big lab with everything that I made.—Tabassum	International student
Opportunities for networking	Masters experience	It was a one-year professional course. I couldn’t get a lot of hands-on research experience, but I was interested in research, so I decided to pursue my PhD.—Rahini	International student
	Proximity to family	I was looking mostly at programs near where my fiancé was going to be. He started his PhD at [Institution Name2] which is in [City1], so I was like, “Okay, I like [State3], [State2], maybe the coast. That’s kind of far… [Then] he told me that his lab was going to move to the [Institution Name3], and I was like, “Okay, I might as well look at programs down there, too.”—Aadishree	Native student
Challenges with and affordances for acculturation	Advisor factors	Finding an advisor is probably one of the more stressful things of graduate school.—Sathwik	Native student
	Discrimination	The other day I was in downtown and some… I have some scary experience because a white dude called me dirty Indian.—Usra	International student
Financial affordances and constraints	Healthcare system	We have to pay like very large amount of insurance every month. Even when you have to claim your bills, it takes like million efforts of yours to claim your money back—Jhoomer	International student
	Lab environment	When I was working in my master’s degree after I graduated for that year between PhD application cycles, they would routinely make me work 15 or 16-hour days, multiple a week, and wouldn’t pay me correctly… treated me like I was an expendable worker, which I was. I was doing these things because I didn’t have a family to go home and feed. I was living alone.—Aadishree	Native student
Barriers to communication	Lack of language barrier	My second choice was going to Germany, but I have not had any experience of learning German language, and I did not want to invest a year or year and a half in learning German.—Rahul	International student
	Culture of aloofness	people [in the US], they are separated, you know, each person don’t care about others.—Saleem
Attitude toward and understanding of mental health issues	Cultural differences	Even if we talk with Americans, they have different interests… They have different festivals and we don’t understand what they were trying to say sometimes. I really don’t get most of the jokes.—Anika	International student
	Peer support	Older graduate students were really helpful in telling me what they experienced—Melanie

Note. *Each theme contains a quote from a native and an international student to help compare and contrast how the two groups in our sample experienced similar issues.

Prior Experience Doing Research

SAI students in our study experienced limited availability of research opportunities and research infrastructure, especially at the undergraduate level. Anila elaborated by explaining the extent of the difference in infrastructure between her home country and the US.

The state of education in our region is far from optimal… We have different constraints, we have limited resources, we have limited funds. The working conditions of our labs are not conducive to productivity… Even [though] I am a teacher [lecturer], sometimes I had to show only the videos to the students that this kind of apparatus is used for such work. I could not afford that apparatus to buy and show the students. But when you come here and I see that the undergrad students, they easily access all the apparatuses, [I find it amazing].

As Anila talked about the limitations of research infrastructure between her home country and the US, she was struck by the extent to which native undergraduates had access to all of the equipment and resources to do high-level research. When asked about how she transitioned into her PhD program given her limited experience, Anila expressed surprise and delight that she had flexible access to a lab where she could gain the technical expertise necessary for success in her PhD, noting, “They have given [me] the keys for the lab, I can go whenever I want to… [I have access to] Displays with the devices, … the instruments … [and] apparatuses in my spare time. So it’s really a good thing.” She further explained that this access allowed her “the opportunities… for independent work,” which eased her transition. For Anila and other SAI students with limited prior research experience, having additional, flexible time early on in their degree plans—time that was not otherwise committed to seminars, assignments, or meetings—was especially important for getting up to speed technically.

In contrast, the native students in our study all had research experience prior to starting their doctoral degrees. In fact, they often cited undergraduate research experiences as important motivators for pursuing research careers and described how they benefited from the skills they developed during these experiences, as Adrianna describes here:

I was fortunate enough … to do undergraduate research. That’s how I actually landed in [PI]’s lab, because he was one of the few molecular toxicology labs that was allowing undergraduate researchers to enter. From there I realized – the more I conducted research, I was like, “You know what? This is for me. This is what I want to do.

As Adrianna explained, she was not necessarily considering a research career initially as an undergraduate student. The idea of prior research experience as a motivation to pursue a PhD was absent from international students’ experiences because their prior research experience was much more limited. This raises the question of whether the transition experiences of SAI students should be designed to allow for more skill building and research exposure than is needed by native students with prior research experience.

Opportunities for Networking

Both SAI and native students tapped academic networks they had in place prior to starting their PhD programs in order to successfully transition. While native students were able to create this network during their undergraduate education, including their undergraduate research experiences, SAI students often, but not always, relied solely on gaining this experience by doing a masters in the US before pursuing a PhD. SAI students in our sample focused on the benefits of a master’s experience, especially in the US, for building professional networks with potential PhD advisors, which eased their transition. SAI student Jhoomer explained, “You go to conferences, you get to know other professors, they get to know you on the basis of talks you give or presentations or posters you present… That helped me a lot.” In contrast, native students relied on networks they built this network through their undergraduate education; as Sathwik explains, “The biggest factors that have helped [are] talking to older grad students, both at [Institution Name1], as well as some of the ones from my undergrad who are … in science graduate programs a couple years ahead of me.”

Both SAI and native students required nonacademic support during their transition. Native students relied on family support to get settled, as Wyatt describes, “When I first moved in, my dad came down and helped market scour Craigslist for furniture because this place had nothing whatsoever. I was sleeping on a yoga mat for my first week.” In contrast, SAI students often relied on academic networks such as their advisors for this support. SAI students with international advisors mentioned that their advisors helped them through the transition by not just mentoring them in academics but also helping them with non-academic matters, as Saleem describes, “When the supervisor met me, he took me to the market, and he gave me general advice like what I should do here in the US and what should I avoid.” SAI students in our sample also relied on existing networks of other international students, especially other SAI students, to learn how to settle into their new environment. Jhoomer described her role in such a network:

I know that there are a lot of students from my own [undergraduate] university who want to come here for their master’s or PhD. They always contact me [asking], “What should we do? What’s the procedure? To which professors should I apply?” I feel that if there is one person already in, he or she always leaves a path for the rest of the people.

Jhoomer clearly had a feeling of responsibility as a SAI student to be a source of guidance and support for others who come to the US for graduate school.

Challenges with and Affordances for Acculturation

The SAI students in our sample mentioned several other cultural factors that affected their transition, including culture shock, cultural expectations, discrimination, alcohol consumption, and perceived isolation from native students, all of which they felt affected their transition experience. South Asian students, both international and domestic, mentioned that they faced familial pressures due to cultural differences, which also caused stress and affected their transition experience. There were also logistical issues such as access to ethnic grocery stores and access to a car that affected their experience.

SAI students reported being treated equitably by their PIs, other faculty, and institutional administration. For instance, Saleem felt both he and his international student peers were treated fairly, yet he felt like his peers who were native students tended to avoid him or not include him. Saleem had trouble adapting to the individualistic culture in the US—he felt that native students had a social obligation to reach out to international students and welcome them. He was surprised when this didn’t occur, as he explains here: In my opinion, people here, particularly those who are resident of the US or, [city] or[state]. If they have strangers [foreigners], they should get involved. Strangers [foreigners] are the newcomers in the cultural activity and social interaction.

Saleem also struggled to pinpoint whether the lack of welcome was a general phenomenon in the US or particular to his locality. This meant he struggled to figure out whether he should be frustrated with his native peers for not making more of an effort to include him and other international students or whether this was a cultural difference that he needed to accept. This idea is further illustrated by Tabassum, who explains:

[I am in a] large cohort with 60 other students… I don’t think that I’m accepted or I think they are not used to mixing with international students that much … At first I thought that something’s wrong from my end because …. I’m not approachable enough or I’m not talking to people myself. Then I started doing it, but then at this age I know when people are interested in talking to me and how people are taking my conversation. I will start a conversation with someone in my class and they’ll say yes or no, I will see that they are not interested in talking to me.

Tabassum starts out by thinking that she is not being approachable enough. After making some effort, she concludes that native students who do not want to mingle with international students like her. In these instances, if these students had more prior knowledge of the idea of American individualism (Gelfand & Christakopoulou, 1999; He et al., 2021; Rhee et al., 1995), it might be easier for them to accept this behavior and not let it affect them as much.

Naturally, many international students felt a degree of culture shock due to the cultural differences alluded to in the previous point. While there were various aspects of American culture that stood out to different participants, every one of the participants reported negative feelings associated with the culture shock they experienced, as expressed by Anika:

And also being in a new environment and different people, … I think it definitely affects all of the Indian … I mean, all of the people coming to US for the first time. … I think everyone has … everyone will feel that culture shock and a kind of … low feeling.

Anika identifies a low feeling associated with the culture shock she experienced. It is interesting to note that she claims that this negative feeling is something not unique to her but something experienced by all Indian international students and even others while they acculturate to life in the US. This indicates her perception that her experience resonates with other international students she has talked to and that she has, to some extent, normalized her negative experience to cope with it and continue with her education.

International students in our sample reported logistical issues that further exacerbated their feelings of culture shock and homesickness. Logistical issues included not being able to access South Asian grocery stores, as Jhoomer reported when asked about issues she had faced initially upon coming to graduate school. There were also difficulties in mobility as many international students did not have cars immediately after arriving. Nevertheless, SAI students reported strong camaraderie from their compatriots and other South Asians in general, which helped them overcome these logistical issues, as Anila described:

They [Pakistani community] guided me a lot. Also the other people, … which are in my [graduate] class. Most of the people have similar culture, which I have. For example, the Nepalis, the Indians or Bangladesh[is], they have a similar culture. So they had same feelings which I had.

Anila’s comments are noteworthy because they illustrate how she sought advice for issues she faced from other South Asian students and that she felt her South Asian classmates shared similar feelings about their transition experience. This shared experience coupled with cultural similarity helps build a common ground to bring the South Asian community together in the US despite the animosity that exists between these countries on a political level.

Other cultural differences between US and South Asians affected the transition experiences of SAI students in our sample. For instance, Tabassum explains that she has noticed that in American culture, people seem to want to only socialize with people when there is alcohol involved. She feels that because she does not drink, she gets excluded from social gatherings, although she does not have a problem with people drinking around her. As a practicing Muslim, she believes she is perceived to be intolerant toward people drinking alcohol.

I think it’s cultural thing. I don’t like just being negative, meaning I think American people will get together just to have a drink. I will not spend my time with someone who I don’t know. That’s the basic thing, but I think people here doesn’t mind mixing with other people [as long as] they have a drink or stuff like that. … I don’t mind getting the alcohol, but that’s the thing, they [native students] think that as I don’t drink, I will not like to hang out with them or something that.

Tabassum also noticed discrimination and felt like she experienced racism, as she describes below:

it is kind of like they [Americans] grouped people based on, I will have to say this word, based on color or how they are speaking, depending on their accent. I think that it’s based on appearance because they don’t know, not every one of them know that I am from Bangladesh, not every one of them know that I am Muslim, I don’t drink or stuff like that. They’re just not interested in doing this stuff they do all together. So I would say it’s based on appearance.

This combination of experiences affected her transition, as she describes here: “It’s not allowing me to live like I wanted to live here. I think being in a grad school you need to have friends. You need to have a network that can help you.” Similar to other SAI students in our sample, Tabassum recognizes that building a community is essential for a successful transition, but she feels like, due to her background, she has not been able to build that community with her peers in her program. While she has been able to build community with compatriots, she is the only person from her country in her program so she feels she needs to build relationships with natives for success and she has struggled with that.

These acculturation challenges exacerbated SAI students’ feelings of pressure, as described by Usra here: “if I don’t get a result, … my fund will be canceled and I have to go home. This is a huge pressure.” The SAI students in our sample came from institutions where they didn’t have the sort of opportunities available in US institutions, so many of them perceived their graduate experiences in the US as their only chance for education and the only path to successful careers.

Financial Affordances and Constraints of Pursuing a PhD

Financial affordances and constraints affected students’ transitions in multiple ways. Two main issues arose for SAI students: their lack of awareness of costs and their ineligibility for certain types of funding. Regarding costs, graduate students often have to pay fees that are not clearly disclosed prior to enrollment. SAI students were unaware of these fees and thus had not budgeted for them. SAI students also were unaware of the expenses associated with the American healthcare system and these expenses increased stress during the transition. Specifically, SAI students struggled with the costs of healthcare in the US and found the US health system hard to navigate, as explained by Usra:

I … [got] sick here … [I had] medical [expenses]. Even the university health insurance cost a lot … The doctor gave me some tests and I … [turned out to be] autoimmune positive. So that doctor … suggest[ed] [a doctor outside the health center] and the outside doctor charged me a huge bill. It is very different… in India or Bangladesh it is not so costly.

For native students, the cost of the healthcare system was more familiar, including differences in costs depending on which facilities or physicians are used. While some native students in our sample mentioned that they were struggling with the exorbitant costs of student health insurance, they at least expressed awareness this issue might arise. For SAI students, the cost was not only difficult to afford, but also they were unaware that healthcare would be costly and that costs could differ depending on the source of the care.

SAI students also realized early in their transition they were ineligible for many types of grants or other financial support because of their immigration status, which they felt was unfair. For instance, Aakash explained that “international students do not get any travel awards. I find it kind of unfair.” Other SAI students in our sample noted ineligibility for assistantships or fellowships offered by the federal government, which are only available to US citizens or permanent residents. This was problematic in two ways. First, SAI students had more limited options for financial support, which exacerbated their financial stress. Second, their sense of unfairness led to feelings of discrimination, which made their transition more challenging.

Native students also noted financial factors in their decisions to pursue PhDs, but these differed from the factors noted by SAI students. For instance, native students appreciated that they would get paid to go to school if they opted to pursue a PhD. Melanie explained, “I decided on a PhD. It began as a financial decision, honestly. I [knew] I can’t pay for a master’s.” Other native students put off pursuing a PhD because of debt they had incurred as student loans from their undergraduate education. For example, Adrianna described how she “did not start graduate school immediately after my undergraduate education… I’m a first-generation student and I had a lot of education expenses, I [had] to take out loans, and I had to pay off those loans.” None of the SAI students in our sample had been delayed in their graduate education due to student loans. Although Adriana felt this delay made her lose momentum in terms of taking classes and studying, which she felt hindered her transition, she used this time to work in industry in multiple fields, which allowed her to gain exposure to different areas of research and hone her research interests and technical skills. The SAI students in our sample did not have this experience and thus did not experience the associated benefits or challenges during their transition.

Barriers to Communication

The SAI students in our sample explained that one of the reasons they chose to pursue a PhD in the US was because it was an English-speaking country. Yet, they reported difficulties in communication due to their unfamiliarity with American accents as well as the accents of other international students and faculty, which affected their transition. For instance, Anila described that she was fluent in English, but this “kind of English was not the English which I learned in my whole life.” This led to stress as she was never really sure if she had misunderstood what her peers and faculty were telling her or if they would understand how she described issues she might be facing if she reached out to them.

Attitude Toward and Understanding of Mental Health Issues

Although both SAI and native students in our sample mentioned mental health issues that affected their transition experience, SAI described and responded to these issues differently. SAI students described all of their mental health issues generically as “stress,” as Rahini describes here:

I think it [grad school] did affect my mental health when I was in [University 1] … Because of how my PI [behaved] and because of the weather also. Especially in the winters because it is like a very small town and there’s like absolutely no one to talk to because most of the grad students are stressed. … and it’s difficult to make friends.

Native students tended to have a richer vocabulary when describing mental health issues, drawing on terms such as anxiety, burnout, cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, and stress. It was unclear whether SAI students simply had a more limited vocabulary for describing mental health issues they faced or whether they were uncomfortable opening up about their specific mental health challenges.

Only one of the SAI students in our sample sought resources for mental health (Usra), and she felt there was a cultural gap between her and her therapists, as she described here: I also visited the university health center and because, because of the culture difference, I don’t think white [American] people can understand my psychological problems. While Usra perceived the therapist lacked cultural competence needed to provide support, it is also possible she was unable to explain why whatever issues she faced were affecting her as they were, as she admitted that she did have some trouble communicating in English.

Limitations

Due to the nature of this study’s design, we did not have a large enough sample size to be able to generalize our findings to all SAI students. While this study does get at many different aspects of SAI experiences, there may yet be other factors that affect their transition experience that our participants did not report. Furthermore, the study was not designed to offer insights into the prevalence of the issues identified here among the larger SAI student community in the US. Prevalence could be examined by surveying a larger and more diverse sample of SAI students in science PhD programs.

Interpretive phenomenological analysis affords insights into participants’ lived experiences as understood by the authors (Emery & Anderman, 2020). Thus, other authors carrying out a similar study might have interpreted the data differently. To account for this limitation, we involved multiple South Asian authors in the study and we made transparent our own national, ethnic, and science PhD experiences. This methodology is more grounded in nature, thus limiting the potential for theoretical connections. Our findings indicate that theories related to acculturation, communication, motivation, social capital, and social networking could be useful for further understanding the transition experiences of SAI students into science PhD programs. For instance, expectancy-value-cost model of motivation could be useful for understanding how SAI students weigh the benefits (e.g., financial affordances, access to facilities) and costs (e.g., financial constraints, distance from family) of continuing in and completing a science PhD in the US (Barron & Hulleman, 2015). Social capital or social network theories could be used to identify the social resources that facilitate SAI students’ successful transitions into science PhD programs or to compare the networks that native vs. SAI students tap as they transition into science PhD programs (Burt, 2000). It would also be interesting to understand how the acculturation of SAI students, as partially described in this paper, may vary from other SAI immigrants or international students from other regions.

Language may be another factor that limited our results. All SAI students in our sample were non-native English speakers; it is possible that they were not able to convey all aspects of their experience. Although we offered to interview in Urdu and Hindi, for many SAI students, these languages are their second or third language. We were not able to interview the students in their first language and so that affects how much of their experience was actually relayed to us in this study. Future studies focused on people from specific regions within South Asia where those languages are spoken, and authors who speak the language of the participants could help solve that. Even then, it would be very hard to find one set of authors who would be fluent in all the languages that participants may speak. Something more feasible would be to work with people who could translate for specific participants who might have more of a language issue.

Finally, our original intention was to follow up with our participants after the initial six-month period, as noted above, but were unable to do so because COVID caused significant shutdowns and people could no longer have a “typical” transition experience. A longitudinal study designed to follow participants through the course of their PhD might help just understand which of the issues identified in this study persisted beyond the initial transition experience, and which of the issues faded away with time. Unfortunately, the time during which this study was carried out would have meant that if we had followed our students, the data we would get would not be representative of an average student’s experience because of the special situations around the early stages of the Pandemic.

Discussion

Collectively, our results indicate that SAI students experience unique challenges during their transition to graduate education in STEM. These challenges are influenced by their prior educational experiences, their status as international students, and cultural differences between South Asia and the US. Through the interpretative process, we generated a conceptual model of the factors SAI students indicated as affecting their transitions, depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Conceptual framework describing factors that lead to a successful transition.

The SAI students in our sample had minimal research experience and often had not worked with the tools and resources that were readily available to native students in our sample. In addition, SAI students also differed in the networks they tapped to facilitate their transition, relying on advisors and peers at their new institution, especially other SAI students, because they often had no local family networks. In Figure 1, we conceptualized these factors as antecedents because they preceded the start of SAI students’ PhD experiences. Students with more research experiences felt they were more adept at performing research tasks and had a larger support network to help to their doctoral programs more easily. To address these issues, graduate programs could consider establishing summer bridge programs, which have been shown to support students in transitioning successfully into novel academic environments (Ghazzawi et al., 2021). For instance, international students could arrive during the summer preceding the start of their doctoral training to become familiar with their new environments and begin to develop knowledge and skills to be successful in doctoral training. Studies of bridge programs for historically minoritized communities in the United States show participants grow in their research self-efficacy and in their research productivity compared with similar students who matriculate directly into PhD programs (Born & Brock, 2022; Rudolph et al., 2019).

Because of communication barriers and cultural differences, SAI students relied on other SAI students for emotional support (see Transition Experience in Figure 1). They were also heavily dependent on their advisors and other faculty for academic support, guidance, and networking as they were newcomers to the academic community in the US. Institutions could support SAI students in identifying such support by establishing mentoring programs that pair more experienced SAI students with new students going through the transition process. Indeed, near-peer mentoring programs have been shown to improve sociocultural adaptation and reduce acculturative stress amongst international students in pilot programs implemented in Canada (Thomson & Esses, 2016).

The SAI students in our study encountered both logistical and cultural differences that made acculturation difficult (see Transition Experience in Figure 1). The logistical issues were exacerbated by the fact that, due to the differences in purchasing power between South Asia and the US, even students who had savings realized that their funds did not amount to much and they did not have economic support from their families back home. Cultural issues included discrimination and isolation, as well as preconceived notions about their religious identity. Language as well as financial affordances and constraints also affected transition experiences (see Transition Experience in Figure 1). While higher education in South Asia is mostly in English, participants in our study felt the way English is learned and spoken in their home countries was very different from how people speak in the US. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that South Asian English is its own dialect, separate from the English spoken in other English-speaking countries (Gargesh, 2020). As depicted in Figure 1, we considered barriers to communication and financial affordances and constraints as factors students experienced during their transition rather than being shaped by their own prior experiences because they were beyond the students’ control and because different students experienced these factors differently depending on their experience during the transition.

The difference is perhaps more pronounced for SAI students then speakers from most other English-speaking countries as although they do speak English, English is not the native language in any part of South Asia and so often they would use words from their native language to fill in gaps in vocabulary which they are unable to do when speaking to native English speakers, making it hard for them to communicate. At the same time, financial affordances in the form of a stipend and tuition waiver made it so that students could afford to study here without loans actually making the transition experience easier for SAI students

The final factor that affected SAI students’ transition was their attitude toward and understanding of mental health issues. Maintaining mental health is a documented challenge for graduate students, especially international graduate students of color (Anandavalli et al., 2021). Discussing mental health issues and seeking help to maintain mental health is rarer in South Asian cultures, where individuals experiencing mental health issues are likely to hide it (Arafat et al., 2022; Marrow & Luhrmann, 2012). In Figure 1, we describe attitudes toward mental health as preceding the transition experience and also being exacerbated by it. For instance, SAI students seemed hesitant to elaborate on mental health issues they may have faced, often describing mental health challenges using the more generic idea of “stress.” This inability or unwillingness to talk about mental health appeared to make some students’ transition experiences more difficult. In the few instances where a participant spoke about mental health, they suggested that there was a lack of culturally competent therapists that prevented them getting the help they needed. This was a factor that students faced during their transition rather than because of any preceding notions about mental health. Institutions could help promote conversations around mental health issues among SAI student communities by having regular seminars with culturally competent therapists and providing access to creative mental health solutions, such as online therapy.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-sgo-10.1177_21582440241245258 – Supplemental material for Understanding the Unique Factors Affecting South Asian International (SAI) Student Transitions into PhD Programs in the US: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-sgo-10.1177_21582440241245258 for Understanding the Unique Factors Affecting South Asian International (SAI) Student Transitions into PhD Programs in the US: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis by Muhammad Zaka Asif, Chaitya Jain and Erin L. Dolan in SAGE Open

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the graduate coordinators and administrative staff who forwarded our recruitment emails to the relevant listservs.

Author Note

This research was conducted while Muhammad Zaka Asif was at University of Georgia. He is now at Florida Atlantic University and maybe contacted at asifm@health.fau.edu.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was funded in part by the Georgia Athletic Association Professorship for Innovative Science Education.

ORCID iD

Muhammad Zaka Asif

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publically available in order to protect the confidentiality of the research participants. However, data can be shared after ananoymization and deidentification upon reasonable request.

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