The power of a female doctoral cohort: Process, podcast, and overcoming procrastination

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In the 2024 call for submissions, CIES recognizes that protest can take the form of small acts and challenges to competitive individualism. In the pursuit of a doctoral degree, forming an academic cohort of women dedicated to the process, and to each other is an act of resistance against a hierarchical, competitive, and often patriarchal academic space. Empowered by the critical awareness cultivated during our doctoral journeys, we acted to create community with one another to confront and rebuff the isolation that is often reluctantly endured during the end stages of a Ph.D. education.

An academic cohort can be defined as a group of students moving through a particular program or coursework together, relying on each other for support, active learning opportunities, and the exchange of ideas stemming from the material and the process itself (Lei et al., 2011). Research indicates that academic cohorts can build a sense of community, reduce stress, improve mental health, boost retention, and build professional networks needed after degree completion. (Goldman, 2012; Leland et al., 2020; Mantai, 2019). Aware of these multiple benefits, some universities have adopted cohort-based learning in doctoral programs. For those students without university-assigned cohorts, the benefits of being in an academic cohort suggest it is worth the time invested to find fellow doctoral classmates to help build one on their own. The self-assigned cohort is also an act of resistance against the often mentally draining and isolating process of dissertation writing.

Our proposal is a group panel on the experiences of four female doctoral candidates in a self-assigned academic cohort, formed around the time they all completed coursework and were preparing for candidacy. Each of them found that while coursework is typically community-centered and relationship-building, doctoral candidacy is quite the opposite, marked by few in-person meetings, no communal deadlines, and no set writing times. Our collective act of resistance against isolation was to form a cohort to help move through the process of completing a dissertation that included holding each other accountable in writing group sessions, navigating forms and rules of the university, celebrating each other’s accomplishments, encouraging persistence, and sometimes just venting about the isolation and processes of the doctoral pursuit.

This proposal centers our experiences around three P’s: process, podcasts, and procrastination. By process, we refer to the process of navigating the space between candidacy and degree completion, including the Proposal presentation, IRB approval, and collecting research data. As a community, being part of an academic cohort grants us the space to discuss selecting a dissertation committee, commiserating about revising research questions, and navigating the strict but often obscure university requirements.

In engaging with podcasts, our group questioned how podcasts could be utilized to disseminate academic research more efficiently to a wider audience. We formed what is most easily described as a podcast club, the same concept as a book club but creating, sharing, and discussing podcasts that disseminated education research while simultaneously considering the role of podcasts in disseminating our own academic research. We considered proposing a live podcast recording as our presentation at CIES, but given the restrictions around traditional conferences, we will offer pre-recorded podcasts as a parting gift to our panel session participants at CIES.

With all of life’s challenges including family responsibilities like elder care and child care, full-time jobs, part-time jobs, assistantships, and maintaining a minimal social life, it is easy for doctoral candidates to slip into a cycle of procrastination with dissertation writing. Procrastination is commonly understood as an avoidance of work which leads to self-recriminations of laziness and incompetence (Klingsieck, 2013). Research indicates that procrastination can be a product of intense anxiety related to the individual’s self-perception of ability to complete the task (Ferrari et al., 1995). Procrastination is lessened when the individual has a clear sense of what the task requires and experiences support that focuses on the process rather than the final product (Hoppe et al., 2018).

Academic cohorts can be helpful in ending that cycle of procrastination by extending support of the process, working through confusion regarding what is needed related to the task, and expressing encouragement in one another’s abilities. Research indicates that academic cohorts foster accountability and a shared sense of responsibility toward the academic success of cohort members (Lei et al., 2011). Members of this cohort have been incentivized to see others’ progress towards Proposal acceptance and IRB approval, as both peer support and peer pressure motivates our individual members in different ways. At the end of the day, knowing your cohort will support you with a writing goal motivates members struggling with procrastination and holds space to discuss underlying mental health issues and its physical symptoms that cause the individual to avoid the work experience.

In our panel presentation and discussion with attendees, we will highlight our cohort’s opportunities and challenges around process, podcasts, and procrastination as it applies to doctoral cohorts. We will discuss the cohort itself as an act of protesting the isolating process of dissertation writing and suggest ways of building community at that stage of the doctoral process. We will build community in the CIES space by providing the participants with podcasts we have produced on each of the three P’s and granting ample discussion space for doctoral students looking to form their own cohort.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Tami Carsillo, George Mason University

Individual Presentations

• Defeating procrastination: Self-assigned cohorts as frontline defense - April Maute Ege, George Mason University

• Podcast relationships through communal and academic exchanges - Tami Carsillo, George Mason University

• Cohort conversations: Finding community in podcasting - Elisabeth H Scotto-Lavino, George Mason University