By Dr. Galia Fussell, Dr. Jacob Kaltenbach, & Dr. Josef Vice

Resilience, according to the American Psychological Association (APA), is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands” (2026, para. 1). Here, the authors consider how to build doctoral student resilience. Faculty can seek to catch early warning signs, foster socialization into the academic community, help students unlearn (and then relearn) workplace writing habits, and teach them to embrace imperfection.

This is “where comebacks begin.” Resilience is built into the academic culture at Purdue University Global (PG). 83% of all PG students work while enrolled and 49% are first-generation scholars (PG, 2025). Our anecdotal data suggest similar numbers for PG’s doctoral student cohort.

As Mitic (2022) notes, first-generation graduate students face unique economic and psychological barriers to completion and success. Not all will instinctively know they belong in their cohorts, and many will experience so-called “imposter syndrome.” Given the unique challenges of doctoral study, it’s not surprising that only 50-60% of doctoral students nationwide will complete their degrees (Collier & Blanchard, 2024; Helgøy et al. 2026; Lani, 2026). At PG, however, completion is motivated by workplace expectations. When last assessed in 2024, our doctoral degree career outcomes rate outpaced the National Association for Colleges and Employers (NACE) average by more than 3% (PG, 2025).

This doesn’t mean our students sail through their degrees. They experience their own share of doubts and struggles, and even high performers in CM801, the Doctoral Writing and Research course we teach at PG, report a sense of resignation as their initially ambitious goals meet the realities of timelines and resources. That reality check is usually a good thing, but we want our doctoral students to feel empowered, not resigned. How can we help build resilience? 

Doctoral students will always face the hybrid pressures of personal doubts, familial expectations, and occupational stressors, and we provide pastoral care when we can. Our first duty, however, is to help students develop coping strategies for their distinctly academic challenges. Because doctoral students must acquire independent research competencies, augment their academic writing skills, and construct original knowledge within their fields of study, “perceiving oneself as being capable to deal with any future stressful research-related circumstances” can thus “indicate a higher degree of perceived resilience” (Kokotsaki, 2023, p. 175). This is the route to resilience.

Building resilience is not just about “toughening” but also about identifying the root causes of attrition. Academic early warning systems (AEWS) are positioned to facilitate timely intervention. We can monitor students’ progress and help them take measures to improve learning outcomes. Wang (2023) analyzed academic and behavioral data across multiple categories and concluded that learning quality has the greatest impact on student success, with a contribution score of 0.33. Online learning participation (0.2) and course difficulty (0.145) are also contributing factors. Armed with knowledge from AEWS, faculty can thus analyze students’ learning, identify their potential academic challenges, and intervene proactively. 

We should not underestimate how hard it is to abandon trusted vocational writing conventions for the more particular rigor (and initially mysterious standards) of scholarly discourse. In fact, this transition is one driver of doctoral student attrition, and we can help. For example, in an analytical reading exercise early in CM801, students are asked to reflect on a peer-reviewed article in their field to learn about research-paper structure, terminology, and expected content. Then, by comparing the example to current APA Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS), they also learn to think like scholars. 

The socialization theory of Weidman and Stein (2003) helps us understand this transition from knowledge consumption to knowledge production as an essential step in the doctoral journey. We can accordingly help the student understand both relevance and authenticity, by showing “how knowledge gained as a student is used in professional practice” and at the same time demonstrating “appropriate normative behavior of individuals in the scholar role” (Weidman et al., 2001, as cited in Weidman & Stein, 2003, p. 654). Faculty might, for example, take a task-centered and protocol-driven paragraph from clinical writing and contrast it with an academic paragraph on the same topic, to analyze the differences in structure, diction, and style, then reverse the process and consider how the results of scholarly research can be repurposed for the workplace. The goal of a professional doctorate degree, after all, is not only to make an original contribution, but also to improve a process or solve a problem in the practical context of the field. 

We know those magic moments from our own teaching and collaborative engagement with students: when the student understands they can make their own original contribution, even in the form of a modest conference proposal, presentation, or draft. Such epiphanies can help build resilience and reduce resignation, but there are no guarantees. Tinto (2017) posits that students also need to engage in the continuum of an active and interdependent scholarly community that prizes relevance. Faculty can activate this community by mentoring academic writing, providing real-time feedback, and cultivating a growth mindset.

They can, in other words, maintain what Weidman and Stein (2003) call an “orientation toward scholarship,” characterized by being accessible to students, engaging actively and transparently in their own scholarly activities, and clearly conveying “expectations and encouragement for students engaging in such activities” (p. 653). For those students who struggle with academic challenges at the beginnings of their doctoral journeys, feedback from peer reviewers familiarizes them with the expectations of the scholarly community. They begin to understand feedback as a natural continuation of scholarly standards rather than an obstacle. 

To become more resilient, students must embrace imperfection and take a realistic view of the limits of their doctoral projects. This reality check can seem counterintuitive. If students falsely assume that research and writing are strictly linear processes leading to perfect manuscripts, they may doom themselves to resignation. But that’s not how scientific inquiry works, and proximity to working scholars helps. Our CM801 students benefit from learning about their professors’ own struggles, failures, and learned strategies for coping. How many times did each of us go back to the drawing boards as we developed our doctoral projects? Sharing our journeys helps students see that their own struggles are not outliers or markers of potential failure; sharing our struggles with APA format, source identification, and citation in the process of literature review similarly helps them find strategies for success. 

Our students don’t want to be identified by how they struggle, but by how they prevail, by their determination and problem solving. Students feel less stressed once they understand that occasionally “getting it wrong” is not only normal but an essential part of the learning process and scientific method, that a completed, relevant doctoral project matters more than a “perfect masterpiece” (McMahon et al., 2026), and that imperfection is not failure.

The journey to the professional doctorate can feel long and demanding, testing the student’s inner resources and coping abilities. Learning to use a scholarly writing style, adopting scholarly research norms, and building their own confident academic voice are all stressful experiences that can delay completion and postpone doctoral student success. The journey from apprentice to independent scholar and back to learned practitioner means reclaiming the resources they need to make meaningful choices: not only cognition, autonomy, and safety (Bertello, 2025), but also socialization into the academic community. That positive feedback cycle starts to transform resignation into optimism. “I look forward to continuing my work,” reported one CM801 doctoral student, “and continuing to get feedback on my research to prepare for publication.” That’s resilience in one step.

References

American Psychological Association [APA]. (2026). Resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience

Bertello, A. (2025). From stormy waters to navigable seas: How PhD students make use of coping mechanisms to deparalyze pragmatic paradoxes. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 24(3), 317–346. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2023.0596 

Collier, K. M., & Blanchard, M. R. (2024). Graduate student resilience: Exploring influential success factors in U.S. graduate education through survey analysis. Trends in Higher Education, 3(3), 637-680. https://doi.org/10.3390/higheredu3030037

Helgøy, K. V., Flobakk-Sitter, F., & Guldbrandsen, A. (2026). Factors related to PhD completion among doctoral candidates: A systematic scoping review. Frontiers in Education, 11: 1794620. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1794620

Kokotsaki, D. (2023). What does it mean to be a resilient student? An explorative study of doctoral students’ resilience and coping strategies using grounded theory as the analytic lens. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 18, 173–198. https://doi.org/10.28945/5137

Lani, J. (2026). Almost 50% of all doctoral students don’t graduate. Statistics Solutions. https://www.statisticssolutions.com/almost-50-of-all-doctoral-students-dont-graduate/

McMahon, J., Shannon, S. W., Blair, J., Crooks, S., Copeland, S., Harrington, M., Hughes, C., Mitchell, G., Brown-Wilson, C., & O’Neill, D. (2026). Exploring resilience in doctoral students: A mixed methods evaluation of the wellbeing shelf. Nurse Education Today, 160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2026.106994 

Mitic, R.R. (2022, March). Insights into first-generation doctoral students: CGS research in brief. PhD Career Pathways. Council of Graduate Schools. https://cgsnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CGS_CP_First-Gen-Doc-Students_ForWeb.pdf 

Purdue University Global [PG]. 2025, December. Purdue Global facts: World-class education online. https://www.purdueglobal.edu/about/fast-facts/

Tinto, V. (2017). Reflections on student persistence. Student Success, 8(2), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v8i2.376

Wang, W. (2023). Academic early warning model for students based on big data analysis. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 18(12), 16–31. https://doi.org/10.3991/ijet.v18i12.41087

Weidman, J. C., & Stein, E. L. (2003). Socialization of doctoral students to academic norms. Research in Higher Education, 44(6), 641–656.

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About the Authors

Dr. Galia Fussell is a full-time faculty member who teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the English and Rhetoric Department.

Dr. Jacob Kaltenbach is Chair of the English and Rhetoric Department at Purdue University Global. He has taught and advised graduate and undergraduate students for more than 30 years.

Dr. Josef Vice (he/him) has taught College Composition and Doctoral Writing and Research at Purdue University Global for the past 22 years, with a total of four decades in the classroom.