What does success really look like for an international PhD student?

Authors: Maxi (Huy-Hoang) Huynh and Lynette Pretorius.

Doing a PhD is often seen as a journey of growth and achievement, but have you ever stopped to ask what success really means along the way? When we first imagined doing a PhD, success seemed quite easy to picture. It looked like a graduation gown, a completed thesis, published papers, a job, and perhaps a future in academia that would make all the sacrifices feel worthwhile. For some of us, it also meant making our families proud. For others, it meant realising what we were capable of. It was a dream shaped by hope, ambition, and the belief that hard work would eventually lead us somewhere meaningful.

But as our doctoral journeys unfolded, that image of success began to change.

In our recent paper, we explore how six international PhD students in Australia imagine academic success, and how those imaginings are shaped by cultural capital, local wisdom, relationships, and uncertainty. What we found is both simple and profound: success is rarely one fixed thing. It shifts. It stretches. It becomes more complicated, but also more human. In more academic terms, success emerged not as a stable endpoint, but as a dynamic and continually negotiated process shaped by the interplay of our personal histories, cultural values, relational support, and structural conditions across the doctoral journey.

For international PhD students, a doctorate is never only about studying. It is also about moving across worlds. We move across countries, languages, cultures, values, and academic systems. We carry with us the hopes of our families, the habits formed through earlier education, and the beliefs we have inherited about what it means to do well in life. Then we arrive in a new academic context that often asks us to think, speak, write, and even imagine ourselves differently.

That is where that neat version of PhD success began to falter.

At the beginning, many of us understood success in ways that were easy to recognise. Like many others, we imagined PhD success as completing the degree, publishing papers, becoming more employable, and securing a stable academic future. These were tangible, respectable, and widely recognised markers of achievement. In a true sense, they made sense both within the institutions we entered and within the worlds we came from, where academic success was often closely tied to credibility, pride, and future opportunity.

Yet life during a PhD has a way of unsettling what once seemed certain.

For some of us, success began to change through moments of exhaustion, self-doubt, or uncertainty. For others, it changed through feedback from supervisors, conversations with peers, or the slow realisation that progress is rarely linear. There were times when success no longer felt like a destination waiting at the end, but something much smaller and more immediate. Finishing a paragraph. Understanding a difficult theory. Staying with the process. Finding the courage to speak. Continuing, even when the future felt unclear.

Over time, success became less about appearance and more about meaning.

What stood out strongly across our stories was that success is deeply relational. It does not belong to us alone. It is shaped by the people around us and the people we carry with us. Family was central in many of our narratives, not only as a source of encouragement, but also as a source of responsibility, memory, and emotional weight. To pursue a PhD was, in some cases, to honour sacrifice. In others, it was to carry forward values of education, service, advocacy, identity formation, and collective uplift.

Support also came from supervisors, writing groups, and peers. These relationships mattered more than we often admit in academic spaces. They helped us see that struggle did not mean failure. They made room for growth. They reminded us that becoming a scholar is not only an intellectual journey, but also an emotional and relational one.

At the same time, our imagined futures were shaped by realities beyond our control. Visa rules, shifting migration policies, and uncertain academic job markets all made it difficult to imagine the future with confidence. Even when we worked hard, planned carefully, and remained committed, there was no guarantee that the pathways ahead would remain open. In that context, success could no longer be imagined as a single stable outcome. It had to become more flexible, more adaptive, and more honest about uncertainty.

Perhaps that is one of the most important things our paper reveals.

Success for international PhD students is not simply about achievement. It is also about negotiation and evolving. It is about deciding which parts of ourselves we carry forward and which expectations we need to question. It is about learning how to live between aspiration and constraint. It is about making sense of a future that is never fully secure while still holding on to hope.

Another powerful thread across our stories was the idea of contribution. As our journeys progressed, success moved away from being purely personal. Many of us began to think more deeply about giving back. To our communities. To our students. To the systems we hope to improve. To the people who may come after us. In this way, success became less about individual accumulation and more about care, responsibility, and impact.

This is why, in our paper, we introduce the Fluid Compass Model of International Doctoral Success. We chose the image of a compass because, for us, success has never felt like a straight road. A compass does not remove difficulty, uncertainty, or change. Instead, it offers orientation. It helps us keep moving even when the terrain shifts. In the same way, our journeys as international PhD students have required constant recalibration. Family values, cultural beliefs, academic expectations, personal aspirations, and structural constraints such as visa rules and labour market uncertainty all shape the direction we take. The model captures this ongoing process of adjustment and becoming. Rather than seeing success as something fixed to be reached at the end, the Fluid Compass Model invites us to understand success as a dynamic practice of finding direction, responding to change, and staying grounded in what matters most.

For us, this metaphor captures what it means to keep moving, even when the path ahead is uncertain. This paper was born from that shared reflection. Through autoethnography as our methodology, it became both a study and a story. It represents our effort to make visible the quieter, more layered realities of doctoral life that are often hidden behind polished success narratives. It is also an invitation to others to think differently about what success means in higher education.

Perhaps success is not simply finishing. Perhaps it is becoming. Perhaps it is not only about reaching the end, but about how we continue to find direction through uncertainty while staying connected to the values, people, and hopes that brought us here in the first place.

Questions to ponder

• What does a successful PhD student look like to you?
• How do academic metrics hinder PhD student progress?
• How should academia change to better accommodate diverse notions of success?