A Disrupted Cohort: Finding Your Closest Confidants When Your PhD Program Scatters

The cohort model is a hallmark of doctoral education. Incoming students are grouped together at the start of their academic journey, enrolled in the same foundational courses, and oriented alongside one another with the implicit assurance that these are the people who will carry them through the program over the next four or more years. For many students, particularly in professional master’s programs, the model delivers. But, at the doctoral level, programs differ widely. The gap between what the cohort model promises and what it actually delivers, especially regarding past coursework, deserves closer attention. 

When Your Cohort Fractures

Doctoral cohorts fracture and splinter for entirely understandable reasons. Throughout the course of a degree journey, some members will have children, take unplanned leaves of absence, relocate, shift research directions, or adjust timelines around full-time employment. Some students enter the program as full-time scholars; others pursue the degree as professional development while working full-time positions. These differences enrich the classroom learning experience, but they also mean that a cohort rarely moves through to the dissertation stage as a unit.

The result is a kind of quiet structural isolation. The research bears this out. Social isolation has been consistently identified as a primary contributor to doctoral attrition, particularly during the dissertation phase (Ali & Kohun, 2007; Golde, 2005). Attrition rates across doctoral programs have remained stubbornly between 30 and 50% for decades (Wolfe et al., 2023; Van Rooij et al., 2021). Burns and Gillespie (2018) found that students who felt connected to one another during coursework experienced a sharp decline in their sense of relatedness once they entered the dissertation stage. This shift directly contributed to their decision to leave. This is not a failure of any particular cohort; instead, it is a design limitation. The cohort model is optimized for the structured phase of doctoral education and offers diminishing returns once students enter the independent work of the dissertation.

Cross-Cohort Connections and the Relationships That Persist

If the cohort is the starting point, it is rarely the ending point. The connections that carry doctoral students through the final stretch are often formed outside the cohort entirely. These relationships manifest through shared challenges rather than shared enrollment: co-teaching a course, navigating a new research method, or simply being at the same stage of life with the same pressures. This is also where our friendship started. Shortly after we both relocated to Minneapolis (Rowe in 2021, and Roman in 2022), we met as graduate instructors, teaching the same undergraduate-level course. As the semester and year progressed, we learned that we had much more in common than just our teaching schedules and research interests. As time went on, our conversations expanded to discussions about the challenges we were navigating as doctoral students, the challenges of teaching while managing our own coursework, and future research and career planning. We also started to bond over other similarities, like exploring our new city, sharing a sense of humor, and enjoying a spicy margarita on a sunny patio after a long week of work and class. 

Massaglia and Wilfert (2023) found that while doctoral advisors were the most important contributors to a student’s academic progress, peers were the most important source of emotional and social support for persistence. The distinction matters: advising drives the intellectual work forward, but peer relationships sustain the person doing the work long term.

This all rings true in our experiences. We agree that three features distinguish the peer relationships that endure:

• Absence of competition. Genuine investment in the other person’s success (i.e., sending relevant articles, flagging job postings, sharing resources) without the sense that doing so diminishes one’s own position.

• Mutual championing. Doctoral training emphasizes critical analysis, which can leave students underpracticed at celebration. The relationships that persist include deliberate acknowledgment of progress: a publication, a committee meeting that went well, or an IRB approval.

• Honest reality checks. For students whose research touches on personal or polarizing topics, a trusted peer serves as a corrective, someone who will say when an argument is too close to its author.

Distance, Tethering, and the Risk of Drift

Research suggests that greater distance from one’s institution correlates with lower completion rates and longer time-to-degree (Brownie et al., 2025). When the program is no longer part of a student’s daily environment, sustaining momentum becomes harder. The dissertation slips from the center of a student’s professional identity to its periphery.

What mitigates this drift is not always institutional. Formal structures help, such as a research assistantship or an affiliation with a campus institute, but the informal tether matters just as much. A peer who checks in about deadlines, who asks how the writing is going, who happens to remember that the committee meeting is Thursday: this kind of consistent attention functions as a persistence mechanism in its own right. Proximity alone does not guarantee progress. Relational accountability does.

Four Things Worth Knowing Before the Cohort Scatters

1. The cohort is a starting point, not a destiny. The people a student graduates with may not be the same as the people they began the program alongside. Staying open to connections across cohort years and departments is not a sign the cohort failed; it is a sign students’ needs evolved.

2. Shared circumstances matter more than shared coursework. Full-time students face different pressures than those pursuing their degrees while working. Students who relocated for the program navigate different challenges than those who have already established a community on campus, or within the local community. Finding someone whose daily reality mirrors one’s own is often more sustaining than finding someone with the same advisor.

3. Rhythms outperform events. A weekend writing retreat is a nice experience, but a weekly check-in (even a brief text) is a practice. Consistency matters more than any single gesture of academic solidarity.

4. The bureaucracy is a team sport. The administrative path to graduation is rarely transparent. Links in the student handbook may inadvertently lead to the wrong page. Forms surface a week before they are due. Having peers to navigate the same systems together (or who recently did) can prevent the kind of missed deadline no one thought to mention.

Silencing the Imposter Voice 

Many doctoral students have reported experiencing imposter syndrome, broadly defined as “feelings of not belonging, of out-of-place-ness, and the conviction that one’s competence, success, and likeability are fundamentally fraudulent, that it is only a matter of time before this is discovered, before being found out” (Breeze, 2018, p. 195). These types of feelings are also a meaningful predictor of depression and stress. Critically, prior research also found that perceived belongingness to one’s scholarly community was an important negative predictor of imposter syndrome (Sverdlik et al., 2020). When doctoral students are isolated, their assessments of the effort required for scholarly achievement become distorted: they do not see the struggle behind others’ successes and overestimate their own inadequacy.

What silences imposter syndrome is the accumulation of evidence. This is not evidence in the academic sense, but the interpersonal kind: consistent support from a peer who witnessed the work happen, believing in each other on the days imposter syndrome creeps in, and saying so out loud. That evidence comes from a specific kind of relationship. This is a relationship built not by program design, but rather the choice to pay attention to another person’s intellectual life when formal structures no longer require it.

The dissertation is supposed to be an original contribution to knowledge. The cohort model suggests that a built-in community will support contribution. The reality is that the community worth having is usually built by the students themselves, one connection at a time.

References

Ali, A., & Kohun, F. (2007). Dealing with social isolation to minimize doctoral attrition: A four-stage framework. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 2(1), 33–49. https://doi.org/10.28945/56.  

Breeze, M. (2018). Imposter syndrome as a public feeling. In Y. Taylor, K. Lahad (Eds.), Feeling academic in the neoliberal university (pp. 191–219). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64224-6_9 

Brownie, S., Yan, A. R., Broman, P., Comer, L., & Blanchard, D. (2025). Geographic location of students and course choice, completion, and achievement in higher education: A scoping review. Higher Education Research & Development, 44(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/27526461231200280.  

Burns, E. M., & Gillespie, C. W. (2018). A phenomenological study of attrition from a doctoral cohort program: Changes in feelings of autonomy and relatedness in the dissertation stage. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 13(1), 517–537. https://doi.org/10.28945/4158.  

Golde, C. M. (2005). The role of the department and discipline in doctoral student attrition: Lessons from four departments. Journal of Higher Education, 76(6), 669–700. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3838782. 

Massaglia, V., & Wilfert, A. (2023, November 3). Find your people: Building your community as a PhD student. JCC Connexions, 9(4). https://www.naspa.org/blog/find-your-people-building-your-community-as-a-phd-student 

Sverdlik, A., Hall, N. C., & McAlpine, L. (2020). PhD imposter syndrome: Exploring antecedents, consequences, and implications for doctoral well-being. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 15(1), 737–758. https://doi.org/10.28945/4670.  

Wolfe, Z.M., Ciampa, K., & DiRienzo, A. (2023, December 19). Supporting first-year doctoral students. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/2023/12/19/best-practices-supporting-first-year-phd-students-opinion 

Van Rooij, E., Fokkens-Bruinsma, M., & Jansen, E. (2021). Factors that influence PhD candidates’ success: the importance of PhD project characteristics. Studies in Continuing Education, 43(1), 48–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2019.1652158.