Halfway in, halfway out: Navigating uncertainty in collaborative doctoral training

Collaborative research between universities and private companies is increasingly recognized as a vehicle for facilitating knowledge exchange and closing the gap between industry and academia. With doctoral training taking on an increasingly interdisciplinary character and focusing on collaborations between universities and industry, PhD students’ roles extend across organizational and knowledge boundaries. This introduces greater uncertainty in the doctoral process as candidates need to serve multiple stakeholders. While university-industry collaborations and academic engagement are well-studied topics, research in this area has overlooked the pivotal role of doctoral students and their experiences from collaborative research. Our study underscores the uncertainty that arises as doctoral candidates navigate the dynamic interplay between academia and industry and makes two original contributions - first, it identifies three distinct types of uncertainty that emerge in collaborative doctoral training, and second, it presents a set of self-management approaches for navigating uncertainty by examining the practices adopted by PhD students engaged in university-industry research projects.