Plant-insects interactions in the Western Andes of Ecuador
Societies around the world are moving fast towards the implementation of the “knowledge economy” and this has promoted the improvement of higher education and the production of highly-skilled professionals, namely specifically the doctorates (CREST, Mod.1). However, the states of health of graduate-education systems are heterogeneous all over the world (Cyranoski et al, 2011). However, the “urgent” need of doctorates should not impact negatively on the quality of doctoral education and I suggest that policy-makers, funding agencies and high education systems (in countries that are building up their high education systems) should set frameworks to warranty that. The process of doctorateness is complex by nature and implies not only the generation of original knowledge (in process and outcome) but also human interactions (PhD candidate-supervisor/s). From the pedagogical point of view, the PhD candidate “suffers” the transformation from student into a responsible scholar. Several steps are needed to achieve doctorateness including: feelings of stuckness (liminality) (CREST, Mod.2), solving independently problems, passing a learning portal, finding the own voice to tell a research story through writing (CREST, Mod.3) and presenting the final work publicly. In order to complete the doctoral process, the PhD candidate needs a proper context to develop the PhD project. The context is composed not only by physical features (materials, equipments, infrastructure, access to literature) (CREST, Mod.2) but also human components (supervisory team and peers that support an scholarly environment, doctoral committe) (CREST, Mod.6). The present survey pretends to characterize the process of doctorateness of PhD candidates in Universities and Research Centers from the beginning to the end, through the exploration of their motivations for doing a PhD, the scanning of their activities, difficulties and feelings, and the investigation of the strategies and resources they use to overcome challenges at certain phases of the process. The present study does not pretend to be exhaustive but gives an overall impression of the experience of PhDs in the doctoral process of education in two types of institutions and in two different continents.
