Singing Through the Struggle: A Musical Reflection on Doctoral Life,Mentorship,and Belonging

Abstract

Doctoral education often entails navigating multiple, sometimes conflicting, roles, identities, and responsibilities. For students from artistic and caregiving backgrounds, the tensions between personal identity and institutional expectations can intensify feelings of isolation, invisibility, and precarity. Arts-based approaches offer ways to explore and represent these experiences beyond conventional academic prose. This article introduces an arts-based inquiry that uses original song and accompanying artistic statements to examine voice as both metaphor and method for navigating the complexities of doctoral life. By framing artistic identity and caregiving as sources of cultural wealth rather than deficiency, this work challenges deficit narratives and expands the possibilities for scholarly expression. This multimodal contribution highlights how dissonance, harmony, and modulation can illuminate the complexities of belonging and becoming within the doctoral and mentorship experience. In particular, rethinking voice as part of a collective ensemble rather than as a soloist affirms the emergence of scholarly identity as a relational and communal process that values mentorship, artistic practice, and caregiving as interweaving lines of a composition. In this way, this work demonstrates how arts-based inquiry can help reimagine doctoral life, offering new possibilities for realizing voice, identity, and belonging in academic spaces.