Is non‐completion a failure or a new beginning? Research non‐completion from a student’s perspective

Today’s performance‐driven model of higher degree research has constructed student withdrawal and non‐completion as failure. This failure is often internalized by the student as their own failure. This paper draws on a longitudinal study that examined the experiences of four female Master’s by Research degree students—Anna, Carla, Grace and Lydia—who had either withdrawn, not completed or who had taken a very long time to complete their research. Their stories reveal that they experienced many of the factors recognized in the literature as likely to negatively affect a student’s chances of completion: isolation (social and intellectual); lack of resources; ‘absence’ of, or poor, supervision; and personal and/or professional crises; and additionally, in three cases, tensions arising from a mismatch between an individual’s understandings and institutional conceptions of postgraduate research. Rather than internalizing their experience as one of loss and failure, each of these women ‘wrote’ beyond this expected ending to reconstruct non‐completion of their postgraduate research as a beginning to a positive re‐storying of their lives.