This study highlights the experiences of doctoral students who worked for at least seven years in a professional capacity before starting in graduate school full time, or "returning professionals" as they are called for the purposes of this study. Returning professionals come back to school with an established sense of professional identity, meaning that they have some level of skills and knowledge that inform their expectations of themselves. My study looked at how having an established professional identity impacted their experience of graduate school and was informed theoretically by graduate socialization, identity development and role theory. I selected twelve participants from a large Midwestern public university from a range of programs and disciplines for a qualitative inquiry using narrative-inspired semi-structured interviews and a photo-elicitation exercise. My interviews explored the following three research questions:1.How do returning professionals experience ongoing shifts in their role from being a full-time worker to being a full-time graduate student as it relates to their professional identity?2.What tensions do returning professionals experience in their role as graduate students that are informed by their existing professional identity?3.How did returning professionals' professional identity impact their experience of the socialization process of doctoral education?Participants experienced the shift from being a worker to being a graduate student as existing in a liminal space. At times, the liminal space felt positive, like a break from the pressures of their previous careers and a time to invest in learning and research. At other times, it felt like a place of uncertainty and loss, where they no longer felt confident in themselves as the professionals they once were nor as the scholars they were trying to become. Participants also felt many sources of tension, which could be meaningfully grouped into two categories: 1. Student vs. Professional: returning professionals felt a conflict between the expectations of being a doctoral student and their previously shaped expectations of themselves as professionals. 2. Academy vs. Industry: returning professionals noted a difference in the way work was done in their previous jobs and in academia and felt frustrated that the rules of their program were not spelled out like a contract as in other jobs. And finally, some participants experienced contrasting socializations where their previous socialization was different than but not in conflict with academia. Other participants experienced conflicting socializations where their previous socialization was at odds with academic socialization. Some of these participants felt that they were being asked to abandon their previous identity, and that felt very threatening to their overall sense of self.The discussion addresses these themes, breaking down how returning professionals experienced their professional identities in the liminal space of their programs. The clash of expectations in how work should be done created an intra-role conflict for some participants that made it hard to know how to operate in the academic space. Being in a liminal space could also create a sense of dissonance depending on the type of job that a participant held previously and how cohesive their professional identity was. The study ends with implications for practice, including better orientations and mentoring that keep returning professionals in mind and more institutionalized supports to validate and equip students looking for jobs outside of academia.
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