I used autoethnographic and narrative approaches in this dissertation study to report on the nature of the graduate school related experiences of women in collegiate mathematics education doctoral programs. The research relied on interview data with 9 women at 3 universities. Each woman had an advanced degree in mathematics and chose to move into a collegiate mathematics education doctoral program housed in a mathematics department. As a co-participant, I was one of the 9 women.

The focus of the two-interview protocol was exploring and extending the framework for doctoral mathematics student experience suggested in the existing literature. This framework included seven aspects of experience related to graduate student persistence and attrition in doctoral mathematics: community, visibility and guidance, moral support and encouragement, mentoring and role models, teaching quality, balancing roles, and intellectual ability. Interviews focused on information in and outside the contexts of these seven aspects, encouraging participants to discuss the ways in which these characteristics (1) affected their experiences in mathematics and in mathematics education, (2) did not affect those experiences, or (3) may not characterize their experiences. I used Clandinin & Connelly's 3-dimensional framework for a narrative inquiry as a lens through which I viewed the data, attending to the temporal, social, and locational aspects of the women's experiences.

Results indicate the existence of the 7 categories of graduate student experience offered in the literature, as well as the emergence of 3 new categories: self as scholar, "my teaching," and future possible self. The results are presented as narrative and autoethnographic vignettes about each of the 9 women, and as cross-case discussions and refinements of each of the 10 categories of experience.

Recommendations are made to mathematics departments that are building and maintaining doctoral programs in collegiate mathematics education, as well as recruiting Ph.D. students into their programs.