empowering doctoral candidates in the dissertation supervision process

This study infers the lived experiences of Ph.D. candidates on empowering them by dissertation supervision. Our research method was phenomenology, and we interviewed students who were selected by the snowball sampling method. For ensuring the trustworthiness of the finding (credibility, transferability, confirmability, and dependability), we employed member checking, thick description, and external audits. The results demonstrate the ups and downs of empowering students through dissertation supervision. Therefore, ups in empowering students include freedom of selecting their supervisor, self-efficiency, independence, self-challenging, and supervisors’ empathetic understandings, fluent roles, and effective feedback. On the other hand, downs in empowering students are Supervisors’ low responsibility, inappropriate proficiency, and poor feedback, which led the students to look for an unconventional pathway.