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Graduate evasion. Graduate socialization. Evasion phenomenon.
This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of attrition in stricto sensu graduate programs, linking it to the concept of interrupted academic socialization. Although attrition at the undergraduate level is a widely debated topic, its manifestation in master's and doctoral programs remains an incipient and neglected field within the national literature. An initial bibliometric analysis confirmed a research gap concerning studies that connect the descriptors 'evasion', 'graduate studies,' and 'socialization,' thereby highlighting the originality of this research. The central objective was, therefore, to understand the disengagement process in graduate studies and its relationship with university socialization. This predominantly qualitative investigation is grounded in the theoretical assumptions of social phenomenology and ethnomethodology, employing sociobiography as its primary methodology, in dialogue with ethnography and content analysis. Throughout the study, eight students who had withdrawn from graduate programs at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) were interviewed. The results reveal that attrition is the culmination of a process marked by five central crises: adaptive, relational, institutional, familial, and work-related. The way which individuals’ experience and responds to these crises enabled the construction of a typology of dropouts: the Phoenix, the relational type, the bureaucratic type, the bewildered type, and the solitary type. It is concluded that interrupted socialization in graduate studies is a complex, human, and emotional phenomenon that transcends individual failure and exposes the structural tensions within academia.