This study explores how master's students perceive their learning experiences and build their identities as postgraduate learners. It also investigates how these students' perceptions affect their aspirations regarding academic careers. By applying the Community of Practice (CoP) framework, this study focuses on three dimensions of master's students' experience; community, practice and identity. Seventy master's students from one research-intensive university in Hong Kong were interviewed regarding motivations for doing a master's degree and reflections on learning. The interview results showed that master's students build their communities partly around shared academic interests. However, the boundaries of these communities are loose and flexible, due to the nature of master's programmes with their short periods of study and large numbers of part-time students. The study also showed how master's students develop their knowledge and skills through doing research and how they evaluate the prospect of becoming an academic.
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This qualitative study investigates the interplay between the ethnic and academic identity construction of a group of university students with South Asian backgrounds in Hong Kong. The findings indicate that ethnic identity and ethnic socialization have protective and facilitative effects on learning motivation and academic achievement. It is found that these ethnic minority students receiving tertiary education, holding congruent views of ethnic and academic identity, display a sense of agency and critical reflectivity of both the host society and their heritage communities and see facilitating community uplift and developing a more positive social image of ethnic minorities as their generation’s responsibility. Reconstructing an ethnic identity and developing new social images therefore motivate them to pursue academic success. The findings indicate that the South Asian students figured out ways in which to interact with the outer world and set up new roles and spaces (i.e., a heritage community with more positive social image). The findings shed light on how to provide better opportunities for and assistance to ethnic minority students when they pursue higher education. Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature B.V.