International graduate research students: evolving academic identities

International students are aspirational and expectant of their learning improving the quality of their life. The stress from academic pressure and acculturative challenges exasperates them from fully experiencing a quality higher educational experience. Despite this, they continuously strive to learn and adjust as they construct their academic identities. While research studies provide several independent perspectives on identity using social, psychological, historical, and political orientations, the current small-scale explorative study focuses on a socio-psychological perspective, discussing the evolution of academic identities of early-career international graduate research (ECIGR) students. This study emerged from the lack of a comprehensive definition of students’ academic identity and may contribute to this evolving definition. It adopts a case-study approach with semistructured interviews and applies the situated learning theory. It finds that adopting a learner-centric pedagogy that considers student’s intellectual abilities and academic knowledge, offering opportunities to explore available resources to develop a critical lens, is a sustainable approach towards construction of purposive academic identities. The findings from this explorative small-scale study provides a strong basis for future studies as it identifies an urgent need for more work to be done in this space.