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This dissertation explores the identity changes and re-negotiation processes after crossing multiple geographical and cultural borders among twelve female international graduate students at a large West Coast university. Despite the increased number of female international students in the U.S., their historical, cultural, and social experiences studying abroad have not been a focus of study or concern to educators and researchers of higher education. Therefore, this study focuses on the lives of female international graduate students as they talked about and reflected on their experiences of questioning, shaping, and trying to understand aspects of their identities while studying in an American university. Participants came to the U.S. from various countries, including Canada, Bulgaria, Taiwan, Turkey, Guatemala, Egypt, Portugal, China, South Korea, and Germany. A wide range of academic majors were represented, including education, counseling psychology, sociology, computer science, geophysics, soil science, history, geography, and linguistics. Grounded theory methodology was utilized to analyze data collected from in-depth interviews with each of the participants. The emerging theory developed from this study has at its core the women's "accounts of experience" and "perceptions of experience" that took place in both the pre- and post-migration contexts, leading to the emerging theory of "(re)forming incipient hybrid identities." The data suggest that becoming a female international graduate student is part of an ongoing, ever-changing process of developing and negotiating hybrid identities. The women developed and devised new ways of being and becoming after crossing multiple geographical and cultural borders, where existing discourses for identities are in flux, in negotiation, and often in conflict. The participants in this study challenged the predominantly homogenous focus on international students' identities as fixed and static, and instead embraced a sense of self that moves away from essentialist notions of identity. This study reveals the importance of a non-essentialist approach to identity in international student research. In particular it highlights the student's multiple, unstable identities and pays attention to the salience of the particular identities that are brought to the forefront depending upon specific contexts, situations, and experiences.
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