: The recruitment and retention of doctoral students is an immediate and ongoing problem in graduate education, with attrition rates for doctoral students over the past 40 years estimated to be 50 or higher. The problem of attrition is particularly acute for departments of library and information science (LIS); the discipline faces increasing pressure from within the academy, with the result that many LIS schools and departments have closed or merged with other units within their institutions. Any attempt to improve recruitment and retention--and by doing so to strengthen the position of the LIS program in the research university context--requires a far better understanding of the current LIS doctoral education experience than is currently available. This study uses Dervin's sense-making methodology to elicit and evaluate information about the attrition experiences of individual doctoral students; the results provide a starting point for understanding the factors unique to the LIS doctoral student attrition experience..