This paper discusses the advisor-advisee relationship in doctoral education and how international doctoral students in the United States experience this relationship. International doctoral students make significant contributions to U.S. campuses, communities, and research enterprises. Higher education stakeholders should attempt to understand these students' experiences in the socially and culturally constructed "figured world" of academia (Holland et al., 1998). The figured world of advising, considered as a branch of the figured world of academia, is explored in this qualitative study informed by hermeneutic phenomenology. Twenty-five international doctoral students at a Midwestern university participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Out of this sample, nineteen students also participated in four heterogeneous focus groups and twenty-three shared photographs that best represented their experiences as international doctoral students. Five central themes emerged from the analysis of interviews and focus groups, and they all fall under the overarching theme of advising as an intercultural and inter-educational experience: advising as mentorship, advising as support, advising as caring, advising as employment, and advising as a dysfunctional relationship. Nonetheless, collision of the advisor's different approaches is possible. This study focuses on the figured world of advising that draws on the concept of figured worlds proposed by Holland et al. (1998). [For the full proceedings, see ED665621.]