Ph.D. Survival Skills
How to present your research in conferences?
Professor: What do you think about my presentation? What makes my presentation interesting?
Studnet 1: At first, your presentation told an interesting story. For the first two slides, you use examples and interesting narratives to attract audiences. Secondly, you add a lot of pictures in the presentation, which makes it not boring.
Student 2: I think one advantage of your presentation is that you can interact with audiences, making all of us felt related to the study.
Student 3: In my opinion, telling story is very important. You provide background about the study and provide police officers examples, which show that Officer safety is a big problem in the urban area. This is a good way to attract people’s attention.
Student 4: I think keeping voice up and down also helps attract the audience. If the presenter’s voice lacks variations, it will make the presentation boring.
Professor: Yes. At first, you need to learn how to present your research in a limited time. It will be more difficult to present your research in 15 minutes than 20 minutes. Once, I was asked to present my research in 12 minutes. So it is not possible to show every detail of your research. For a conference presentation, you cannot talk about everything. What do you think is the purpose of the conference presentation?
Student 3: I think conference presentation could help us get ideas from others. People will connect their research interests with your study, and give valuable opinions. Also, it provides a good opportunity to present your research to potential reviewers. Thus, they can offer you some feedbacks before the review process. It is like a practice.
Student 4: Sometimes, we may be too focused on our ideas and think our study are very interesting. But it is important for us to show it to others and get ideas from the people who are not familiar with the study. They probably will point out problems that cannot be discovered by us.
Student 5: I think one important purpose of conference presentation is to make self-advertisement. You are trying to sell your research to others.
Student 1: I always try to explain my research to my parents. Present research to people who are not familiar with the research can get new insights. Also, we can learn something during the presentation process.
Professor: Yes. You make a good point. You will act as a salesman in a conference. You want to sell your research to the potential editors and reviewers. That’s the function of a conference. Obviously, you don’t have much time to tell everything. You need to convince audiences that you are doing interesting research. It is very important to grasp their intentions. So you don’t want to start your presentation with boring statements, such as “Mobile industry is a big industry (ambiguous)”. You need to think about how to grasp their intentions. An excellent presentation takes a lot of practices.
One thing in my presentation is that I didn’t use text until the page 14. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. So when I prepared a presentation, I spend a lot of time on finding good pictures.
Student 2: Can you share some tips on how to practice? What is the most effective way to practice?
Professor: Present your research to the audience who knows nothing about the research is a good way to practice. I always present my research in front of my wife, and she gives me interesting advice. Also, you can gather some friends or colleagues and practice in front of them.
About texts and figures, I use texts because I did not want to memorize my script. I can look up the slide and explain. But if you use figures, you have to memorize everything. However, in a presentation, you don’t want always to watch the screen, which makes less interaction between you and the audience. Remember, a good presentation is a two-way communication. Another important point is that if you don’t know how to use animation, you’d better avoid it.
Student 3: Yes. Once I tried to insert five slides content into one slide. If the computer in the presentation room is not compatible with yours, the animation will change. It will not achieve the expected results.
Professor: Yes. I don’t recommend you using too much animation. Also, it is a good idea to show context using graphs and numbers.
Student 3: I think another advantage of your presentation is that you can keep the audience calm and avoid their questions. I also noticed that you did not show the literature and theory part in the slides.
Professor: Yes. I don’t like showing literature review in a presentation. If you show the literature review part in your presentation, it maybe not an interesting research from the beginning. You have to demonstrate this is a new and interesting research without literature review. Showing literature review means you are just a follower. Of course, some people have different opinions about this.
Also, I skipped the robustness check fast, because I think it is not the core part of my study. You don’t want to spend a lot of time at the end of the presentation. I just showed the summarized results and contributions. Please think hard about which part of your research is more important and what is not. However, people always like to ask questions about details. In this case, you can prepare extra slides to show literature reviews, definitions, and correlation table. When someone asks specific questions, you can show them these details.
Student 4: Can you provide some tips for the Q&A section?
Professor: My advice is that practice is important. At first, I was also scared about the Q&A part. You probably will get similar questions. So it is a good idea to go over the first round review from a journal. Then you can prepare what kind of questions you will meet. For a conference presentation, it is more important to sell your story than to get comments. My experience tells me that sometimes it was difficult to get valuable feedbacks.
Student 3: One of my advisors likes to send papers to a lot of people and get feedbacks. When you present your work, audiences may not totally understand what you are doing. It is a very limited time window. But if you sent papers to them, they have more time to read it. Then they probably will provide more valuable feedbacks.
Professor: Yes. You could ask friendly reviews. But remember, you cannot nominate these as your reviewers when you submit the paper to journals.
Student 1: My question is that what is the condition to be nominated?
Professor: People who have the conflict of interest should not be nominated. These include teachers, colleagues, coauthors ( a five-year window). Reviewers are supposed to be someone without the conflict of interest.
Week 9_How to Improve Your Fluency level in English
How to Improve Your Fluency level in English
Prof. Pang: My English was used to be very poor. I was also shy, but I enhanced my fluency. There should be various way to improve it. What is your suggestion for it?
Student 1:
It has been helpful for me to watch video clips such as presidential speeches, news, sports events, and so on. Also, one faculty recommends to have a tutor for conversational English.
Student 2:
I did my undergrad in Australia. Hanging out with students in English definitely helped. Picking up your advisor’s terminologies is a good way to improve your academic communication skills in English. In addition, watching TV shows is helpful. I personally recommend “Modern family” to pick up contemporary conversational English.
Student 3:
In my case, I learned a lot through preparing for the TOEFL test especially for reading, listening, and writing.
Student 4:
Obviously, you need to make many native-speaking friends and hang out with them.
Student 5:
Indeed, this is a matter of accumulative learning, I believe. Try to use unfamiliar words or expressions consciously. That helps a lot. Repetitions will engrain English in your mind.
Student 6:
To expose myself to more English-speaking environment, I personally created a debate club, which is aimed to discuss about diverse social issues in English. Active participation in such activity definitely helped me to improve my fluency level.
Student 7:
No specific strategy to mention, but setting up a goal actually helped. My goal was to be of native speaker’s level. Setting up a high bar pushed me to practice more though relaxing the aim also helped me in a way.
Prof. Pang:
I do believe that making friends who can have a conversation in English is very helpful. Watching TV shows such as “Modern Family” is also beneficial. Previously, I have watched the old TV show, “Friends,” more than 20 times for each episode. Why? That is because the repeated exposure to practical English expressions from the TV show can be part of my own terminology after repeated listening. I did experience this.
One more thing is here. As a second language learner, if you don’t have knowledge common with that of native speakers, it is really hard to have a real conversation. This is actually not about the fluency level. That is why watching American TV programs should be emphasized once again. In reality, hanging out with native speakers may not be feasible. However, watching your favorite TV programs can be a good alternative.
I still like to listen to podcasts. For example, the BBC podcast is full of great information for conversation. I keep listening to the podcast every day as much as possible. This podcast inspires me that written and spoken languages are actually not different. The highest level of spoken English resembles much like a written language. This podcast can be a good resource to hone your skill.
Student 1:
There is also a great app, called “tunein,” for listening to HBR discussions and other academic findings.
Student 2:
I think, helping each other is also critical. Presenting one’s own research idea can be helpful, too.
Prof. Pang:
When networking in a conference or other settings, academics talk about lots of things other than their research. As Prof. Yoo mentioned, we should practice to converse over diverse topics with your colleagues and friends. Eventually, that helps you a lot in many ways.
Week 8 How to write a lot
Week 8 Book recommendation How to write a lot
- Set milestone. For example, I will write one page on Monday. I need to finish 10 pages by this week
- Writing is a accumulating process. You don’t get a good paper in one iteration. I write a lot in the beginning without thinking the quality of English. I will improve it after I read it several time or re-write.
Week 6_How to become a good teacher?
Discussion topic: How to become a good teacher?
Prof. Pang: I want to talk about teaching. I told you that teaching may not be as important as research in research schools, but it is still very important. I want you to think about your favorite teacher that you’ve met one by one and why that professor in your previous institution was a good teacher.
Student 1: One of my favorite teachers is from my master degree. He teaches data mining. He uses a lot of good examples to let us know how to use the different models; he also did surveys in our class.
Prof. Pang: So it’s like his class is more interactive. He lets you get involved in class.
Student 2: I want to share a story of one of my favorite teachers. He was also an advisor of mine. Beside he is knowledgeable, he is trustable, and he set a good example for us. He helped us solve problems not limited in academic but also in our life. We couldshare our study ideas and experience with him.
Prof. Pang: So he cares about students’ life and personal interests, beyond the classroom.
Student 3: My favorite teacher is from my undergraduate studies. He taught a supply chains analytic course. I think he is good in that he made many good examples to demonstrate some complex models. I took a very impressive course of his at the end of the semester. In that class, we did not have any real material. He told us why supply chain analytic is important pretty much like what you are doing in our seminar. I think at least that course did deeper teaching style than any other courses. Not only the class materials are important but also the philosophy of ideas is important.
Prof. Pang: He must have a very good ability to explain difficult stuff to students especially for undergraduates. That’s would be your job to explain technical or IT stuffs in the IS field to undergraduate students.
Student 4: I’d like to share my favorite teacher. He has a different background. I have some background with a history major during my undergraduate. I kind like the editor of the class. I remember a course named invisible city. He was facing a group of undergraduate. But he never stopped with half of class a break. He used one slice by another; it seems like the knowledge inserted into your body. This motivates me to be a professor. I want to be a professor that is knowledgeable like him.
Prof. Pang: So, I hope that you are going to become professors/teachers like them. Teaching is important. You won’t get tenured for becoming a super fantastic teacher. However, you still have to be a good teacher to survive.
Here is a kind of the criteria in most of the business schools. You have to get at least 4.0 out of 5.0 in your teaching evaluation. 4.2 to 4.3 out of 5.0 is good enough for tenure and a job market.
We are multi-taskers. We have to do many different works such as research, teaching, etc., and as our Dean says, we have to solve optimization problems every day. Here is an optimization problem(just consider research and teaching) to evaluate your value to get a job (or tenure):
Max V(R, T), R+T ≤ 24.
This illustrates that your value (in a job market or tenure) V depends on your Research and Teaching, but you don’t have unlimited time to spend in both. So you have to split your limited time between two. How you do it? It depends on the marginal returns from R and T, which is that the marginal return from R is much higher than from T. Therefore, we have to spend much more time on research to get more publish while spending not too much time on teaching, enough to get 4.2 out of 5.0 (at least 4.0 out of 5.0) in teaching evaluation.
The problem is however, that it is NOT easy to get 4.0! Let us think about an example where 10 students give you 4, 7 students give you 3, and 3 students give you 5. Then, your evaluation is 3.8. It looks like a good evolution but actually is not. You need to have more students who give you 5 than 3. We all know that we don’t go extreme (1 or 5) in filling out surveys. This is why it is not easy to get a good point like 4.0. And it is even more challenging for us, because we are not native speakers. You students won’t like your accent.
The bottom line is it is not easy to become a good teacher. Thus, it is very important to have teaching experience during your doctoral studies and to make efforts to become a good teacher.
There are several useful resources:
http://tlc.temple.edu Teaching and learning center
http://www.fox.temple.edu/cms_research/institutes-and-centers/center-for-innovation-in-teaching-and-learning/ Center for innovation in teaching and learning
http://tlc.temple.edu/teaching-certificates/teaching-higher-education-certificate-teachers-and-professionals Teaching higher education certificate teachers and professionals
Think about how to be a good teacher from now. I think it is a good idea to teach one course in your 3rd year after passing a comprehensive exam and becoming a candidate. I don’t think it is a good idea to teach in the 4th or 5th year, because you have to prepare your job market and dissertation. So the 3rd year is the best time to teach, and you have to prepare for that from now. You can sit in your professors’ class to take some of skills about how to teach, how to manage a class, how to interact with students, etc. Any question about teaching?
A few practical advices. We cannot get 4.0 when we just deliver lectures. My advisor said: “the more you talk in your classroom, the less evaluation you get”. So good teachers make students get involved. In my classroom, I ask a lot of questions. I want my students to talk more. It is more fun for them than to just listen what a teacher talks for the whole one hour or two. Good teachers care about students’ life, career, and interests beyond the classrooms. Good teachers have to have an ability to explain difficult stuffs to students. You have to get such a skill. That’s why I want you to share your favorite teachers because you have to become like them.
Also, there is a misconception that teaching and research are two separate things. I don’t agree with this. So my teaching approach is to use my research in my classroom and to deliver some theoretical perspectives/foundations to students. I think that’s our job as an academically qualified teacher.
Student 3: So if research can benefit our teaching, in what case can teaching benefit our research?
Prof. Pang: I got one of my research ideas from my class, which was about how to make balance between new IT development and IT maintenance. You can get research ideas from teaching. Teaching helps you keep the idea fresh.
Week4_How to work with your advisor?
Discussion topic: How to work with your advisor?
Pang: There are two important principles:
- Your advisor is not your boss.
- Your advisor is not doing your research for you.
Let’s talk about what the first principle means. How is an advisor different from a boss?
Student1: A boss and an advisor are different in that an advisor gives guideline for what you are doing, while a boss gives you what you should undertake and follow.
Pang: Right. In your research, you are the boss, not your advisor is. You don’t need to do everything that your advisor tells you to do. If you only follow your advisor’s instructions, you are no more than his/her research assistant. You should be the boss for your own project, dissertation, or job market paper.
I understand that to Asians, what a teacher says is always God-given truth. You must change such a mentality. Sometimes, you have to have a courage to disagree with your advisor and should be able to convince him/her why your way is better. If you can’t convince your advisor, how would you convince your editor or reviewers?
Pang: What do you think with the second principle? – Your adviser is not going to do research for you.
Student2: You should be an independent researcher.
Student3: From my own experience, I had to recheck and have a second look at a paper before submitting it, because I am responsible for it.
Student4: We should be the one who pushes your project forward.
Pang: Yes, you should be the one who manages your research. The bottom line is, your advisor is not going to solve your problems. His/her role is helping you do quality research and complete it, not offering solutions to you every time you hit a wall. “My advisor does not let me graduate..” does not really make sense from this perspective.
Student5: I think the relationship between a student and an advisor varies in disciplines.
Pang: True, but in a business school, as we’ve been discussing, you are expected to become an independent researcher. Remember this – Don’t blame your advisor when your research goes south. Your advisor is not the person who solves every problem of yours. It is your job.
You are the one who knows the most about your project. An advisor often does not know everything about your work. At a conference presentation, I’ve seen a professor talking to the audience that “I don’t know why my student chose this method..” He may not be supposed to say it, but he was likely telling the truth. Since you’re the boss in your research, you make the decisions, and therefore, you’re responsible for it.
Pang: I also want to talk a little about who should be your advisor. It might be a good idea to have two advisors – a senior professor and a junior/assistant professor. There is a study in a science discipline that the most cited papers are ones with a three co-author combination – a doctoral student (first), a junior faculty (second), and a senior professor (third). The doctoral student is the one who came with up the idea, did the bulk of the analyses, and wrote most of the paper. What are the roles of the other two co-authors, then?
Student1: The senior advisor provides a big picture, and the junior advisor provides detailed skills.
Pang: That’s right. The junior advisor can provide hands-on and detailed skills and tacit/intimate knowledge on how to make a progress in research, how to get it done. The senior professor, on the other hand, can provide a big picture: What is interesting to reviewers, what is not, how to frame/sell the paper, and what contribution the paper makes, and etc. This is a complementary role between the senior and the junior faculty members.
Why there are PhD programs in business schools?
Introduction:
Why do business schools offer PhD programs? Unlike science and engineering schools, which usually require a certain amount of labor to conduct experiments and efficiently operate labs, most business schools don’t have labs and thus don’t need students to perform lab work. This is why some top-tier business schools do not have Ph.D. programs. In addition, running a PhD program is expensive. Schools spend a lot of money on PhD students, including tuition, insurance, coursework and support for living expenses.
So what do business schools expect to take away from PhD programs? This’s an important question for PhD students. As a PhD student, you need to understand what the school expects from you and try your best to meet that expectation.
Student 1: I agree that extra labor in business schools is not as much needed as in engineering schools. But I would say we still provide labors to professors, being as a TA or a RA.
Student 2: I think PhD programs could benefit business schools in two ways. First, PhD students help business schools maintain their reputation by presenting at conferences or publishing papers. This benefit could continue even after they graduate. Second, having a PhD program contributes to sustaining the academic community as a whole; if no school offers Ph.D. degrees, there is no next generation of academics.
Student 3: Based on previous discussions, I think investing in a PhD program could be profitable to some extent.
Student 4: In my opinion, it’s not about profit or reputation. It’s about new ideas those students could bring in. Students may not be as productive as professors in terms of doing research. But students with different backgrounds usually have different thoughts. These different thoughts could potentially lead to new ideas and creative research topics. Cooperation between students and professors is beneficial for students as well as for professors and schools.
Student 5: Actually, having a PhD program is a good way to build research networks. Professors will have PhD students, each of whom could have their own students in the future. These mentoring relationships would help business school establish a broad network in academia field.
Comments from the professor:
I agree with most of the opinions. To be clear, we need Ph.D. students, but for a different reason. In my perspective, faculty members do not necessarily need PhD students to do data collection or basic research work. We could hire masters or senior undergraduate students to do such work.
Actually, what is expected from Ph.D. students is fresh idea,s new energy, and enthusiasm, all of which are more important to build a successful research program! New students could bring in new energy, new ideas, and new perspectives. They could lead our attention from academic fields to what’s going on in the outside world. From this view of point, PhD students are not expected to grow as a research assistant or a teaching assistant, but intellectual contributors and independent researchers. This is why we treat Ph.D. students as colleagues.
Another reason could be about the reputation. A good way for a business school to build reputation is to produce good Ph.D. graduates who are placed in top-tier research schools. We understand not all of you would end up in research schools or academic career. But our target is to train you as an independent researcher who can collaborate with faculty members, do your own high-quality research and publish in top journal in the future.
Week 1_how to give a good job talk?
Professor: Let us talk about who do you think is the best job candidate and how to give a good job talk.
Student #1: First of all, the choice of paper or project to present is very important to the success of job talk. The key is to bring the best or most satisfied work to present. Second, handling the process of presentation should be another necessary skill. Audience may ask all kinds of questions, some challenging and some difficult. So it is always useful to prepare ahead of time in case some dynamic issues that would ruin the whole process of presentation
Student #2: Good presenter in the job talk can well prepare his work so that he or she could self-defend with confidence.
Student #3: Good presenters usually show good communication skills, confidence in what he or she is presenting and can clearly explain what has been done and what has been thought about even though not shown in the presentation.
Student #4: Job talk is the time to show the best of you. So one should choose the best paper to give a job talk.
Student #5: Good job talk is about confidence. And I would like to share a tip related to it, that is, whenever someone ask you a question, the first sentence you should always say is “It is a good question. I have thought about this.” If you are not confident and say something like “I am not quite sure. Could you give me some feedback?” etc, that is not a good interaction with audience.
Professor: What about you three? Any merits you could find from good job talkers presented in your department?
Student #6: I think confidence and self-defense is always important. If I were a committee member to hire someone, I would focus on the research topic too. Is it a good topic? Has it got some potential to publish in the A level journal? So a good job candidate should be capable to show future publication opportunities.
Student #7: Normally in our department after job talk, we doctoral student and professors get together to discuss the performance of the presenter. It is an intuitive and practical way to let doctoral student know what is good and bad about job talk and what should be done or not be done in such talk. So we get a sense that good job seekers can show your own research idea, which is not from your advisor. That is a good way to tell others that you are able to conduct research independently.
Student #8: Good job presenters give impressive talk with confidence. He or she could be tolerant and open to any kinds of questions in a manner without arrogant and over-confidence. Also he or she could manage the time well.
Professor: First of all, a good job talker could manage the conversation with audience. Often times you would encounter challenging and difficult questions, but only if you know some tips and tricks to go through it even if you do not have a confirmative answer, your talk would not become a chaos. If there is a disagreement between his or her opinion and yours, you could say “Maybe you are right, well, but I think…, and we could always talk about it after this.” More of such tips and tricks can be obtained by observing how a good job talker communicates with audience. I heard that a job seeker who had to stay on the first page of slides for 45 min due to mismanage the conversation with the audiences.
Second, it is a useful to show descriptions of other projects in your job talk. Top research universities implicitly require candidates to have pipeline papers that are potentially published in the future 5 or 6 years to ensure tenure. But review circle is uncertain and this requirement may not be met if you do not have a considerate stock of papers. But the problem that has been seen times and times is that some cannot publish beyond dissertation, which means, it is almost impossible to get tenure in a good business school. Doctoral time is the best time to do research, not only research for dissertation but for your future 5 or 6 years being an assistant professor. Thus, to present and propose research agenda is a good way to show the working papers beyond the dissertation to show potential to survive in the process to tenure.
Third, confidence is important. But more important is you should know what and how to make you confident. As my personal experience, before my job talk, I have presented the same projects 7 or 8 times in workshops, seminars and conferences, and before each presentation I practice up to 10 times ahead of time. This means that I memorize everything, and means I am confident about what I am going to present and about what questions would be most likely to be asked. Besides a lot of practices in other academic activities, the choice of paper you present is also a key to keep you confident. You had better to present a paper that has already passed the 1st round review because reviewers and audiences usually give you the same comments, which could help you prepare ahead of time.
Last but not least, please remind that those siting in front of you when you give a job talk are hiring a professor, not a student. So you should act like a professor. As a student, it could be freaky to hear from sharp critics, comments or questions from senior professors. But when you present as a job seeker, you should be professional and accumulate experience to handle those questions. As mentioned before, you could say “That is different from what I know, let us discuss it after this talk.”
In summary, to give a good job talk or to be a good job seeker, you should prepare ahead of time, practice and experience more to keep you confident, show your potential to publish paper in tenure-track, and behave as a professor with professional manner when you interacts with the senior professors who consider hiring you.
(Scribed by Aaron Cheng, 1/13/2016)