Vyndian

Thank you for your thoughts, agilist! That’s some super positive energy. Also, you have some really great ideas. I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to @brazilianphd’s responses regarding my research interests. I mentioned earlier how I’d like to help volunteer based organizations develop better reward and retention systems. Most of the research in this field is pretty old— from my google scholar searches, I didn’t find much that was post-1995. So, I’m going to sketch out my profile to see how I can craft a narrative around this. The idea to look at Future Research is really A+. When I built my politics software, called VoteFlipper, I also wrote about future research areas for it if I decided to pick up the project again. So, I definitely feel a little dumb for not thinking about that for major publications! RE #2: You’re completely right about school choices. Before I wrote this post, I was going off of MBA rankings rather than PhD ones. In the last few days, I’ve learned about the UTD rankings and I now have a very different top 40 list using the 5 management journals as selection criteria. Booth doesn’t even place. (But I also included Booth because one of my LOR/former professors strongly suggested Booth as a culture fit). From this new top 40 list, I’m whittling down by location and soon plan on breaking down the faculty and their publications. RE #3: Yes! I will absolutely make sure that it’s front and center. I know I shouldn’t talk about teaching as much as research in the context of being a professor. But a life in academia is my end-game at this point and I don’t see that changing again. What somebody wants when they’re 18 is different what they want at 30. But at 30, I have significantly better understanding of what I want the next 30-35 years of my life to be. Also, @brazilainphd: I’m reading more journals to figure it all out! Research, research, research, hah! Thank you both for the continued conversation!

This was way more than I was ever expecting and it’s all great feedback. Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You’re right, I’ve got to work on developing my selling points. To address specific feedback: 1) What do I have to offer? Wow. That’s a hard introspection. I think that answer is something like “if you give me a goal, I will figure out if the goal is possible, how we get there, and then perform the tasks to achieve it.” I guess, if I picked a Real Estate/Poli-Sci PhD., I would be able to align sub-skills better. 2) Yes, you’re correct about how industry enjoys ‘results’ of prediction more than how I got there. But that’s exactly the part I personally find unfulfilling. For example, in my previous real estate consulting work, the only folks who cared about how or why my opinions were developed were found in the courtroom. Everyone else was “what’s the number???” 3) I am worried about the slow pace of academia, but I also understand that most projects are a several year affair no matter what. My politics software was a 3 year adventure, for instance, and there were months of slow burn or failure sprinkled in. 4) I’m glad you called out my interests being vague. I’ve thought about your major, marketing, a lot, since my prior work is at least tangentially related. But I lack the psych background for it. So, I picked Management/OB because of the topics like social influencing, broader tech integration, and understanding how emotions and employee competitiveness affect volunteer-based organizations (where traditional reward structures are not available). 5) I’m not trying to put the cart before the horse with regard to tools vs ideas, but it’s hard when I receive feedback of “have an idea of what you want to do and how” (not from you, obviously, just others) when I would rather experience it for a little bit and then make the choice. I’m badly burned on industry at this point. Before I left B-school, my professors pleaded with me to consider a PhD with waived requirements at my R2. I knew better and I regret not listening to folks who were wiser than me. I spent almost a year of my life studying for the GRE because I really want this. Trying to stay optimistic, I hope there’s time to fix and refine my profile before ‘22 applications. Do you have any resources (or examples from your own history) on how you developed your research interests? Mine *are* vague right now, because they’re under developed. That doesn’t mean they aren’t in my head somewhere, it just means I need to tease them out.

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