Westpac PhD and f/t Master's Funding (31 Aug 2016) - Australian citizens & PR

Call for recent graduates of undergraduate and honours degrees to apply for the Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship - $120,000 over 2-3 years. 

Open to Australian citizens and Permanent residents only.

Westpac have allocated us between 4-5 scholarships for next year. Apparently MBS did not have any eligible PhD applicants last year.

Applications close 31 August 2016.

2015 Industry Studies Association Meeting - Deadline this week

For those of you looking for another US conference, here are the 2015 Industry Studies Association meeting details – papers and panels due this week for the May conference. Apologies for the late notice.

Sign up to review for the Academy of Management

Reviewers needed for all divisions, although OMT does have a fancy design... You do not need to be an AOM member to review, and it is an especially good training exercise for PhD students to do these reviews each year.

Academy of Management  Organization & Management Theory Division (OMT) Call for Reviewers  OMT 2015 Program, Vancouver, BC, Canada

What do you learn in doing a PhD?

Really interesting post on the Chronicle of Higher Education forums lately about the skills of a PhD student. Poster polly_mer highlights some of the generic skills, according to learning research:

A PhD student has to be on the road to independence instead of a good instruction follower.  A good PhD student has ideas and can make plans.  A good PhD student knows the difference between "I need some help here to sort through ideas and bounce around possibilities before I make a decision on what to do next" and "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it".

At some point, being diligent and pliable are negatives because what's needed is taking control of one's own research or piece of a bigger project instead of simply doing what others have decided needs doing.  On Bloom's taxonomy of learning, a PhD student (and certainly a candidate) needs to be spending a lot of time on analysis, synthesis, and evaluation with very little time spent on pure application, comprehension, and knowledge.

Networking and research

As a sociologist, I'm obligated to tell you we live in a networked world. Most academics might go for academia.edu for an online profile (with papers posted on SSRN), but apparently, linkedin can also become a good source for recruiting interviewees.

For those of you who are students, you might want to start setting up these profiles sooner, rather than later, so you have a professional web presence. This is helpful for when you're on the job market, especially if you are going for non-academic jobs. Not to mention that if you do get an academic position, having another website it useful because you just might be faced with a highly dysfunctional university web server.... not that I'd know anything about that.

Sociogram of my LinkedIn network
(blurred for privacy)

Academic culture and critique

As academics, we live in a culture of critique. Students and potential students need to learn the norms of the profession, and the constant critique is one aspect. In this post I am mostly thinking of seminar presentations.

Because norms vary, it is interesting to contrast the two following posts.

• Academic jerks
• Passivity in female researchers

Having been trained in the... rigorous tournament of ideas that is Chicago, I suspect we need a middle ground. I've made some effort to tone down my style for local norms in Australia, although I probably come off as too abrasive for some people. Norms will vary.