by Delphine Caruelle and Yupal Shukla
With the beginning of a new academic year, September is the perfect time for a fresh start. And attending the AMA SERVSIG Doctoral Consortium provided an excellent opportunity to freshen up our minds.
This year’s SERVSIG Doctoral Consortium was held on September 5-6 in Austin, Texas, and preceded the Frontiers in Service conference. It started with an opening reception on Wednesday evening. Welcomed by the consortium co-chairs Yany Gregoire (HEC Montreal), Stephanie Noble (University of Tennessee) and Linda Alkire (Texas State University), we boarded on a boat for a dinner cruise tour on Lady Bird Lake. This tour was a fantastic opportunity to mingle with fellow Ph.D. students and with service scholars in an informal setting. While we were engaged in lively discussions throughout the evening, we remained speechless when, at sunset, thousands of bats came out of Congress Bridge and flew over our heads.
On Thursday morning, we met in an elegant meeting room in the Hilton Hotel in Downtown Austin for the “core” of the doctoral consortium. The day started with a small celebration of the 25th anniversary of the doctoral consortium. This was the occasion for all of us to delve into our memories and recall what we were doing in 1993, the very first year the AMA SERVSIG Doctoral Consortium was held.
The first session was about “Creating Value Through Teaching and Service”. In this session, Sabine Benoit (University of Surrey), Paul Fombelle (Northeastern), Nancy Sirianni (University of Alabama), and Kristina Heinonen (Hanken School of Economics) provided useful insights on how to prepare for lectures, how to deal with heterogeneity in the classroom, and how to be innovative in teaching and in engaging students in learning. They also addressed how to balance research, teaching and service in an academic career.
The topic of the second session was “Publishing with Different Methodologies”. Anders Gustafsson (BI Norwegian Business School), Mark Houston (Texas Christian University), Kay Lemon (Boston College), and Rebekah Russell-Bennett (Queensland University of Technology) emphasized the importance of employing different research methods that complement each other and explained how to deal with obstacles that may arise on the publishing journey.
The third session was dedicated to work-life balance. Within this session, Sterling Bone (Utah State University), Helen Chun (Cornell), Lerzan Aksoy (Fordham University), and Ming-Hui Huang (National Taiwan University) shared their own experiences on how they balance career and personal life, and on how they remain motivated and research-focused over time.
The day ended with breakout sessions in which Ph.D. students were divided into groups of 3 students. Each group was assigned to 2 senior faculty members (mentors). Within each group, Ph.D. students presented their research projects and got feedback from the mentors and fellow Ph.D. students. These breakout sessions provided Ph.D. students with a unique chance to discuss their research in an intimate setting.
The doctoral consortium was truly inspiring. For everyone, a lot of reflections and ideas emerged from the discussions. On behalf of all the Ph.D. students who attended the consortium, we would like to thank the consortium co-chairs for organizing such an amazing event. We would also like to thank all the faculty members who participated in the consortium. The whole event was beautifully planned and we felt very much welcomed in the SERVSIG community; it will be always remembered in the best of our memoirs. We will be looking forward to the next AMA SERVSIG Doctoral Consortium.
Dr. Yupal is a close buddy to me. He has been a great researcher and my good wishes to him and his fellow researchers to keep measuring the heights (y).