Doctoral Candidate, Jayci P.'s Experience in PhD of Management Program at Oklahoma State University

My name is Jayci Pickering. I am a doctoral candidate here at OSU in the management department. I started during COVID, so it was a bit of a unique experience. I wasn't sure how much interaction I would have with the faculty just because everything's online. But, it was nice because people still continuously checked in like not just on my work and my classes but just how I was doing, my overall well-being during that time, so that meant a lot to me just as a person.

My first semester I worked primarily with Lindsey Greco. She was my "advisor." But one thing I also appreciate about our faculty is they encourage you to work with a lot of different people, and that kind of speaks to finding your own passion, rather than them just pushing their own onto you. I think being able to work with other people and see what their research looks like, gives you a better idea of kind of what your career trajectory would look like. It's not like you're just assigned to one person throughout your time in the program, you can really move around and kind of see what fits you best.

That's like kind of one of the things you hear about as like a big scary daunting thing, is comprehensive exams. The faculty definitely knew that I was anxious about that so I spent a lot of time just talking to them about the best strategies for me. One of the main things that was helpful was helping me create a schedule and a structure around studying because there's so much content and information you learned in the next two years. I took Lisa's methods class so sitting down with her, going over those concepts, taking the biggest important pieces away from those was really helpful in kind of setting up my study structure going into comps.

Then also just being encouraging and reminding me that like I am capable. They have trained me for this. They want us to pass. It's not something they're like looking to torture us with. They want us to be successful. Ultimately it benefits us and the program, and so that encouragement was really integral because that's not always the perspective that PhD students get.

They open about their own experiences. So comps looks different no matter where you go, the format's going to be different. So getting to talk to them about kind of what they did to cope and then pulling apart bits and pieces of their own experiences and applying it to mine. I know one of them talked to me about meal prepping the week before and that was something big that I did was meal preps. Because nobody wants to make yourself dinner after you've been working for four hours on these really intense problems. Things like that, going on walks afterwards to clean your mind. It sounds really intuitive but kind of having that advice and encouragement helped me put those things in front of me and focus on that during the weeks leading up to the exam and the actual exams itself.

I've done a virtual conference and in-person conference and I felt really prepared for both. Our faculty is big on networking and that's the main benefit of a conference. Yes they're helping us prepare submissions. I had something submitted my first year to AOM, which is our biggest conference. That was a really big deal but at the same time while I was preparing to present these ideas, I was also preparing to meet important people in the field and our faculty does a good job guiding you in terms of how you should present yourself and your research at a time where you're kind of unfamiliar with like what your path might look like. So, having someone guide you in terms of what information you give out, what's important for people to know, how should you present yourself, was really helpful at kind of taking a really intimidating environment and making it feel manageable.