PART ONE: Dr. Jason Ridge, Oklahoma State PhD in Management Alumni, talks about his PhD experience

Hello, I am Jason Ridge. Currently, I'm the department chair of the Strategy Entrepreneurship and Venture Innovation department at the University of Arkansas and I got my PhD at Oklahoma State University. I received three degrees all at Oklahoma State, My undergrad was in business management. My master's was in healthcare administration, and then my PhD was in Strategic Management through OSU. I graduated from OSU with my PhD in 2011 with my first job being at Clemson University. I was there for four years and then I moved to the University of Arkansas after about four years.

Faculty there, were strict but fair I guess is one way of putting it. I think just they're very in tune with the students and they they did a great job of treating us as somewhat Junior faculty. That we were part of the of the faculty and they wanted to work with us, and they wanted us to be successful and you could tell the way that they would bring us onto projects and work with us. Which really allowed us to get out ahead of the curve whenever it came to job placement because we had already had projects either moving into acceptance stages or already accepted for some of us, which allowed us to be much more successful than I think we could have been in other programs. uh

Also just broadly speaking the faculty, at least the ones that are still there that I worked with at the time, they were without a doubt instrumental in all and any success I've had ever since then. Still to this day, I still speak with several of them some I work with still, pretty closely with different projects. This is still the people that I go to and talk to whenever I have questions or if I need help or advice, still this day. So, that speaks to the willingness of some of the faculty there, to be involved with their students and really wanting to see the best for them.

I think honestly one of my the best times of my life was the five years I spent in the OSU PhD program, because of A) you meet great faculty that care about you and even post graduation, care and reach out and you know, are really there for you and trying to make you be as successful as possible. Further, you meet some of the this you know your the colleagues that you have in your cohort. We still meet at conferences. We still get together. We still try to have dinner whenever we have to go to conferences. We still have text chains and email chains together. When they have successes we also are um texting each other.

We're still very close friends and those are things that I think you don't, a lot of people don't consider in programs, is if you get into a program that has faculty that really care and want to mentor. You have other students that are engaged and want to be successful and that also are engaged in want you to be successful, that creates a culture that is very valuable and and can propel people to much greater successes than they may have in a program that wasn't like that and that was one of the that was what we experienced there. Well I experience and have been extremely grateful for that. I've done and been in places that I would have never guessed when I entered the program and it's 100% based on the people I worked with and we're able to be in contact with.