PART ONE: Dr. Truit Gray, Oklahoma State PhD in Management Alum, talks about his PhD experience

I'm Dr. Truit Gray. Okay and where are you at now? I'm at Bowling Green State University up in Ohio. I'm an assistant professor of management here, focusing on like organizational behavior. For undergrad I started at Rockhurst University. it's a little school in Kansas City, Missouri. Mainly went there to play tennis and they had a decent business program so I got an econ degree there. Like a lot of people after undergrad, didn't know what the heck I want to do with my life, so I figured I'd put off the real world and did a masters of Finance at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. From there worked a little bit but decided that you know, I had this draw towards Academia. Started looking around for different Management Programs because I was interested in Psychology, and I figured how can you study psychology in the workplace? Well with management and so I ended up at Oklahoma State to do my PhD and finish that up um in Spring of 2022.

The Faculty at Oklahoma Statte are great and that's one thing that has been very consistent, it seems like talking from past PhD students, current PhD students. They're very supportive of first off, what your goals are when entering the program. But as anyone who's considering going on this path knows, research really is everything especially for getting that initial post PhD job in Academia, if that is the route you want to go and for that you you have to publish. The Faculty at Oklahoma State are very active in publishing and they're all, at this point, pretty well established names within the field of management. They're well respected, well-known. They do just good work and beyond that they know how to do good work. They're willing and more than willing really, to help and support you, train you up so you know what needs to be done, how to do it.

Again all the faculty there are very willing to work with PhD students. They're willing to just be sounding boards for ideas, if the PhD student more so is just looking for some general input. So that's great you get all the support you need from that. You get I would say at this point, elite training from the faculty there. Over the last few years a lot of really really sound methods people have been brought in. More than sound, like Elite, top of the the world, methods people have been brought in to be faculty at Oklahoma State and so you leave knowing that you know what you're doing to an extent, that can be taken for granted. I think sometimes people will leave their PhD program at other places and still feel like "No, I'm not really sure how to do certain things. It would be helpful for me to be able to answer a particular research question." You feel pretty confident after you leave Oklahoma State, that you can do what you need to do for your different research.

Overall your support, well supported from a resources standpoint. Te department chair, Jim Pappas and overall the faculty in general are more than willing to, I mean time, but then also I mean financial support for going to conferences and stuff. Which also is not I would say guaranteed with a lot of places. If you get a paper in somewhere at a conference, you're probably going to be able to go, and they will do everything they can to cover all the expenses for that trip. If you need software, you need databases, they will get it for you and they will figure out a way. You need support for incentivizing participants for data collections, there's funding for that. They will help you out with all that and these are the types of things that I maybe didn't think about as much before going into the program and then once I got there I realized okay, well thank God, they do have all this stuff because it does make it a lot easier to do the research so overall really good support system there um great experience.