PART TWO: 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.

Whenever I graduated, I had two different papers accepted. One at the Strategic Management Journal which is really what put me in, that was working with Dr. Federico Aime, and at the time Scott Johnson. Dr. Scott Johnson who was a faculty there and also that was with one of my cohort mates Aaron Hill as well. Having one top tier publication like that really put us in a different place on in the job market. It puts you at the top of the stack and that's what was great about the program, is we had faculty that could publish in those things and also wanted to help students be involved in those type of projects. Then you know, from there, that was that was really the thing that set me apart. Then I also had multiple other projects I was working on with primarily with Federico again, that were in different stages of data collection or submission or revise and resubmit.

I mean I'll just talk specifically about what I do with Federico. He's just a warm guy that I would go and I just stopped by his office sometimes, probably more so than he would like. That's a joke, he was always very welcoming. I mean, we didn't really have anything set up. He would stop by, I mean, he was one of the one of the faculty that would also stopped by the PhD students um offices. He knocked on the door and check on us then we could we would strike up conversations there. Sometimes we'd go have wine after work or something like that. So it was a very collegial mentorship and in way that we worked together. So there was not really a structure to it, other than, hey if you're working, send me stuff and then we'll talk about what you did and how we can fix it, or make it better, or alter this.

So there wasn't like a weekly or monthly meeting or anything. It was really just popped our heads into each other's offices. I would come to him with ideas. He would tell me that they were not good and we needed to fix them, which he was always correct and that's the learning process particularly in the PhD program, is you come up with ideas that initially are not great. But they are able to be good mentors, help you understand where and why they could be better and where they could be better and how to make them better.

Yeah, so yes. While I was there, I went to the Academy of Management annual conference and the Strategic Management Society annual conference every year. That's another great thing, some of our faculty are very, particularly are really research active and the faculty that were involved in the PhD program were and are still very active in the academy as well as an SMS, and so they know a lot of people and they would go out of their way to introduce us to people at different schools that they knew, that we may be interviewing with in the future. You know, just got our names out there and our faces out there to those people that were perspective colleagues and/or on hiring committees whenever we were on the market. So yeah, we traveled. We went to most of the conferences, typically trying to have papers to present and then faculty would take us to and from and introduce us.