PART TWO: Dr. Tessa Recendes, Oklahoma State PhD in Management Alum, talks about her PhD experience

Hi, I'm Tessa Recendes. I'm an assistant professor at Penn State in the management and organization department.

I guess there are two levels to conferences. One, when you're actually presenting, which is like super important right? You're going to be presenting to room of scholars who you've never met before and it's a pretty scary situation, so um having advisors that would meet with you beforehand as you are preparing your slides for it and let you do lots of practice talks and then having other faculty member members that would let you practice as well. That's super important for getting you ready for the actual like conference presentation. But then also with the networking skills, trying to get you familiar with okay, who would be in the room? Who are some of the people that you should know about or that you've read in the past and talking about how those soft skills are important. They would try to be kind of the Linker. So they would introduce me to people and and try to get the conversation started. So that's important when you're a doc student, you don't know anyone and you also get placed in the room with a bunch of people that you've read all their work, and you're trying not to fan boy or fan girl out right, because they're kind of rock stars. So having that faculty member there that will go and make that connection and introduce you is super helpful.

Everyone's real nice they're really happy to talk to PhD students. Sspecially when you're in your two or three. You're not on the market, you don't want anything from them, so it's super easy to converse with them because the pressure's off for both people. So I think that was super helpful too, but again it goes back to kind of I guess the the deliberate process that Federico did with me, of setting my goals and setting kind of those benchmark actions and goals to get to ultimately where I wanted to be, and I ended up landing my dream job which is super fantastic and I'm really happy here. But it wouldn't have been an easy road for me, had we not done that process and had it not been for Federico really helping me through that. So um yeah many thanks to OSU and the Federico for all the support that they've given me wouldn't be here without it.

The faculty at Oklahoma state, they're actually really amazing across the aisle and strategy and in OB. The amount of pubs that they put out, like per staff member is phenomenal, so they always kind of rank within the top 12 to 10 in terms of some of the the biggest list of research productivity in the nation.

There's a lot of people there that publish well, and the reason why I bring that up is because then they know how to publish. So in their relationship with PhD students, when they're walking you through how to do research project, it's with publishing in mind at the end. It really is about understanding your research question and the story that you can tell with your design and your data and your results, and making sure that that's that's a story that links to theory but also has practical implications. That's something that they're really skilled at, because they've done it so well. I think I benefited a lot from that and because we were able to set goals and because they were so fluent in the publishing process, I was able to come out with a pretty good CV and kind of set myself up for success on the job market and beyond. I think that all goes back to like how phenomenal the faculty are and how much they take their mentoring relationship seriously. It's about preparing you for a career. The career that we're in is a publishing career and so I think that they kind of take that orientation into their mentoring relationships which is super helpful as a doc student. Especially, if you are a proactive, go-getter kind of doc student and you want to learn, and you're really passionate about this career, like that faculty will mentor you and you're going to be set. But you kind of have to bring those soft skills to the table so that you can capitalize on what they bring to the table.