Department of Strategy & Policy

A short report from Gu Qian on her Research Findings presented in the conference.

The picture was taken in front of the AOM conference site: Hyatt Hotel in Chicago. The background is the hotel building

As one of the largest cities in US, Chicago is certainly attractive to me. However, nothing makes the trip more exciting than getting the best paper proceeding and being the finalist for Douglas Nigh Award. This might be trivial for senior scholars, yet it was a huge incentive for me to push things forward.

I did two presentations in AOM and both went well. Unlike last year in Anaheim where conference participants obviously favored Mickey more than papers, a much larger number of audiences showed up in my presentations and provided constructed feedbacks this year. For one paper, Professor Henisz suggested us to add more contextualized analysis to strengthen the argument. For another paper, Professor Deephouse suggested us to include some other dimensions so as to draw a larger audience. Such comments are not only useful for the current working papers, but also very valuable for the construct of my dissertation.

Furthermore, I was very impressed by the workshops that I attended. For example, the workshop titled “Halfway there, but now what? Advice for pre-dissertation doctoral students” provided me a lot of good advices about the dissertation process, tips for developing a stream of research, and an introduction to the job market. The workshop titled “Introduction to social networks analysis” was also a fantastic lecture where I acquired a better understanding of the state-of-art in social network research and the application of the UCINET software.

Below is a picture that I took in front of the conference site. Participating AOM this year was an excellent experience and I look forward to a more fruitful one next year in Canada.