Article S6.1 On Entering a Doctoral Programme Panel Discussion: Biswa Swarup Misra, C. Shambu Prasad, D. P. Dash, M. N. Tripathi, Prahlad Mishra, S. S. Ganesh Faculty Members, XIMB, India Note. This is a report on the panel discussion held at XIMB (Bhubaneswar, India) on June 27, 2008, which was organised as the opening event of the Research Training Seminar (RTS) series for the academic year 2008-2009. The research training seminars provide an opportunity for doctoral students to learn about the excitements and challenges of doing research in an applied field such as management. Through these seminars, the students get to interact with more experienced scholars from different disciplines or fields, whose insights on research typically go beyond what is available commonly in text books on research. The opening event for this academic year was organised as a panel discussion, with panellists drawn from the XIMB faculty. One of the senior doctoral students moderated the discussion. The panellists were requested to draw upon their own doctoral experiences and identify important lessons for the new students joining this year. Research is a continuous and rigorous process to study a particular topic as meticulously as possible. Hence it calls for inquisitiveness and perseverance. Besides, one needs to be innovative at every step in order to deal with the challenges that arise during the research process. Research teaches us to be tentative with all our results; overconfidence and complacency are not dispositions conducive to doing research. Research is also a process of personal growth. One becomes aware of one’s own “baggage,” that is, one’s ideas and assumptions that prevent one from doing what is necessary to develop as a researcher. Feedback from others, both positive and negative, can be very helpful in becoming aware of such baggage. Frustrations can arise during the research process. Often, it is the result of the researcher’s own preconceived ideas. At other times, it can be the result of inherent uncertainties associated with the research task. One must be open-minded enough to welcome unexpected results in the research process. Reading, writing, listening, and thinking constitute important skill areas for early-career researchers to develop. Researchers have to read the scholarly literature in order to become aware of the past and present debates concerning their research areas. Besides reading, writing is also an important part of doing research. Writing stimulates thinking, imagination, and learning. A lot of research discussions happen through the medium of writing. Written text is also the most common form of research communication. The skills of listening are known to be important in any form of communication. It assumes importance in research because communication is involved in many stages of the research process. The common barriers to effective listening in the research world can be similar to those in the everyday world, such as inattention, preoccupation, fatigue, anxiety, preconception, stereotyping, evaluating, hesitating to cross-check, and so forth. Although there is no standard type of thinking common to all research, still a type of thinking that is often used in research is the one that admits a variety of ideas on any given topic but systematically weeds out the weaker ones, so that only the stronger ones remain. At the same time, researchers do not always throw away an idea merely because it has been found to have a certain weakness. Researchers can go to different lengths to nurture and develop certain ideas which seem promising to them, even if the ideas have been found to suffer from known weaknesses. The research guide plays a very important role in the doctoral research process. Although research is often a self-directed activity, the guide typically provides the initial orientation to research. It helps if the guide can provide a suitable form of mentoring that is appropriate for a particular student, considering the student’s individual style of working and his/her specific learning needs. However, it is also realistic for the students to accept the fact that sometimes a guide may not be the most knowledgeable person on a certain topic. Therefore, it is important for doctoral students to participate in a variety of support networks--something that has become relatively easier in the digital era. Choosing a topic is a crucial task for a doctoral student. Usually, it takes time. Often, one starts with some rough notion about a researchable topic, based on one’s educational background, professional experience, personal orientation, and so forth. However, one needs to access and explore a variety of sources to ascertain the current state of the discussions in some broad area. It also helps to interact with the more experienced researchers associated with that area. A facilitative institutional environment also plays a vital role in this. Research in applied fields such as management tend to use inputs from multiple disciplines, such as anthropology, computer science, economics, history, law, linguistics, mathematics, psychology, sociology, statistics, technology, and so forth. This puts a variety of demands on the researchers. They not only have to take in ideas from different disciplinary sources, they must also devise means for synthesising these ideas into useful forms. This is intellectually demanding. Sometimes, there may be a temptation to learn a specific research method well and then look for a suitable problem to apply it. This is possibly a vestige from one’s undergraduate education. However, at the doctoral level, one learns to do the reverse, that is, to give primacy to the research issues at hand, only then select or devise the appropriate method to address those research issues. Reported by Rohita Kumar Mishra and D. P. Dash. [August 8, 2008] Copyleft Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India Research World (ISSN 0974-2379) http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/Home |
