By Imran Ali
Over the past few months I had the opportunity to be a part of the Center for Performance Management Research and Education Mentorship program. Membership in this program entailed reading a number of academic articles as a group with others in the program as well as 2 professors from the School of Accounting and Finance from the University of Waterloo, as well as attending a number of research presentations from prospective authors looking to get their papers published in top accounting journals. One of my favorite parts of this program - as trivial as it may seem - was learning to read effectively and dissect academic literature. Initially, my peers and I found the idea of reading these papers to be highly difficult and very intimidating as we had never been exposed to academic level writing before. However, through our CPMRE meetings and our group discussions we were all able to increase comfort levels with academic writing, and learn how to effectively and grasp the underlying ideas. This mentorship program gave me a deep insight into Accounting research, it also provided me with the ability to experience the process to have Academic Paper published. As someone who plans to pursue a career in Academic in the future this provided me with invaluable knowledge that will help me with my Academic career. Another aspect that I found to be particularly interesting was the Research Paper workshops. In these workshops, prospective Academics will share their research paper drafts to facilitate constructive criticism and discussion over the context of their paper for improvement. As I sat in these sessions, I was really surprised to learn that the majority of the research process is heavily reliant on team effort rather than being an exclusively individual oriented process. Throughout the many workshops my peers and I in the mentorship program had the opportunity to attend, we each got the chance to use these sessions as learning development opportunities for the future. This provided me with great insight to when I would have my turn to present my draft research paper.
After completing the CPMRE program, I believe the most important thing an incoming PhD student should learn is how to hear feedback. From my experiences in the research workshops, I have observed that despite each of the presenters being highly experienced researchers who had extensively published papers in the areas they were interested in, all of them were subject to a huge range of comments and feedback. This makes it clear to me that as a prospective PhD candidate, you should go into it with the mindset of being a committed lifelong learner. Being open-minded will allow you to accept constructive criticism, learn from it, and apply it to your work. Doing so will not only improve your work but it will also make your ideas stronger for the reader.
In conclusion, during this program I have learnt invaluable things. The program provided me with great insight in the world of Academics. It has made me realize my interest to pursue a PhD in Accounting. I will surely recommend this program to individuals who are pursuing a research program or interested to do so.
About Imran
Imran has recently completed his undergraduate degree in the Accounting and Financial Management program and is currently a Master of Accounting student. After graduation, he hopes to start a career working in audit and pursue a career in academia in the future.