How do you succeed in a Ph.D. program?
This is a question that is asked by every prospective Ph.D. student and there are many sources of advice. The best available advice on the internet is from fields other than accounting, but most of it applies to accounting. A list of helpful links and citations follow:
- Orgtheory.net has 21 blog posts describing "grad school rulz"
- Ngan Dinh, of the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program Vietnam Program of the Harvard School of Government, compiled advice from top economists for young economists
- Getting the Most from Your Doctoral Program: Advice for the Ph.D. Student in Finance, by Frank Alpert and Thomas H. Eyssell, Journal of Financial Education, Fall 1995
For your accounting seminars, two things helped me "excel." First, my classmates and I wrote a review of every paper we had to read and shared these with each other. That way when it was time for comprehensive exams, we did not have to reread every paper, but could reread the reviews. Our reviews followed a what, why, how framework taught by Bill Kinney. What is the research question? Why is it important? and How did the researcher answer the question? One thing I wish I would have done is after each class, I should have added one paragraph to each summary about how this research fits into the "bigger" picture and what are the main takeaways from the paper (understanding the main takeaways is much easier after you have discussed the paper).
The second idea is to volunteer to lead the discussion on the most difficult papers. This forces you to learn these papers and better prepares you for comprehensive exams and research in general. If you don't volunteer to lead the discussion you might be tempted to slack off on a difficult paper. At some point you are going to need to know the paper so by volunteering to lead the discussion you force yourself to learn the paper.
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