eso I've kind of been all over the map. Um, leading to kind of where I'm at today, coming out of high school, Uh, like most well, probably a good number of students. I didn't really know what exactly I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go to college, but that was about it, so I actually started off going. Teoh, a community college that I had already been attending while in high school, is taking night classes at the community college. So I got a lot of the generals out of the way. Uh, and then I went full time for one semester at that community college before transferring to a small school up in Virginia, a private school there. And that semester, the main take away there was. I started working on the school newspaper, became the sports editor, and for the first time, my writing, something I had written was being read by other people on. I enjoyed that, and and at that time I thought, Hey, I wanna be a journalist. I wanna be a sportswriter. So I did a semester at that school, transferred to Brigham Young University in Utah, and I went into print journalism and my full intention to become a sportswriter. Get a degree in journalism, kind of live my dream. But they have a selective program there and on the way to take the test. Like the admittance test that gets you into the program. I got a flat tire, and then while I was changing my flat tire, I locked my keys in the car on. By the time I got my keys and got to the test, I had missed over half of it in the way the test worked is they showed you a news clip, and then you had to write a story based on it. And I had missed the news clip and there was no leniency. They said we'll do the best you can. So I didn't get into the program that semester s I was pretty disappointed. So at that point, for some reason, I still don't really know what I was thinking. I decided I'm just going to get a degree any degree, get out of here and go to film school in L. A. I still don't really know what I was thinking on that, but I picked a degree I picked geography because it was the It only required 30 credit hours of classes toe in geography to get a degree. So I started doing that, and I was. I was almost done. I had 27 out of the 30 and then I kind of realized that. Wait, what am I doing? What am I going to do with the geography degree? Um, why am I doing this? And just by chance, I ran across an old friend who had been out of touch with for a few years, and he was finishing up a degree in information systems, and I never even heard of that. And I asked him about it and we talked quite a bit, and I realized, I think that's that's what I want to be doing. So I started taking all the pre RECs for information systems, got into that program, stuck around for the Masters degree. Ah, years later, went back for the for the PhD. What led me to decide to do? The PhD was while doing the bachelors and masters, and I think I might touch on this later and to a different question. Uh, I got a job working as a teaching assistant just to kind of pay the bills on while doing that, I realized I really I didn't just like information systems, but I really enjoyed teaching and specifically teaching information systems. And so those early jobs as a teaching assistant and I started teaching for every class, possibly could. At one point, I was teaching for, like, four different classes. Andi. That's when I thought for the first time Hey, Professor, that's perfect. I like information systems. I like teaching. Uh, you could get paid to do that. So that's kind of what ultimately lead me Thio. Ah, job currently as an information systems professor.

Yeah. So one of my big researching interests. And this was actually an interest. Um, that kind of developed before going in for the PhD. I was working at a job out East in Washington, D. C. And it was, ah, job in I t security. And that kind of developed a an interest in 19 security and security related things. And that is an interest of mine. I haven't had a chance to thio find a project that kind of fits those interests just yet, but that's always on my back. Burner is doing something with that. But I remember talking at that job with a co worker and we're talking about We're making a purchase. And we have been trying to figure out what item to purchase and looking at online reviews. And we were both discussing our frustrations with the difficulties in interpreting online reviews like Is this product really good? Is a bad. Are these reviews paid reviews? Have they just been bought? Are they accurate on DSO? That kind of was an early interest of what type of research could be done around product reviews. I got into the PhD program and that was an interest, and I came to find out that that I'm not unique in that regard. That's actually a really popular thing to research, and it has kind of, um, somewhat ran its course. Not entirely. There's still questions to be answered there, but it was kind of a hard area to contribute to because there had been a lot of work already done in that area, and that kind of one thing led to another. And I realized, Well, maybe my interest in general is user generated content. So when users of websites are the ones producing information about something a product, that's when online review is. But there's lots of forms of user generated content that you could do research on. And we my adviser and eyes, we discussed various ideas. We came across the idea of online professional recommendations. So, like sites like Lincoln allow you to get recommendation professional recommendations from other users, they can. They not Not the part where you just endorse for a skill, but you actually write a blurb and you say I worked with them. They were great, they were the best. So it's essentially a product recommendation product review, except you're the product, and we looked in the literature and nobody. Nobody had really been doing anything on that. And so that kind of is where I gravitated, at least for my dissertation. And I have three papers at various stages and review process on that topic. So the main thing we're looking at is how do you make those recommendations more useful on MAWR? Effective, effective being the influence recruiters or hiring managers toe want to hire you on useful to them so that they can rely on that information and actually use it to make good decisions? And so that's where that research is kind of focused on. And one of the main things that we found in that is that recommendations in general are overly positive. Ah, lot of superlatives, and that really hurts the credibility of the recommendation. And while the whole point of a recommendation is to speak highly of somebody and recommend them, there is value in um discussing an area where they could improve or touching on a weakness or saying I would like this person to continue working on this or that a Z get better. At that, they'll be even better so It's a bit of honesty, and what it does is it's a signal to the reader and the recruiter or hiring manager that the recommendation is kind of fair and balanced or that they're giving accurate information. They're not just providing, uh, positive information that they think you want to hear type thing eso that that's the general finding. And then the various papers go into the different papers, go into more specifics on when that works and when it doesn't finding the boundary conditions of that that effect on. Ultimately, I think it and uh will help users because more and more companies jobs are being found being posted on on these networking sites like Clinton and kind of the way people hire eyes changing in those profiles that you have out there. The face you give to the world on those sites is really important and all the decisions of what you post on those sites is important. And I think in general it's kind of under studied under studied area. But we so far we focus on the recommendations. Part aunt had some pretty interesting findings. Another, another area just kind of this last summer that I had no intention on doing research, and that just kind of happened, was in relation to co vid. There was a special issue for a journal where they wanted to know how teaching academic teaching has been affected by by Koven. And so a number of colleagues at the university I'm at right now got together and we we kind of studied that. And we surveyed 150 undergraduate students to see their experiences on that first semester. When students got sent home mid semester, Andi had to resume the semester in remote learning. So we surveyed them on that and found out what went well went, went bad, uh, and tried to get a sense for how we can best teach moving forward incoming semesters and and the results of that were pretty predictable. I mean, there were issues with it was hard being in different time zones, and it was hard being in sharing a house with their brothers and sisters and things like that. Those were all fairly predictable challenges, and one of the challenges that we we kind of stumbled upon that I had not foreseen was this idea of a role conflict when these students went home the on campus, they were these individual self to a degree, self sufficient, independent students living on campus. And then they went home and they had, in a way, resort back to being a dependent child. And they were given chores and they had to ask permission to go to do things. And they had their parents, you know, overseeing them. And the mindset that shift in mindset of being at a university as an independent student to being a dependent child at home again was really, really hard for a number of students. And that was something that I really, uh I had not thought about that semester as I was working with my students, and they were clearly, uh, being challenged and having a hard time with certain aspects. That just wasn't something that crossed my mind. And that wasn't something that a lot of the students, I think maybe we're self aware of that challenge it really. In the results of the survey, it was a handful of students that seemed to be the most self aware that could really articulate that conflict within them. And once we understood that that conflict was there. We were able to go back and look at other students responses and see that that that conflict was there. They weren't identifying it as such, but that's really what they were struggling with. So that was really interesting thing to find the nature of the journal and the nature of the the papers that we wrote for it. Uh, it's not really in depth analytical analysis. It's more of an opinion piece eso. But that is something that we the whole research soon we're really interested in and might want to pursue in the future. To find actual, run a formalized study on on that topic, or at least collect more data to see how widespread that is.

eso for me. At this point in my career, I'm still early in my career, untended and working towards that tenure track the number one thing would just be one of the number one things. This time. I don't have the kind of the luxury of entering a project that will require years of data collection, you know, and because I need to get things in the pipeline and get things in the review process sooner rather than later to meet various tenure requirements. So for me, looking at a project I look at Is the data available? How quickly? If not, if I do need to collect data, how quickly can I do that? And it has to be feasible in a relatively short time with Once we have the data, how quickly can we then turn that into a paper and get it submitted to get it in the review process? So that's been kind of the number one thing. Obviously I would prefer topics that I'm kind of naturally interested in because thes papers you, some of them you could be working with, for even after you've kind of finished the paper and you submitted it could be another two years of revising and working on it. And if you didn't like the topic or weren't interested in the topic when you started it, you certainly aren't gonna be interested in it. Uh, two years later, when you're still working out the wording of a specific sentence in the middle of the paper. So the time, the interest of it and then it needs to be. Before starting a project, you need to be realistic about the chances of getting published somewhere. A list of you may not know the exact journal, but you should have a good idea of what journal or journals might publish this type of work on. It needs to be something that they you could see being published in that place, and and you just have the potential for publication. There's a lot of ideas and things that I like that I think would be really interesting to pursue or toe to study. But I don't think there's a there's a journal. There's a place for it. So putting those on the back burner for now, maybe I'll do that as a hobby at some point. But it's not something I'll pursue professionally because the name of the game is a meaningful research that gets published. Ondas faras Collaborating Uh, I'm I'm always looking for opportunities for collaboration on the one of the main criteria that I have had is I need to feel like I have something to offer. The last thing I wanted to join a project because somebody, maybe a coworker, a colleague invited me to be cordial or toe as a favorite type thing. And then I feel like I have nothing, nothing to give, nothing to add to the project s Oh, I need to make sure whether it's the topic or the method of analysis or connections I have with helping gather data, something I need to feel like. I am a contributing riel, full contributing author to the paper. Otherwise, um, otherwise, it may turn out to be more kind of more work than it's worth because, uh, people want to know that when Europe for tenure and promotion, they want to know what you contributed to the paper. And if you didn't really contribute anything that that has a way of coming out and it may not help you much, and it can still um, cause require a lot of work for you. Toe. We'll require work in time getting it through. So I wanna make sure I'm a full contributing participant in the paper. Obviously, if it's something I'm interested in, all the better. And I need to make sure that I have the same goals and aspirations for the paper as the other workers. So if I'm at a point where I'm shooting for all top journals or a journals and they're okay with it going to a be journal, uh, then there's some sort of conflict there that either needs to be worked out at the beginning, or it's just not a project that would be a good fit for so. And I think as my career progresses and in general is people's career progress, their requirements may change. Being junior faculty member, I don't I don't really have people knocking on my door very often, saying, Hey, I need your help with this or that. Hopefully, as my career progresses, that will start happening, and maybe my criteria will have toe have to change because I simply won't have time to accept all of the all of the offers that are out there. But at this point, a zits turned out. I've had the time and opportunity, so I haven't really declined any collaboration opportunities. But in my mind, everything that I have accepted has met those criteria, though.