HEC Research

Research Stays

Our PhD candidates share their experiences



At HEC Liège, we encourage our PhD candidates to enlarge their network and collaborations, and one way to do it is going on a Research Stay. Discover what 3 of our PhD candidates share about their experiences.

Marie Baratto (PhD candidate, Business Analytics & Supply Chain Management)

I am in my fourth year as a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at HEC Liège, under the supervision of Professor Yves Crama. As part of my doctoral training, I did a research stay of three months, from February 24 till May 25 2022, at the University of Porto as a collaboration with Professor Ana Viana and Professor Joao Pedro Pedroso. My desire to go to Porto comes from the fact that Ana Viana is the vice-president of the COST ENCKEP Action related to the optimization of kidney exchanges (my thesis topic), of which I am also a member. We have met several times since 2019 at ENCKEP conferences and workshops. She and Joao Pedro Pedroso have published several articles directly related to my thesis topic.

My stay was entirely founded by an ARD grant (flights + accommodation) and an FNRS grant (daily costs). Hence, they quickly agreed to welcome me for three months. The collaboration during these three months was not as easy as expected since homeworking was still highly recommended in Portugal. But we had weekly online or in-person meetings. Ultimately, I can happily say that we have a nice research topic to which an entire chapter of my dissertation will be dedicated. One or two paper(s) should be ready for submission by the end of the year.

 

Jérôme Sulbout (PhD candidate, Changing Workplace & Strategic HRM)

With the support of my supervisor, Professor François Pichault, between February and May of this year, I had the chance to do a PhD visiting stay at University College Dublin, Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School (Ireland). I chose this place for several reasons. UCD is a well-known university, and very well ranked at the European level. Most importantly, I had the opportunity to meet Anne Keegan during a conference organized in Ireland (IAM 2021). Anne is a full professor at UCD, specialized in HRM strategic, and project workers and project-based organizations. She is therefore a scholar I have read a lot about previously. These two aspects led me to consider a stay at UCD, and later on prompted me to apply for it.

This PhD visiting stay allowed me to meet and share with PhD students of many fields. I also met many professors from Ireland, and even from other countries, with whom I could learn on the academic world dynamics. I am thinking in particular of James Duggan (Maynooth University), Stefan Jooss (University College Cork), or Jeroen Meijerink (Twente University).

This stay led to a scientific collaboration with Anne Keegan, through the participations in conferences and the writing of a paper on the career shocks of project managers. In addition, a European project is being considered for the coming years, with various European actors.

These three months brought me a lot at many levels. The stay at the UCD allowed me to develop in an international, English-speaking, competitive, and renowned environment. Especially thanks to Anne Keegan (UCD) and James Duggan (Maynooth University), I had the opportunity to expand my knowledge of the academic world, and to extend my academic network with many professors. Furthermore, this stay allowed me to think on and write papers with renowned professors from the field. Finally, living in Dublin pushed me to finalize the writing of my PhD thesis, and to broaden my thinking on this topic.

I can only thank Anne Keegan for her kindness and her time, and HEC Liège for making this opportunity possible. If you have any doubts about doing a PhD Research Stay, I will only advise you to jump in and live this experience, which is beneficial from both professional and personal standpoints.

 

Raphaëlle Mattart (PhD candidate, Strategy & Performance for the Society)

Towards the end of 2019, I got a scholarship from the university to attend an EAISM doctoral seminar (which I highly recommend to all PhD candidates). There, I made some interesting connections related to the topic of my PhD.. being back at HEC, Prof. Nathalie Crutzen encouraged and helped me to contact the professor I met there to do a research stay. We started the process to organize my research stay at the Politecnico de Milano to improve my research proposal on family governance mechanisms. The research stay was planned to take place from March to April 2020, but due to Covid 19, the stay was postponed twice and then cancelled.

At a later stage in my PhD journey, Professor Yannick Bammens (Maastricht University) joined my thesis committee and became my co-supervisor. In June 2021, following the award he and I received for one of my thesis papers (Best Paper Award - EURAM FABR), and based on my thesis committee support for a research stay initiative, he offered me the opportunity to do a research stay at the Department of Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship of the School of Business & Economics of Maastricht University, and join a team of researchers and PhD students working on family entrepreneurship.

I started my research stay in November 2021 and I was supposed to finish in February 2022. In December 2021, I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar organized by Yannick and his colleagues and I received very constructive feedback for the 2nd paper. Following this seminar, Yannick put me in contact with researchers who specialize in qualitative methods in family entrepreneurship. Thanks to him, I had the great opportunity, not only to discuss the topic of my 3rd article (as initially planned), but more importantly to collaborate and co-write it with Prof. Juliette Koning, head of the Department of Organisation, Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the UM. This new collaboration has led to an offer to extend my research stay until the end of summer 2022.

The results are fruitful in several ways. First, my paper 2 (co-written with my supervisor Fabrice Pirnay, and co-supervised by Yannick) has been accepted as a full paper, accepted in a Paper Development Workshop (mentoring with an editor), and nominated for the "Best Paper Award" at the IFERA (International Family Enterprise Research Academy) conference, that will take place from June 22 to 24, 2022. Second, my 3rd paper, more than being enriched by different perspectives, is now co-authored with Prof. Juliette Koning. Third, I it helped me created a network of researchers and friends working on family entrepreneurship.

In a nutshell, this research stay has allowed me to build bridges between Liege and Maastricht, to surround myself as well as possible with experts on my research topic, to confront my ideas, and improve them in order to consolidate the papers of my thesis, all this while being in close contact with my thesis committee. I am learning a lot about qualitative methodology, and this has helped me a lot.

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