I got back from the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ yesterday night and figured I'd write a quick blog post about something my doctoral student E.C. mentioned, in addition to my regular blog post for the week which was published on Tuesday. Here is what prompted the extra post: my student participated in the Future Practitioner Colloquium, a one-day event before the annual meeting geared toward senior doctoral students that focuses on "career paths for OR/MS professionals, challenges that new
practitioners experience, discussions concerning choosing between an
academic and a practice career and more", and she said that, although the Future Academician Colloquium was very well attended, there were only twelve students in the Future Practitioner Colloquium, including nine from the University of Florida and herself. Only twelve.
Now, I don't know how many doctoral students in operations research or analytics have completed their basic course of study (one of the few requirements to be nominated, see here) and are interested in industry careers, but I'm very sure there are more than three in the country outside the University of Florida. With all the talk about the current analytics wave - or tsunami? - and interest from top companies in "data scientists", as well as the number of companies recruiting at the annual meeting, it seems certain that a whole more students would have benefited from, and should have been interested in, attending the colloquium.
E.C. was actually happy at the small number because it gave her more opportunities to interact with the students who did attend, but from the perspective from someone who enjoys preparing tomorrow's practitioners, I wish more students had been able to benefit from the colloquium for several reasons. One, it covers important topics that we professors can't really teach to students who want to join the real world. And of course it takes more than a one-day colloquium to teach those topics, but at least the colloquium is a start. This is particularly relevant because the whole concept of doctorate involves spending several years making one's own contribution to the field in a specific area, and at the end there is only one name on the dissertation. In contrast, industry involves significantly reduced time scales and teamwork, among other things, which also has implications in terms of students' ability to interact with others, contribute to a large project, deal with difficult team members, and so on.
Intuitively, students who pursue doctoral studies are people very comfortable in spending a lot of time by themselves with their computer, equipment or textbooks, even if they have many friends outside the lab. We teach our undergraduate students to work in teams for some courses or capstone projects, and graduate students in some courses also do team projects, but as doctoral students gain seniority and focus on research, the whole emphasis shifts to that of individual performance over a time horizon of years. Hopefully students attracted to industry will already have the skills required to succeed in the real world - but maybe they'd benefit from identifying early on areas that are particularly important for them to work on in order to be successful, and from hearing about the experience of other O.R. professionals who made the choice before them.
Some students get that exposure through industry summer internships, but not every doctoral student is able to get one, perhaps because his/her adviser prefers that he/she focuses on working on his/her dissertation, and perhaps because industry summer internships for PhD students are not nearly as common as undergraduate internships - besides, finding one that meshes well with a student's expertise is not always easy. A one-day colloquium won't be the solution to everything, but not attending guarantees students won't get any exposure at all to those topics.
Two, given the rising importance of analytics, data science and O.R. in industry, it seems particularly relevant to create a network of young, up-and-coming practitioners who can stay in touch after graduation - those are the people who will call upon each other when senior analytics opportunities present themselves later on. Again, a one-day colloquium won't forge everlasting bonds, but if the students don't attend, then they most definitely won't know about each other. INFORMS tries hard to remain relevant for practitioners, and hopefully there will be a time in the not-too-distant future where the practice conference in the spring (rebranded "analytics conference") will attract as many attendees as the more academic one in the fall, but for now membership does seem to be heavily tilted toward faculty members, and helping future practitioners see a clear benefit in INFORMS membership could contribute to INFORMS's continued relevance in that respect.
Maybe an issue is that professors don't bother telling their department chair that they want to nominate their students for the practitioners colloquium - maybe they are not sure of the value of attending, and while the first student per department goes for free (i.e., the colloquium fee is waived), the department does have to shoulder some of the costs for the subsequent ones. So whoever organizes the colloquium might consider distributing the agenda from the previous year and testimonials from students when he/she calls for nominations. Maybe the timing, in the middle of the summer, is bad for the students or professors who are away; maybe it'd be easier to move the nomination date forward to match abstract submission. But if we want to ensure the continued relevance of analytics in industry, we academics should offer those among our students who are inclined to pursue industry careers more opportunities to meet like-minded students and learn about the specific challenges related to industry work. The University of Florida, whose ISE department is headed by a former Lehigh faculty member, certainly seems to have understood that. The rest of the O.R. departments in the country might want to take notice.
