cii Doctoral Seminar 2024 – Bad Herrenalb – with Prof. Dr. Kalle Lyytinen

(10.05.2024) This year the cii research group again held a doctoral seminar in Bad Herrenalb. For the three-day retreat doctoral students worked together on their current research ideas at the Haus der Kirche Evangelische Akademie Baden, Bad Herrenalb, from May 6th through May 8th. They were joined by Prof. Dr. Kalle Lyytinen who shared his knowledge on various topics throughout the seminar.

The theme for this year’s seminar was “A PhD Toolbox”. For the seminar the research group around Prof. Dr. Ali Sunyaev organized several sessions and workshops on contextualizing research, selecting and reasoning research methods, academic writing and presenting research.
 

At noon on Monday, May 6th, Prof. Sunyaev started the seminar with a brief welcome speech and encouraged the research group to share and discuss experiences and ideas during the workshops. This was followed by the first session on “Contextualizing your research” by Dr. Sebastian Lins, who showed the PhD students how to be aware and include contextual conditions that can affect phenomenon under scrutiny.

In the second session, “Selecting and reasoning your research method” Dr. Scott Thiebes introduced the PhD student to research paradigms, method choices and rationals for different research methods.

On the second day, after a brief team activity, Dr. Tobias Dehling opened with a session on “Problematizing your research: Alternatives to gap-spotting”, in which he presented an overview of how to properly motivate a research problem in information systems research.

After a short lunch break, the team from maKeIT presented the various offers on transferring research into practice available at KIT. To start over with a fresh mind after the enriching morning and noon, the PhD students took part in a small competion where they had to fish for A* papers.

The second half of the day was then used by Dr. Niclas Kannengießer and Dr. Benjamin Sturm in a session “Improving your academic writing” to help PhD students in improving their writing skills and a brief Q&A session by Dr. Sebastian Lins about the general PhD journey. After a day of fruitful discussions and engaging sessions, the research group concluded the evening with a dinner at a local restaurant.

The last day encompassed another two sessions. First, Dr. Manuel Schmidt-Kraepelin introduced the PhD students to good presentation techniques in this session “Presenting your research”. Afterwards, Prof. Dr. Ali Sunyaev and Prof. Dr. Kalle Lyytinen shared their rich experiences of their academic life. With that, they concluded the well-structured seminar that helped the PhD students to be well-equipped with PhD toolbox. Finally, everybody parted ways for a well-deserved holiday.