Poet Management Scholar : Jasmine Kang

Making the transition

For our first course our professor had a reading list of over twenty academic articles. It felt like a lot of reading, my mind was struggling to find a way to absorb all the information and make effective notes. Since we are management students, the breadth of topics were quite wide. The challenge was twofold- reading dense academic texts and to figure out what was I was supposed to absorb to participate in a meaningful way in the classroom session. The urge to master all the information was very strong, furiously I tried to take notes, summarizing the articles. The eagerness of performing in the first course and make a good impression felt quite overwhelming.

Within the first hour of our session our professor cleared it up for us. Our goal he said, is to turn you all from consumers of academic content to be producers of academic content. The goal of your reading is not to be experts in the content of the text, rather to read it critically, ask questions, do the authors convince you of their propositions and findings? I had never thought of questioning academic content in this manner before. We spent time dissecting these articles to evaluate their validity, their plausibility and their generalizability. It blew my mind and I felt quite energized, the challenge to critically analyze exceptional quality of work was daunting yet exciting.

Reading academic texts

The second learning was also about covering the volume of content that was expected from us. We have full time jobs and we need to be thorough in our research. There is an expectation to read broadly but with techniques that allowed us to know which articles we wanted to read in-depth and which ones are meant to be skimmed. These were also valuable lessons in how to write papers. Someday one hopes to be published, you want your abstract to be intriguing enough that the reader is interested to read further. You also want to write in an engaging manner to tell your story. He challenged us to summarize each article in one sentence, this was a challenging exercise but helped read texts from a different lens.

New Lessons

From consumers to producers, 
From doers to thinkers. 

As Practitioner-scholars we train, 
Construct, validity new words we gain.

The white space we search, 
To establish our proposals of research. 

Curse of knowledge we carry, 
Grounded in reality two worlds we marry. 

From consumers to producers, 
We are new knowledge creators.