Report from AFAANZ representative to EAA Doctoral Consortium

2018 EAA Doctoral - Colloquium Report

It was my great honour and privilege to represent AFAANZ attending the EAA 34th doctoral colloquium, which took place on 26-29 May 2018. The colloquium and the following EAA Annual Congress were hosted by Bocconi University. The venue of the colloquium was at Palace Grand Hotel in Varese, a beautiful and best-preserved town near the city of Milan, Italy. The Colloquium was attended by 36 doctoral students and 12 distinguished accounting researchers from EU and US universities as faculty members.

The colloquium started with a welcome dinner where all students and faculty members met and got familiar with each other. Two co-Charis, Prof Keith Robson (from HEC Paris) and Professor Beatriz García Osma (from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) gave us inspiring and humorous speeches to encourage us to discuss our ideas with others and also to enjoy our time at the EAA Doctorial Consortium. We had a very relaxed and delightful dinner after such long journeys.

In the following two and a half days, all students were divided into four broad research area groups — Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Financial Analysis, and Social and Organisation Accounting. Each group has three faculty members. According to my research topic, I was in the Financial Accounting Research group together with faculty members: Prof. Joachim GASSEN (from Humboldt University Berlin, Germany), Prof. Wayne Landsman (from University of North Carolina, U.S.A.) and Prof. Cathy Shakespeare (from University of Michigan, U.S.A.). In our group, each student had 75 minutes to present his or her PhD thesis. Meanwhile, faculty members and other PhD students asked some questions and provided suggestions to help the presenter to improve the thesis. The interactive nature of the presentation offered many opportunities for feedback and fruitful discussions. The comments I received from them are sharp and constructive, which helped me improve my thesis.

Besides the presentation, there were three plenary sessions each day during the colloquium. The topics of the plenary sessions include: “Reproducible Exploratory Data Analysis: A Step towards Open Science in Empirical Accounting Research”, “Early Career Development”, and “Editors, Reviewers and Getting Published: Research Contribution and Originality”. These sessions offered useful advice about the issues that a doctoral student or a junior faculty member is likely to meet during their career path. I have learned a lot from these sessions and would like to thank all the faculty members in the colloquium. I will carry their advice with me as I begin my academic career next year.

Finally, the opportunity to attend the EAA Colloquium has broadened my sights and enriched my research experience, which is invaluable to my academic career advancement. It also enabled me to improve my communication skills and to build up social networks with the students and faculty members in many other countries. I much appreciate AFAANZ for this opportunity. I would also like to thank EAA, the University of Queensland Business School, and my supervisors for supporting me throughout this amazing experience.

Yi Xiang
The University of Queensland

(Participants at the Colloquium.  Yi is second from right in the third row)