Chiara Spina and the Workings of the Academic Job Market

A FRESH PHD GRADUATE CUM LAUDE IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT AT BOCCONI AND SOON TO BE AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT INSEAD, CHIARA SPINA HIGHLIGHTS THE PATH LEADING FROM A PHD PROGRAM TO AN INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC POSITION

Many realize that you don’t land a university Professor position by responding to a LinkedIn ad. Chiara Spina’s story, however, sheds light on the academic job market for new PhD graduates. Chiara graduated from the Bocconi PhD School and, in September, will start working in a prestigious organization, INSEAD’s Asian campus.
 
Chiara Spina, supervised by Alfonso Gambardella and Charles Williams, discussed her PhD thesis at Bocconi's PhD in Business Administration and Management at the beginning of 2020. She, though, had started thinking about the job market in the first half of 2019, and in June of that year, CVs and personalized applications were sent to 45 universities around the world. «Forty-five may seem a high figure,» says Spina, «but I only applied where I thought there was some fit with my skills. I study entrepreneurship with an experimental approach and in each application I highlighted the aspects that best suited the research interests of some key scholars».  At the same time, Dr. Spina published her personal website to make all the information regarding her research easily available.
 
In all the material she prepared, her research orientation and the results already achieved were clearly underlined: a publication in a top journal for academics in her field, Management Science, which was also discussed in the Harvard Business Review, and two more papers under review in journals of a comparable level.
 
International job markets for the various academic disciplines resemble, in many cases, real markets, with stands or hotel rooms instead of stalls, and are a side-act at the conferences of major scholarly associations. In the case of Management, the job market takes place during the Academy of Management conference, in August. In 2019 the conference was held in Boston and Chiara Spina, on that occasion, was interviewed by about 20 universities. «You must present your research and your interests very clearly,» says Spina, «but I also took into account the fact that, on such occasions, the interviewers are super-busy and I chose to leave a tangible mark, in the form of a brochure that illustrated my work».
 
Based on the interviews, universities select the best candidates and invite them to the headquarters for the so-called fly-outs: the candidate presents his or her research in front of the academics of the relevant department and often undergoes individual interviews with potential colleagues and supervisors. Universities, at this point, also try to make themselves attractive and guided tours of the facilities and their surroundings are common, in view of a possible relocation. Chiara Spina's success rate was very high and, the twenty or so interviews resulted in 15 fly-out proposals - which, throughout the autumn, turned into a full-time job.
 
Starting next September, Chiara Spina will be Assistant Professor at INSEAD, Singapore campus. «Before I even finished the fly-outs, as some American universities reacted too late, I was able to choose from six job offers. During a vacation in California, I weighed up the pros and cons of the various work environments. In my case, for example, the existence of a good laboratory for field experiments was a decisive point but I also evaluated other factors, such as support for research activities, location, the possibility of teaching at an MBA», she concludes.

by Fabio Todesco