One of my hobbies these days was to surf the web for "role model". This is in relation to what I said the other day about "thinking out of the box". I came across something that kept me thinking for a while today. Honestly, it is not easy to find any professor of finance these days. What I find interesting is that, such career advancement in the academia do take into account the factor of "luck". You can really trace someone else research career by visiting their research website. Thanks to the fact that University needs to be as publicly available as possible for their profiles and especially research profile of their academic staff, for the interest of potential students who might like to enrol for a PhD studies, for example. Therefore, from such publicly available information, you do identify "role model". They might be academics of your similar research area with good list of publications.
Today I found a relevant "role model". He is a recently appointed professor of finance, who has a total of 18 publications in total since 2004. That was quite scary because this means that in 7 years, he achieved all that. Well, my first publication was published in 2005, imagine in 7 years, which will be in 2012, how many papers would I have published. Well, currently I have 5 publications with a potential 6th paper in the pipeline.
Looking at his list, you do find he collaborate a lot and is quite productive. He is specialised, but you know by the look at the title of his paper, what direction he is moving and the choice of the good (and right) direction help him to be productive, that is important. This is despite the fact of aiming for 4* journal, which unfortunately I didn't see any on his list (I have one 4* out of my 5 published so far, :D), the choice of topics is important.
I like the fact that, this "role model", like me, had a single-authored paper at the early stage of his career, and that was in "Journal of Empirical Finance", a good 3* journal. I also published one single-authored paper in a 3* journal. I hope it is this potential in him to conduct independent research that eventually lead him to devise successful strategy to manage his research. Perhaps he also used what I considered to be a simple strategy of maintaining an "equally weighted" research portfolio at all time?
Anyway, something that I can bring with me after reading my "role model" profile is the choice of an important research topic, that help you synergize with other people, and therefore more productive. This is good, my next phase of my research plan should focus on the "type of topics", apart from those already with the pipeline. And indeed, we should all "think out of the box".
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