We are starting the 27th year of our DBA program with new vigor and excitement as we are again back on campus and also having virtual residencies, hopefully throughout the full year. I welcome our new DBA cohort of 11 students and our 12th PhD cohort of eight students. I look forward to working with the DBA and PhD students in the coming years and making sure that the student journey will be successful.
This year we are running six physical residencies per year with more extensive virtual residencies. We are also introducing some changes and innovations to the program design as we continue to revise our methods sequence. Some initial changes will be experienced by the first- and second- year students in the qualitative and quantitative sequences and later new workshops will be implemented with sessions focusing on archival data, text data and so on. The ongoing revision is based on a relatively careful and diligent analysis of the expected competency profiles of the future DBAs given the rise of ‘big data’ and new types of computational analysis techniques. With these revisions, we feel the program will continue to show methodological and intellectual leadership which it has done throughout its history.
Also this year we will start preparing for the program’s 30th anniversary. Due to COVID we could not celebrate our 25th anniversary. Related festivities were then moved from year to year as the pandemic kept its hold. Therefore, as we enter the third year after the pandemic started, we decided to run a real 30th anniversary in the 2024-25 academic year. Prior to that, we will organize our alumni reunion as part of the traditional CWRU homecoming weekend in fall 2023. Please stay tuned for the coming programming and events that we plan to organize as part of that fall event.
During the last year we also reached some other important milestones in our program’s history. Our PhD program surpassed 100 PhD graduates, and we should be close to 110 by the end of this academic year. This is a major achievement as there are relatively few PhD programs in business schools that have been running for over 50 years and never achieved such numbers. We achieved these numbers in 11 years––much earlier than I ever expected! The overall number of DM/DBA/PhD alumni from our programs has also surpassed 300 and we should be close to 330 by the end of this academic year.
I wish you all the best in the academic year and success in our common journey.
