Editorial

Abstract

Doctoral research within the faculty is world leading. This is evidenced in the latest Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (2023), where 90 percent of our doctoral researchers, both PhD and DBA, said they are satisfied overall with their doctoral programme, far exceeding national averages.

We are passionate about developing a supportive research community, creating a culture for critical thinking and opening opportunities for discussing your research. Through this we hope to enable our candidates to network with others and disseminate their research at successful research conferences. Engaging with this opportunity for candidates is crucial to their doctoral journey as it encourages you to gain a greater clarity on the main argument, or story, you are trying to communicate in your research. To effectively communicate your research to others requires you articulate your research in a focused and engaging manner, which takes practice and critical friends.

Our Faculty Doctoral Conferences integrates candidates from across the Faculty of Business and Law and from the DBA and PhD programmes. The opportunity to share your research to a room full of diverse thinkers makes you must really think about how you can best tell your story to people who might not be from your primary research community. However, as this is a doctoral conference, you could say, ‘we are all in it together’, everyone is currently going through the doctoral journey of testing out ideas and practicing how best to communicate ideas. Therefore, this is a supportive community to test out what does and does not work.

For this reason, this year our keynote speaker was Dr. Mollie Evens-Bryde, a recent Liverpool Business School PhD graduate. Mollie shared her experience of completing the PhD, the opportunities and challenges that can come with completing a doctorate. Mollie, discussed explicitly about the PhD journey and how it presented numerous challenges, from navigating complex research methodologies to managing time effectively. The conversation from Mollie highlighted the demands sustained in maintaining  motivation amidst setbacks and failures; balancing the doctorate and personal life which  can be daunting including  the pressure to publish and present findings adds to the stress. However, Mollie was delighted with the programme and wished she had spent longer on the programme.

Thank you to everyone involved: our doctoral researchers, supervisors, cross-faculty attendees, friends of LJMU, and our doctoral administrators who have worked extremely hard to ensure the day runs as successfully as it possibly can.