Basically, I got admitted to the Masters of Accounting program at my school back in nov/dec and I was looking into potential scholarships/grants/work-studies/etc. I found that doing a graduate research assistance program would be the best choice for me so I talked to the MAcc Coordinator (not sure if that’s his official title) and he directed me to an online job posting board that the school uses for GRA openings, but he also mentioned that they typically begin posting openings for the during late Spring 2017 or early Summer 2017 so just wait till then.
I’m somewhat impatient so I was considering potentially emailing various professors to see if they would be looking for a GRA starting in the Fall or not. Good or bad idea?!?!!?!?
One useful thing to do early this semester would be to start attending faculty research seminars in your future department, since you are on campus. Become a familiar face and learn what types of projects faculty are working on. I am surprised when students apply for GRAs in the research center where I work but never seem to have ever attended our events even though we sponsor various research talks and an informal monthly brownbag seminar.
How about teaching assistant jobs? You could find out which classes usually have TAs and then introduce yourself to the profs.
Definitely going to call and ask; to be perfectly honest I always assumed students weren’t allowed to go to them because on my school’s website it says, “The Seminar Series provides the FACULTY an excellent opportunity to directly interact with leaders in their research areas, get valuable feedback on their ongoing work from peers and also creates possibilities for high impact collaboration.”
Definitely worth getting involved in; though out of curiosity since I’ve never gone, how involved would I have to be in the actual discussion of the topics because several of these seminars based off of the abstracts seem to be galaxies away from my understanding of business topics,
For example;
"In electronic anonymity markets, a taker seeks a specified number of makers in order to
anonymize a transaction or activity. This process requires both coalition formation, in order to
create an anonymity set among the taker and makers, and the derivation of the fee that the taker
pays each maker. Moreover, the process has a novel property in that the taker pays for anonymity
but anonymity is created for both the taker and the makers. Using the Shapley value for
nontransferable utility cooperative games, we characterize the formation of the anonymity set
and the fee for any arbitrary number of makers selected by the taker. "
@CheddarcheeseMN My business school doesn’t use TAs unfortunately. At least I’ve never seen or heard of one being used.
Good point about the faculty seminars possibly being beyond an advanced undergrad’s understanding. But if the faculty are all doing theoretical research like that, then you probably wouldn’t be very helpful as a research assistant. You can contact the faculty but also try to get an understanding of who is doing research that could benefit from the help of a first year accounting master’s student.
@CheddarcheeseMN Well my school only offers a 1 year MAcc program and according to the Career Services for the business school several students do get involved in the GRA program while they do the MAcc program.
In that example though, I would expect that is more aimed towards IS/MIS research, since the research seminars among the list aren’t categorized by subject matter.