UNNATI N. - Blog

My interview with Poets&Quants [2023 Best Undergrad Professors]

12/4/2023

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when… "I never wanted to be a professor. I found my way to this career – which is now truly my dream job – through many winding paths and serendipity."

Click here for the complete interview on Poets & Quants' website.

Academic job market season (and phd advice!)

6/9/2023

It’s time for the academic job market season again. I have been helping our students practice their AMA conference-style 30-minute job interviews.

Here’s some thoughts and general advice I compiled in a Twitter thread recently:

Use your time well. The goal is not to present every study and robustness check in this short interview format. Share the main narrative – and enough to spark interest in the topic and demonstrate the rigor and credibility of your findings.
State explicitly who you are and why you study what you study using the methods you use, e.g., “I study mobile and digital marketing using causal inference and machine learning. I got interested in these topics even before my PhD when I had a retail and ecommerce startup.”
Get to your job market paper (JMP) and research questions relatively early in the presentation. Shouldn’t take more than 1-2 slides to motivate. State your questions clearly.
Use the same language and terminology throughout the talk. Keep a consistent narrative. Avoid jargon and surprises. A new term on slide 12 with key results will likely confuse the audience.
Know who’s going to be in the audience (most departments tell you), have some idea about their work, and 1-2 specific questions you genuinely want to know about their group/department.
Reiterate your pipeline and overall research program in addition to the one JMP you spend most of the time on. Also be prepared to talk about teaching – courses you’ve taught and any innovative highlights, e.g., a new technology you implemented.
Follow up thank-you notes. I might be old-fashioned, but I still believe in these. No one is obligated to listen to your research; send an email to thank them individually for their attention and if possible, for the specific comments they gave you during the talk.

Most important, take care of yourself and be kind!

2022 – My year in numbers!

12/9/2022

Last year, I started tracking my data and wrote a blog post about it.

I primarily track two types of data: Work (e.g., hours logged on research, teaching) and health (e.g., daily workouts, calories consumed, body measurements).

2021 stats: In 2021, I spent 932 hours working on my top 6 research projects. I completed over 250 hours of workouts and lost over 20 lbs with a 5% drop in body fat.

It’s a bit soon to summarize 2022 and the December data aren’t in yet – but I wanted to take an early look at the year (minus December).

2022 stats: In 2022, so far, I spent 818 hours working on my top 5 projects with an additional 59 hours exploring 7-8 new ideas of which only 2 have continued and stuck with me. Killed 5 new project ideas this year! Taught at least twice as many classes as 2021.

Of course, all this is based on the projects and hours I am able to track subject to some measurement error. Many "new ideas" never make it to this set. So these numbers should be interpreted as lower bounds.

My key trends @ work:

Expanding the pie: My total tracked hours of work in 2022 (minus December) were 30% more (!!!) compared to 2021. I am amazed that I could continue putting in the hours towards research given that my work commitment to my teaching doubled in the 2022 calendar year; I taught 3 courses in the Spring (one carry-forward from 2021) and 2 in the Fall (with Spring 2023 off teaching) + a 4-week iMBA course!
Exploitation-exploration trade-off: I spent more time on fewer research projects (still too many IMO). I also more actively used a “walk away” strategy; I was more deliberate about walking away from projects early on. I used two main criteria: Is this a project I want to work on for the next 3-5 years i.e., does it align with my research interests? Is this likely to be impactful i.e., does it have a clear contribution?

My key trends with fitness:

With fitness, my main goal this year was maintenance. I continued to keep the 20lbs I lost in 2021 off and maintained my 250 or so workouts with lots of long runs/cardio in the first half of the year and transitioning to mostly strength workouts in the second half.

Overall – what a year it’s been!

More details below for those who love to see the data as much as I do.

(1) Expanding the pie: 30% more hours in 2022

2022 vs. 2021 data!

Logged more hours in the summer this year compared with 2021. Thanks to Thanksgiving, the month of November in both years was pretty good for home/family time.

(2) Exploitation-exploration trade-off

Invested primarily in my 5 main projects in the early part of the year with over 60% time on just 2 of them. Both are now (re)submitted. Fingers crossed!

Tried out new ideas and teams more in the second half of the year. I am pretty sure I didn't track my time on these ideas properly but spent about 59 hours as a lower bound:

What's in a Number?
Key “qualitative” milestones @ work this year

Hours worked is a limited measure; it mostly reflects the work that went in and my priorities. More hours do not always translate to more outcomes, but they do signal to me that I am enjoying the process and using my time well. The outcomes are always mixed -- and often beyond our control. This is a humbling realization.

Research progress: For me, this year started with a major setback. I submitted a major revision in January that turned into a third round rejection for a paper I have spent at least 1,000+ hours since I started tracking in 2021 (and several more during my PhD). The summer was also challenging, as several projects moved slower that I'd have liked. However, the year is ending on a high note. The summer projects I did push forward are now submitted. I also received a conditional acceptance on a paper with a relatively large team, where I am not a lead author, but one that still feels great as a nice closure to years of teamwork! I also pushed forward a solo-authored paper this year, which is now a working draft (yay!) and no longer on the back-burner. Finally, I submitted my first ever NSF grant proposal as a co-PI with a team from education and computer science.

Teaching highlights: I have been a proponent of MOOCs for a decade. This year, thanks to the Gies College, I was able to teach in the online space. I started teaching in our online iMBA program and also offer a MOOC version of marketing analytics. I filmed about 1-2 hours of content in the summer to introduce causal analysis in this course after I took it over from the previous instructor. Lots of additional changes and revamp is in the works. Excited to teach a course with over 17,000 learners.

This year, I also took on an undergrad course on marketing strategy, in addition to my marketing analytics course for MS students. I love our undergrads. We had fun with the Markstrat simulation -- and it was as much a learning curve for me as it was for them! If you want to learn more about how you can use Markstrat, watch my "teaching webinar" on this link (starting at about 17:30 minutes).

Finally, my marketing analytics class that had once struggled with enrollments exceeded 50 students this fall!

Other stuff:
This was also the year of conferences for me. Since the pandemic subsided, I was excited to get back into the in-person conference mode. I gave invited talks at Wisconsin School of Business (twice this year!) and Cornell, and also attended conferences at Emory, Duke, Texas A&M, UChicago, and the University of Tennessee! All of this in addition to a few amazing weeks in the summer at the University of Toronto. Grateful to have a great community!

I also presented my work widely within the Illinois community and presented my research at the Grainer College of Engineering, at the Center for Social and Behavioral Studies, and at the Gies 5th anniversary celebration.

Workout summaries!

When I am not working, you can pretty much always find me at the gym. I stayed consistent this year with my 5-6 am workouts.

I completed at least 200 workouts in Jan-Oct 2022. I started the year focusing on running -- and was able to get to 9 miles on the treadmill before I terribly injured my foot and had to go into physical therapy. I transitioned to other types of workouts in the second half of the year, including spinning/cycle classes and yoga. I kept up with OTF (i.e., Orange theory) for the community aspect, but plan to discontinue to focus more on my upper-lower splits.

I was also consistent with tracking my food. This was particularly challenging during my travels, but I recently hit a "550 days of food logging" milestone so I plan to stick to it. My calorie goals through the year varied between 1600-2000 calories depending on my goals in different phases. I did't see much difference based on my calorie consumption on different workout days this year either.

I started with a maintenance goal for my body composition and ended this year close to where I started! This is a big win given my running injury in March, getting COVID in June, and traveling non-stop for conferences. I hope I can ramp up my fitness goals and balance work-life a bit better next year. Sometimes, less is more!

Last year, I got suggestions to track sleep and heart rate. With my Apple watch, this is much easier now. It tells me I sleep around 7 hours and have a resting heart rate of 50 bpm. Should have more data on this next year. What kind of data do you track?

How I collected these data

Research project data: I use a mobile/web tool called Toggl that allows me to set up various buckets of projects I work on. All I have to do is hit play when I begin working on a project and pause when I stop. Most of the times, I do remember to track it. If I forget to stop it, Toggl sends me an timely email nudge to go in and pause it, so I guess with some accuracy what time I stopped working. For the most part, I can correctly see where my time is going with some margin of error, of course.

Fitness data: I use a combination of apps to track my fitness journey, including MyFitnessPal for nutrition, the Orangetheory app and heart rate monitor for OTF workouts, and my own filming skills (iphone camera, really) to keep track of non-OTF strength workouts.

Awarded the Emerging Scholar honor by the Retail & Pricing SIG at the summer ama, 2022

8/22/2022

TUNE IN: Listen to My podcast interview on the future of higher ed and Student Engagement

8/11/2022

This Simple Nudge Can Get Students More Engaged in Online Courses

6/29/2022

The pandemic taught many of us that online learning is possible. What is less clear is how to do it effectively. In my op-ed for EdSurge, I discuss findings from my recent research on engagement in online learning platforms.

June 2022 in Toronto: Taking an "Ultra-mini sabbatical" (UMS) as a junior faculty

6/24/2022

This post describes my recent research visit to the University of Toronto in June 2022. It's meant to serve as a potential guide for other junior faculty interested to plan a research visit (i.e., an ultra mini sabbatical, or ums). I cover topics, such as how I started thinking about ums, how I planned it, what helped me get the most out of it and how you can still have fun while working and traveling.

I recently discovered that many junior faculty and students have found my blog and informal musings about academic life in #marketing useful. How did I discover this? At the virtual Marketing Science conference, I “ran into” (at the Gather Town virtual simulation) at least three PhD students from three different schools who said that they had read my blog (and my papers – whoa!) and that it helped them decide to pursue their PhD. One even said that I MUST continue writing these posts.

In the spirit of believing that maybe I do have something useful to say, this post is dedicated to a recent experience I had: a short research visit to another university, i.e., University of Toronto, over the summer. I think of this visit as an ultra-mini sabbatical or ums, just like the filler word umm, symbolizing a pause, although a deliberate one.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m currently finishing my second year as an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This means that a fair bit of my dissertation research is wrapping up (hopefully) and that I’m on the cusp of something exciting i.e., developing new papers and crafting my research identity. All of this, while teaching three different courses including an online MBA course and MOOC on Applying Data Analytics in Marketing, mentoring PhD and Masters' students, and serving my profession, department, and school in various ways.

So, what was I doing in Toronto? What prompted my visit? What were the pros and cons, and how did I make the most of it?

Origin of my ums

I first started thinking about ums when I saw a Twitter post by another assistant professor of marketing, saying he was going to spend some time in Italy visiting another school. Some universities have a structure and a more formal process for visiting scholars but for most, if you know someone there, perhaps a senior mentor, it could be worth exploring informally if the visit makes sense.

The purpose of these visits can vary greatly depending on what you want out of them. You can meet and learn about various faculty in the department, get feedback on your papers, start new collaborations, and work on existing projects if you already have co-authors at that school. Since a full sabbatical is often not feasible or recommended for junior faculty, a mini sabbatical is a potential path that gives you more time compared with a typical 2-day visit for a research seminar but is shorter than a one-year commitment.

I wanted to visit the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto for various reasons. First, I had visited them for a job talk during my academic job market year. They had seen my job market paper during my campus visit. In fact, the feedback I had received during my presentation and meetings there had already been super helpful on my earlier drafts. This is also the paper I’m currently revising and one that could benefit from immediate feedback before I sent it back to the journal. Second, they’d been very warm and receptive during my last visit, and I had since been in touch with several of the faculty there. One of their former PhD students is also my very good colleague and friend at the U of I and I also know her co-authors well. Third, I have overlapping research interests, both in methods and topics, with multiple faculty members in their marketing group. When I wrote to them exploring a potential visit, I also learned that most faculty I’d want to meet with was around in the summer. Finally, my cousin had serendipitously just moved from New Delhi to Toronto in May. So, I could also get to see her.

Planning the ums

The two big considerations for planning the ums are the visit timing and budget.

The timing is important for both strategic and tactical reasons.

Strategically, it makes sense to visit when you have projects at various stages in your pipeline. Depending on the faculty or PhD student you are meeting and the amount of time you have with them, it could help to have some advanced papers waiting revision, new working papers that are not yet submitted and a few new ideas you may be on the verge of starting or may have collected data for.

Tactically, my visit was ideal during the summer. At least in 2022, summer is the only time I don’t teach (since I’ve borrowed my future Spring ‘23 teaching into Fall ‘22). This is also a summer when the global pandemic has subsided, and people are more available to meet in person. Depending on the school and department, it might also make sense to visit during your non-teaching semester if more faculty members are around at that time and/or you want to attend their regular seminar series, etc. Paperwork, such as getting a work permit in another country, may also influence the timing of visit. Finally, the timing should also make sense personally, especially if you have children and may have to visit with family. I have two dogs and a cat, and my husband was more than happy to watch them. His work is also only a five-minute commute from our home, so he could walk them during his lunch hours.

The budget for the visit is another important consideration, particularly when visiting a major (and expensive!) city. Most schools can support accommodation and travel for a few days if you are giving a talk but will not be able to support longer stays. They might be able to offer an office or working space, access to the building, and Internet credentials. One way to fund an ums is to set aside some of your own research and travel/conference funds. You can also combine the trip with a conference in that area or close to the airport you’re flying from, if you don’t live near an airport. I was going to drive from Champaign to Chicago to present at the Advances with Field Experiments conference, so I planned my visit right after that. Chicago is also the nearest airport for me to fly to Toronto, so I flew from there directly.

Another suggestion for keeping the visit affordable is to explore accommodation options on campus. I was able to stay at New College Residence at one sixth the cost of a hotel. Living close to the campus you’re visiting also allows you more flexibility (and less Ubers!). If you’re a gym-fanatic like me, there are also always free gym trials or short-term memberships available. Finally, if your accommodation provides a kitchen, consider traveling with basic cooking equipment. I packed a small pan with me and pretty much made myself an egg-white omlette every morning for breakfast. This is also healthier option, especially since you’ll likely end up getting several meals outside for lunch meetings, etc.

During the ums

I have a bunch of advice for what to do during the ums.

First, make sure everyone (at least anyone you plan to meet) in the department knows you are visiting. You can do this by sending the faculty an email a week or more before you go. In my case, I had been in touch with at least two of the senior faculty there since April for my June visit. I was sharing my office with a junior faculty, who’d herself reached out to me a week before to let me know about being officemates. I’d also emailed most of the other faculty individually a week before the visit. In general, 90% of them said they’d be around and would love to meet. Instead of formally setting up doodle or something (who wants to deal with this super formally during a summer visit?! Of course, you can if that’s what you prefer), I started maintaining a google doc with my own itinerary and booking meeting times at my end. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t double-booked, that I didn’t miss any meetings, and that I was tracking meeting-related conversations across all possible conversation channels (e.g., two PhD students reached out to me on Twitter and Facebook to set up coffee chats).

Second, make sure you plan ahead of the meetings. While ums is not a campus visit and you don’t need to read everyone’s entire set of research papers, it helps to know what they are doing and what their recent research projects are about. Why? In my experience and conversations, this helped me select the right projects from my pipeline to talk about and the right questions to ask. I learned, for example, that someone I was meeting for lunch had recently published a paper on giving incentives for COVID vaccines. While I don’t have a COVID-related project, I have a new project on financial- and non-financial incentives for going to the gym. It ended up being a meaningful conversation and he gave me several ideas for potential new experimental designs as well as literature to consult.

Third, build in some deliberate pauses or gaps between meetings. If I had a meeting at 2pm, I’d not schedule my next one until 4pm. I don’t think I did this on purpose so much, but it worked great because sometimes we ended up going for a long-ish walk to talk, and I didn’t need to rush anyone for my next meeting. This is the kind of rush you’d typically experience in a 2-day research talk visit. In some of my longer meetings, the first half hour or so could be dedicated to a specific project or a warm-up conversation, so the real topics of connection or possibility of a collaboration would not even come up until much later. Having less time-pressured meetings was a great benefit of a longer visit!

Fourth, don’t hesitate to reach out to someone and meet multiple times. There are no rules. Again, unlike a 2-day seminar visit, you can find opportunities for continuing your conversation. I met with a junior colleague who is at the same career stage as me once for a quick chat in the office, then for dinner (it happened to be my birthday that week, so we celebrated!), and then again over brunch. It wasn’t until the third conversation that we even explored any ideas about potentially working together. Similarly, a senior faculty member gave me some excellent feedback for my job market paper, so I was able to circle back and meet with him the following week to share what I was finding based on the analysis he had recommended and get detailed feedback on my overall research portfolio. In another case, a senior faculty member wanted to meet a second time to discuss my marketing analytics syllabus in detail. The opportunities for multiple meetings can be rich and rewarding for everyone.

Finally, don’t overplan. LOTS of work and conversations can happen serendipitously. During my visit, I learned that someone else in quantitative marketing was also visiting Toronto. I’d talked to him virtually before. I reached out to him and was able to meet in person for a great conversation! Stuff Zoom can’t do justice to :)

Work-life balance in ums

Last but not the least, an important goal of ums is to reset. It can allow you to step out of your comfort zone and routine, and to try something different. Travel gives you a chance to step away from the structure of your daily life. Make sure to enjoy it. During the weekend and some of the evenings, for example, I explore Toronto Islands, the Little Italy food festival, and dinner with my cousin.

Cheers to a dream summer, and to many of you, hopefully exploring your own ums after reading this!

incentives to work out: Evidence from field experiments

6/8/2022

VQMS seminar: Recording available

12/31/2021

2021: My year in numbers

12/31/2021

Where did 2021 go? I know exactly where.

If you know me or anything about me, you know that I love data. I track my workouts. I track my daily calorie intake and macros, and most importantly, I track the time I spend on various research projects.

As 2021 comes to an end, I wanted to share some of the tracked data from my life. My hope is that this will be a useful sneak peek for current and future tenure-track assistant professors. Perhaps this may even be useful for those wanting to pursuing a goal in 2022, especially a fitness-related goal.

Snapshot of what I did this year

My biggest commitment in 2021 was my research projects. I spent 932 hours on my top 6 research projects this year!

While I explored opportunities for new projects, it turned out that I spent 60% of my time on projects that continued from last year. Last year, in July-December 2020, I had already spent 610 hours advancing 3 of the top 6 research projects this year in terms of time commitment. In 2021, one of these continuing projects on online learning platforms was accepted for publication at the Journal of Marketing Research. Two were rejected in advanced rounds, and subsequently received an opportunity to revise at other journals (note to self: never give up).

Interestingly, the research that I spent most time on took up about 37% of my effort this year. It has recently resulted in its first complete draft (coming soon). It also happens to be a paper about the privacy implications of tracking granular mobility data.

Now onto the tracked data from my other big commitment of 2021 -- health and fitness. I completed over 250 hours of workouts this year!

My breakdown from the last 6 months shows that I spent 117 hours spent working out between July-December. Of these, more than 50 hours were at Orangetheory fitness, a popular group fitness class comprising treadmill, rowing and strength training intervals. In addition, I spent about 58 hours doing heavier weightlifting, with 60% lower body training. I have been going to group fitness classes for more than 10 years but this year, for the first time, I stepped under the barbell, going from body weight squats to over 160lbs barbell back squats in just a few months.

Since I also track my calorie consumption, what surprised me most was that I wasn’t eating any differently on my cardio vs. strength days, or upper vs. lower body days. The box plot below shows that I consumed very similar amount of total calories irrespective of the kind of workout I had that day. I'm curious to see how this split varies by macros, since I do make an effort to consume more carbs on lower body/heavier lifting days and keep carbs low on other days.

Results? Overall, it was quite rewarding to see that I started this year at 160lbs and closed it just under 140lbs with a 7% drop in body fat (between June and November).

Did tracking everything cause me to be more productive or get more in shape? I’ll leave that question for a future paper once I can figure out an identification strategy. For now, enjoying the descriptives and looking forward to continuing the tracking trajectory in 2022!

How I collected these data

Time spent on research projects: I use a mobile/web tool called Toggl that allows me to set up various categories of projects I work on. All I have to do is hit play when I begin working on a project and pause when I stop. Most of the times, I do remember to track it. If I forget to stop it, Toggl sends me a timely email nudge to go in and pause it, so I guess with some accuracy what time I stopped working. For the most part, I can correctly see where my time is going with some margin of error, of course.

Fitness data: I use a combination of apps to track my fitness journey, including MyFitnessPal for nutrition, the Orangetheory app and heart rate monitor for OTF workouts, and my own filming skills (iphone camera, really) to keep track of non-OTF strength workouts.