Thriving and Creating Impact During Your PhD: Tips from Award-Winning Scholars

Below, both scholars offer tips for how doctoral students can thrive in their PhD, while creating impact through their work.

Tips for Thriving During Your PhD

While their research spans different topics and contexts, both Soniya and Ambreen emphasize that doctoral research does not happen in isolation. Building relationships with peers, mentors, practitioners, and communities can strengthen your research while helping you navigate the challenges and opportunities of a PhD. Below, they share advice from their own journeys on developing a research identity, sustaining motivation, and thriving as an emerging scholar.

Soniya’s Advice

Stay Rooted in Your “Why”

Coming from India to Cambridge, I often felt like I was navigating two worlds at once: learning the methods for rigorous research while staying connected to the realities of micro-entrepreneurs running roadside stalls in Egypt or smallholder farmers in rural India. That tension was real, but it also became my compass. So, my first piece of advice is to anchor yourself in a research question that genuinely matters to you and serves a purpose for the world. The PhD is long, and your passion for the question will be the only fuel that sustains you through long research paper timelines, failed data partnerships, and months of messy data.

Take a leap and cross disciplinary boundaries.

Some of my richest insights have come from combining satellite data with marketing theory, or causal inference methods with questions about micro-entrepreneurs in marginalized communities. Intellectual curiosity across fields is a strength when it draws on interdisciplinary theories and diverse perspectives.

The world is your learning field.

Finally, invest in a community of peers, mentors, and the people your research is about. Some of my most clarifying moments came not in seminars, but while sitting with a micro-entrepreneur in Indonesia or a farmer in India. Your research does not have to be a solitary experience with your data, your paper, or your geographical setting. Go beyond that; listen to people’s stories. Let the world in.

Ambreen’s Advice

Work on Parallel Tracks

The dissertation is the central commitment, but it is also long and often frustrating. Treating it as your only intellectual outlet can make difficult stretches harder than they need to be. Develop side projects that let you think differently. These might include methodological experiments, collaborations with colleagues at different career stages, or contributions from your expertise to someone else’s question. The best side projects keep you excited about research during the periods when your dissertation feels slow or frustrating. Building sources of intellectual energy that are not entirely dependent on your dissertation’s progress can help you finish well.

Grow your professional network

Invest early in your professional network, both within your institution and beyond it. The scholars you meet at conferences, workshops, and through informal connections can become your intellectual sounding board, peer support system, and eventually, your colleagues. Reach out, stay in touch, update people when a paper moves forward, and show genuine interest in their work. Start earlier than feels comfortable and maintain those relationships more consistently than feels necessary.

Advice for Creating Impact through Research

Soniya and Ambreen also encourage doctoral students to look beyond academia’s traditional boundaries. Impactful research begins by thinking broadly about where ideas come from, who research serves, and how it can contribute to change beyond the university. Drawing on their own experiences, they offer advice on engaging with communities, building meaningful partnerships, and creating research that is both rigorous and relevant.

Soniya’s Advice

Go Where the Questions Actually Live

The communities I study—micro-entrepreneurs, women-owned businesses, and smallholder farmers—rarely appear in the datasets researchers are simply handed. If you want your research to matter, you often have to build the evidence from scratch. That might mean planning a field visit, forging an industry partnership, or travelling to the village.

My most impactful work has come from partnering directly with organizations like Farmonaut, Banas Dairy, and Micromentor, not just to get data, but to ask questions together. Research impact does not begin only after a paper is published. It begins much earlier, in the way the study is designed, the questions it asks, and the real-world dilemma it seeks to understand.

Rigour and relevance can go together

Good research need not choose between being methodologically strong and being useful in the real world. The best research asks questions that matter to people outside academia, and then studies them carefully. Strong methods help us give better answers to problems that practitioners, organisations, and policymakers are already trying to solve.

Amplify underrepresented voices

Amplify the voices of those underrepresented in business research. Business research should not only focus on large firms, formal markets, or familiar contexts. Informal workers, women entrepreneurs, and small farmers are part of the global economy, but their experiences are often overlooked. Centring them in your research is where some of the most consequential discoveries are waiting. So before starting any research, I would suggest asking: “What real problem is this connected to?” and “Who could benefit from knowing the answer?” Those two questions can make the work more grounded, useful, and meaningful.

Ambreen’s Advice

Ensure findings flow back to the communities you study

The insights that matter most for journals are not always the same insights that matter most to practitioners. Learning how to translate between these audiences is a skill worth developing deliberately.

One practical step is to create something for the organizations, policymakers, or communities whose work informed your research. When you submit a paper, consider also preparing a short brief or presentation that explains what your findings mean outside theory. This can clarify your own thinking while offering something useful to the people who gave you their time and access.

It is also important to enter practitioner spaces. Environmental conferences, policy roundtables, and NGO convenings are places where your findings can reach people with the ability to act on them, often years before a journal article is published.

About the Ivey-ARCS PhD Sustainability Academy

The PhD Sustainability Academy, co-hosted by the Ivey Business School and Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS), brings together PhD students and senior researchers spanning multiple disciplines and theoretical and methodological approaches. Each student receives intensive feedback on their research project, but also becomes part of a highly supportive community of impact-oriented scholars. The Academy has been organized by Dr. Oana Branzei since its inception in 2008.