Student in Focus

Student received the VC's OCTAL Award

Congratulation to Commerce's Stephanie Perkiss who was named as a shared recipient of the Vice Chancellor's Sessional tutor/lecturer OCTAL Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning for 2013.

Stephanie is completing her PhD with her thesis titled "Placing (Dis)Placement within the Sociology of Worth: Towards a Social Accounting for Environmental Migrants”. Stephanie develops her teaching strategies to encourage, support, and motivate her students to consider new emerging social qualitative areas in accounting while learning, which are important to business. This teaching style allows Stephanie's students to "think outside the box" when understanding the applications of accounting theory. She feels that constant feedback is the key to learning and brings her great fondness of your PhD topic to inspire her students to enjoy learning.

These prestigious awards recognise colleagues who have made a major contribution to teaching and learning excellence within the University of Wollongong over a sustained period of time. Staff were nominated by students or peers for their outstanding work. They then submitted a portfolio of evidence of their contribution to teaching and learning at UOW, and this portfolio was assessed by an independent panel comprised of members of the Teaching Excellence Subcommittee of UEC and an external reviewer. Their achievements will be formally acknowledged at the Vice-Chancellor’s Awards ceremony on 23 August 2013.

Best paper for "creative questioning"

Congratulation to IIBSoR's Duncan Rintoul who won the Best Paper at the 40th National Australian Market & Social Research Society Limited (AMSRS) Conference with industry colleague Jon Puleston (GMI).

In 2011, GMI and the UOW fielded a massive multi-country survey experiment, to see how well ‘creative questioning techniques’ perform in non-Western cultures, and whether they help reduce the cultural response style biases that cause so many problems when conducting multi-country surveys.

The results were presented in the paper Beyond colour and movement – Measuring the impact of dynamic survey answer formats on respondent behaviour" that won them the award. To find out more, click here.

Student wins National Conference Sponsorship

Faculty of Commerce PhD candidate, Bonnie Dean, attended the 10th Annual Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR) international conference from 17 to 19 April in Adelaide. Dean won the opportunity to attend the conference through applying for a competitive, national scholarship. Dean was sponsored by Research Master Pty Ltd (RMPL), an innovative software company that designs and supports the management of research processes, who was also the major sponsor for QPR.

Ms. Dean won the sponsorship over 131 applications from across Australia. Anita Chai, Client Services Manager at Research Master, said that “the adjudicators were particularly impressed with Bonnie’s reasons for attendingyy the conference including mentoring first year postgraduate students”. Dean is the Faculty of Commerce’s first HDR Committee chair, who’s role includes advocating for the postgraduate community, supporting students’ transitions into university and liaising between faculty postgraduates, staff and academics.

Dean described the conference as a window to the other side of postgraduate education “I saw how concerned academics and administrators are for students, and their supervisors, inventing new ways for supporting both in the postgraduate milieu”. Dean plans on presenting what she learnt from the conference to the Commerce HDR student committee, to inspire new opportunities and deeper understanding of the politics, policy and practice of postgraduate research.

QPR is an international conference focused on doctoral education. The conference attracted educational researchers, postgraduate students, supervisors, academic developers, policy makers and postgraduate administrators. The conference theme was “Narratives of transition: Perspectives of Research Leaders, Educators & Postgraduates” and delivered presentations on policy, research and practice of doctoral education. The RPML sponsorship included airfares, accommodation, conference registration and all meals.

Student Excellence Award

Congratulations to Qigui Liu for winning the HDR Student Excellence Award  in 2012. Qigui is a PhD student in Acconting who commenced his PhD in 2011. Qigui's thesis tile is "Ownership structure, political connections and firms' leverage policy: Evidence from China" and his research interests include: Disproportional ownership structure; capital structure; Venture capital monitoring; Political connections; CEO compensation; and Chinese capital market.

Qigui has two articles in two ERA A ranked journal:

1. Liu, Q, Tian, G., and Wang, X., 2011. The effect of ownership structure on leverage decision: new evidence from Chinese listed firms. Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, 16(2):254-276
2. Liu, Q, and Tian, G., 2012. Political connections, firms’ debt level changes, and expropriation by the controlling shareholders. Conditional accepted by Australian Journal of Management.

Qigui also has written several other working papers, which have been presented in several conferences. Some of his papers are under review of high quality journals include Journal of Corporate Finance, which are all co-authored with his supervisor Professor Gary Tian and other international Academics. Quigi will be awarded his prize at the Faculty of Commerce's annual Student Awards Ceremony.

Student receives A-CSEAR's Emerging Scholar’s Colloquium Award

Jeurgen Seufert was awarded for his presentation at the Emerging Scholar’s Colloquium preceding the annual Australasian Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (A-CSEAR) hosted by the University of Tasmania in December 2011. Jeurgen is a PhD student from the School of Accounting and Finance and his thesis combines costing and accounting for carbon within an organisational change framework. The award was sponsored by the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, a high quality publication in accounting. The School of Accounting and Finance together with Social Accounting and Accountability Research Centre are hosting the 11^th CSEAR Conference 2-4^th December 2012.