Sherida Santiago is a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) student at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, studying management and organization. She is also a faculty member at Coppin State University. Doni Glover, a fellow DBA candidate at Smith, sat down with her to talk about the program, the classroom, the cohort, and what it takes to carry a doctorate to the finish line. Doni Glover: What’s your discipline — what are you studying? I’m working toward my doctorate in business administration, with a focus on management and organization. How’d you come to choose the Smith School? That’s a really interesting question. In 2017, I joined the PhD Project and was exploring programs that would allow me to earn my PhD. But after understanding the distinction between earning a DBA and working as a scholar-practitioner versus going straight into research, I thought the DBA would work better for me. I started looking at DBA programs — Temple, the University of Maryland, and some executive programs, I believe, through Virginia State or Virginia Tech. The University of Maryland offered the better opportunity. The school had the rigor, the reputation, and the ranking. The faculty were well-researched — as an R1 institution, I found that I could pull a paper and discover that someone from the university had conducted the research or was listed as a contributor. I still find that to be true as a student. I looked at a lot of other programs, and this one just felt most suitable. Tell me about the difference between research and practice — where do you sit in that? In organization development, I sit on the other side of research. As a practitioner, I use the theories that researchers create and implement them within the systems I enter. As a faculty member, I’m doing something similar — taking information for which the research has already been done and the theories have already been implemented, and using it in the classroom and in the field. But in the future, I see myself as someone who theorizes concepts — coming up with scholarly ideas and developing my own approach. I didn’t fully understand that distinction before because I was in the classroom teaching. Now that I’m actively conducting my own research project, I understand what it takes to review the literature, formulate the right question, establish causality — all of it. I plan to use that in my future as an author, a speaker, a researcher, a scholar-practitioner, and a contributor to think tanks. It’s something I wanted to do as a child, believe it or not. I always wanted to be someone who had the answer. Tell me about the classroom experience — the professors, the instruction, the leadership. It’s interesting to talk about the classroom without discussing rigor. I’d say the experience has been fresh and fairly flexible — though I don’t know if everyone would agree with me. I feel heard. I feel like my questions get answered.…