Undergraduate Students' Corner
Did you know that you can earn 3 credits of ADM electives in your program by helping a professor with their current research project?
ADM 3998 Applied Research in Management allows you to work with a professor for 45-60 hours per term, allowing you to gain meaningful academic research experience, while participating in an exciting venture that will help us make a greener, healthier, happier and wealthier Canada.
This special course allows you to evaluate your aptitude and interest for graduate research work. You could even potentially be nominated for one of Telfer’s Undergraduate Research Prizes (monetary prize and digital badge).
To apply for one of these research projects, you must send a short letter of interest to
Fall 2023 Research Opportunities:
Madeline Toubiana’s Understanding inclusion in the skilled trades
We are conducting a study to investigate the experiences of minorities in the trades, and how they navigate their work environment. The trades are a large and important field of occupations in society, yet the trades have received scant attention from researchers, and we have very little understanding of the dynamics particular to this work. While we know there have been calls to make the trades more diverse and inclusive, it is not clear what this means for training programs or for those who do the work.
Students will support this research project by conducting research on diversity and inclusion in the skilled trades. Experience in conducting literature reviews or summarizing research articles in an asset.
Keri Kettle’s Defining financial fitness
Who is more physically fit: an Olympic wrestler, or an Olympic sprinter, or an Olympic marathon runner?
Who is more financially fit: a high-income doctor with $500,000 in student debt and a $1M mortgage, an unemployed student who just inherited $2M, or a debt-free self-employed personal trainer who owns their house?
Answering each of those questions requires a wholistic approach to defining and measuring fitness. Current academic research on financial well-being has focused primarily on consumer debt (e.g., credit card debt): it’s a metric that is both ubiquitous (~50% of households have recurring credit card debt) and easily measured. However, it’s but one metric.
Similarly, research on physical well-being has focused primarily on weight (e.g., Body Mass Index): like credit card debt, it’s an accessible metric that is both ubiquitous (~50% of individuals may be considered overweight) and easily measured. However, it’s a very simplified metric. Is the marathon runner fitter than the wrestler or sprinter simply because the have lower BMI? Clearly, the answer is no.
In this project, we are building on measures of physical fitness to better understand and measure financial fitness. Our long-term objective is to write a book that will help consumers understand, measure, and improve their financial well-being. Our short-term objective to clearly define – and understand how to measure – financial fitness dimensions.
Your work will fit with the short-term objective. You will work with other students (in small groups or with a partner) to research, define, and summarize measures for financial fitness dimensions. You will build on research in personal finance, economics, consumer behaviour, and psychology (among other fields). This project is ideal if you are considering doing a research-based Masters or PhD program, particularly in either Finance or Marketing, or if you are considering a career in Personal Finance. This will give you the opportunity to read and understand academic research, and to relate it to a new construct we are researching. At the end of this project, you will contribute to a draft research paper.
We will base this research around the 10 dimensions of Physical Fitness: Cardiovascular Endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance, Accuracy
Qualifications Required: Knowledge of Personal Finance; Advanced Writing Ability (in English); Ability to work independently and collaboratively (to search for, read, and interpret academic research)
Tommaso Ferretti and Jose Carlos Marques’s Uncovering the network structure of the global sustainability standards ecosystem
The proliferation of voluntary sustainability standards represents a distinctive feature of global efforts to tackle major social and environmental challenges in global supply chains. An increasing number of standards shape production and trade activities across agri-business, manufacturing, and service sectors. The evolving ecosystem of sustainability standards generates complex and sometimes overlapping regulatory regimes that push toward adopting more sustainable practices in supply chains. It also originates challenging compliance requirements for firms across different geographies, which led numerous industry practitioners and researchers to call for more harmonization and alignment across different standards.
Multiple studies have focused on understanding the impact of individual sustainability standard initiatives on the social and environmental performance of specific supply chains. For example, countless studies examined the outcomes, limitations, and mechanisms by which standard initiatives such as Fairtrade, Rainforest, Better Cotton, the Marine Stewardship Council, and the Forest Stewardship Council operate in industries like coffee, cocoa, forestry, and garments, among the others.
While that research advanced our understanding of how single-standard initiatives operate, we must improve our knowledge about the broader interdependencies between different sustainability standards. We need to understand better how standards initiatives influence each other in the global sustainability arena and what dynamics and forces are in play to enable or hinder the harmonization of global sustainability standards initiatives. Through the regulatory regimes they purport and the sustainability goals they share, standard initiatives originate complex global structures whose features have not been researched enough yet. What does the structure of the global sustainability standards ecosystem look like?
With this research project, we adopted a social network methodology to identify the whole network structure of the global sustainability standard ecosystem. In social network analysis, a whole network refers to the complete set of actors (individuals or organizations) and the relationships between them that make up a social system. The project aims at mapping the global sustainability standards social system by collecting data about all individual and organizational actors operating in that ecosystem. Network data analysis will provide a whole network snapshot of the global sustainability standards ecosystem, contributing to an improved understanding of how different standard initiatives co-evolve or gain more prominence over others, impacting the sustainability governance of global supply chains.
The student(s) participating in the project will have the opportunity to contribute to the process of network data collection (30 hours) and to the review of relevant literature at the nexus of voluntary sustainability standards and social network analysis (30 hours). The student(s) will thus develop relevant methodological skills in social network analysis and advance their competencies on global sustainability standards.
Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP)
The UROP scholarship is a great opportunity to stimulate undergraduate students’ interest in research, and encourage senior students to pursue graduate studies.
Congratulations to the following four students and their supervisors who participated in the program this year, you should be proud of your work!
- Magalie Bourdeau-Potvin : “Comment la pandémie affecte-t-elle l’utilisation des technologies de l’information (TI) dans le milieu de la restauration?“ Supervised by Muriel Mignerat
- Lina El Azrak : “Le rôle de la confiance dans l’intention d’achat d’aliments biologiques” Supervised by Leila Hamzaoui-Essoussi
- Aisha Gheriani : “Employees’ Perceptions of Fairness Toward their Co-workers Mental Health Accommodations” supervised by Jane O’Reilly.
- Juliette Treble : “Bridging the Gap: Equating Three Keystone Health Gap Measures and Beyond” supervised by Kevin Brand.
