Taylor Oswald and Rachel Prom are both student researchers at UMD for Associate Professor Jannifer David in the Department of Management Studies at the Labovitz School of Business and Economics (LSBE).
Prom is a senior majoring in Organizational Management and Writing Studies. Prom originally wasn’t going to study at UMD. But she chose Duluth after visiting the campus and thinking “Oh, I think I’m going to end up here’’ because the city felt outdoorsy, so it felt like home.
Since August 2019, they have been doing research for Dr. David on a correlation between work passion and job recruiting ads. Oswald was approached by Dr. David in Spring 2019 to join and finish her major credits doing the research. Prom enrolled to take David’s Staffing Work Organizations class for graduation credit-- she had to take the regular class and then do something extra arranged for graduate credit. David needed help with this research and asked Prom if she’d do this for the graduate credit piece.
After getting responses from the participants, Oswald and Prom spent 3-5 hours a week putting the responses into the software so they could group the responses into categories.
“For example, do you talk about the pay you’re going to make, or the purpose of the job or the passion part of it?” Oswald explained.
Going deeper into an example, Prom said, “There are two different types of work passion. There is harmonious and obsessive, and the survey determines where you fall on that scale-- whether you have work passion at all or if you fall under harmonious or obsessive passion.”
They are trying to find a correlation between what type of passion someone has for their job and what they would look for in a job recruiting ad. This research should help Human Resource professionals understand how best to attract job applicants with passion for their work.
The project hasn’t been without challenges. Oswald explains that they were using software that nobody had really used before at UMD so it was “a little bit of a learn as you go with the software.”
Oswald and Prom take the responses given and put each into one of the categories they created (motivated by money, or passion, etc. “We are still kind of in the gathering stage of research, but we will probably know the results soon,” Prom said.
“It is interesting what people have to say about their jobs, and seeing the difference between two people who have the same job… One could say ‘Come work here, you’ll love it’.. And someone else will say ‘this is a boring job to make money,” Prom explained.
Oswald said it would be really interesting to see a follow-up with the students specifically. She added that, “it would be interesting to see if the students who were passionate about their majors ended up doing something with it for their careers.”
Both Oswald and Prom said they love working with Professor David and that through this process they learned how to be a bit more efficient, especially when it came to the coding portion of the research.
After graduating this semester, Oswald is going to return to US Bank, where she interned last summer, as a compensation analyst. Prom is working on a 4+1 Masters Business Administration degree at LSBE.
Top photo: An aerial shot of UMD's Labovitz School of Business and Economics.