July 11 Project Intro

Synchronous session info:
Date: July 11, 2025
Start Time: 14:00 UTC (10:00 EST / 16:00 CET)
End Time: 15:20 UTC
Link: https://georgetown.zoom.us/j/99313919043?pwd=huivLfbwQDaS6ooRlhbTTm28bqQn9M.1
Meeting ID: 993 1391 9043
Passcode: 957 810

TOM 2025 Summer School Final Project

The capstone of the TOM Summer School is a group project on a subject of mutual interest. 

The main output is a 10 min presentation (plus 5 min Q&A) on July 24nd at the end of the TOM conference. No other written output is required (although you’re welcome to use the project as a springboard for ongoing and future research). The main goal of the group projects is gaining hands-on experience with modeling; to that end, we encourage you to work together on any coding, including pseudo-coding and/or code review, even if it might be less “efficient” than leaving coding to the individual(s) with more experience. It may be useful to discuss upfront each individual’s learning objectives (given time constraints).

The projects are designed to be open-ended explorations (rather than resulting in a publishable product), so we expect that final presentations will reflect this. Presentations should include each of the following:

1. The research question & modeling framework used (including any choices/assumptions you made)

2. Preliminary analyses/findings and potential next steps

3. Some takeaways about the process: what did each of you learn about modeling, what went well (and not so well), what tools & resources you found useful, etc.

The project offers students an opportunity to learn how to use formal modeling to gain novel insights about theories and phenomena. The best projects seek to introduce a new question, justify why the question might be interesting or important for a particular audience, propose an appropriate modeling framework to interrogate the question, and then execute on that framework to generate a novel insight.

We (strongly) recommend that groups include at least 3 students and no more than 6.

Here are three potential ways to get started:

1. Start with a question: If there are a group of students who are interested in a similar organizational theory or phenomenon, then you can collectively determine what model(s) introduced during the online summer school are most appropriate for interrogating the question and then implement the one you think is most promising.

2. Start with a model: If there is a modeling framework that a group of students is especially interested in, you can interrogate features of the model, then explore how what is learned from the analysis of the model could be applied in an organization setting. One possibility (which hasn’t been available in the past) is for a group (or multiple groups) to submit an algorithm to the NK competition (https://sites.google.com/view/tomsociety/tom-initiatives/nk-competition?authuser=0) and then to structure their presentation around the insights gleaned from the choice of algorithm and its performance in an NK landscape. (We’d love to see at least one group give this a try!)

3. Start with an insight: There may be an insight from a particular paper (perhaps a modeling paper, perhaps not) that a group of students find compelling. If so, the group can start with the insight and interrogate that insight further by extending an existing model or developing a new one. This could include, e.g., exploring the robustness of the result to different modeling assumptions, tweaking the existing model to apply the insight to a novel organizational question, or using a different modeling approach to replicate and extend the original insight.

Coordination tools for project groups

Whatsapp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/FZby6P96neX2U4jS9T2LB7

Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10qo3GWjYsxtQo2DRZFDce3_YFamyh6R38WMEcoiSP1k/edit?usp=drivesdk