This is my third ISTR International Conference, but the first one that I am attending as a PhD student. As such I applied and was selected to be part of the PhD Summit, a pre-conference open to enrolled doctoral students. And it started on a Sunday morning!

The PhD Summit was an insightful opportunity for everybody, including for someone living in my context: transitioning from an executive career to an academic one and at the beginning of their PhD studies. This was one of the things that most surprised me as many participants were also practitioners and are brought their experience and knowledge of the sector to the field, making ISTR even more diverse. Diversity was a great strength of the PhD Summit as I was able to exchange with peers from Ghana, England, South Korea, and the United States, with our facilitator coming from Norway.

The final session of the Summit was a three-minute thesis competition. I wanted to join and share what I intended to study in this ‘pitching’ exercise, but I felt insecure to do it at the beginning of my PhD trajectory. I am actually a very competitive person (I play board games every week with friends, as a hobby), but in this case I wanted more to hear than to speak.

Now the Conference has begun, and I am overwhelmed with the number of options of sessions to attend. My priority is philanthropy, and I am very excited to be able to follow the Lester M. Salamon Tribute Series here. It’s because of his work, Brazil had the support of Leilah Landim and other fantastic academics, that inspired myself to start my PhD studies and whose shoes I want to walk in.

João Paulo Vergueiro, PhD student at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) and professor at Fundação Escola de Comércio Álvares Penteado (FECAP).