Andrea Morales and the art of academic mentorship

Andrea Morales is the recipient of the 2013 Erin Anderson Award, which recognizes outstanding female marketing scholars and the contributions they make by nurturing other women who want to launch academic careers. The associate professor has established a “rock star research record” while at the same time “providing an enduring level of encouragement and support” to the PhD students she has mentored. Morales herself says, “With every student I’ve mentored, I become more and more grateful for my own mentors.”

Andrea Morales sounds as though she’s only half joking when she says she wouldn’t have accepted her own application to the doctoral program she completed at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. “I wanted to teach college, and I was told you needed a PhD to do that,” she recalls. “I knew very little about what being a college professor was all about.”

In grad school, Morales discovered that teaching college is as much — if not more — about conducting research as it is about providing instruction. She also learned that some of the most important teaching a university professor does take place in offices and coffee shops, as an established scholar guides a novice through the rigorous coursework and dissertation research that will earn the student a PhD of his or her own.

As it turns out, Morales excels at all these endeavors: research, teaching, and advising the next generation bound for a life in academe. Her accomplishments in these areas have earned her the 2013 Erin Anderson Award, which recognizes outstanding female marketing scholars and the contributions they make by nurturing other women who want to launch academic careers.

The award is conferred by the American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF), a nonprofit, philanthropic arm of the American Marketing Association and an organization dedicated to good works, such as support of nonprofit entities and nurturing marketing skills through conferences, local chapters, and academia. According to the AMAF website, the late Erin Anderson (left) “was more than a top-notch academic scholar. She was a caring mentor to many PhD students and faculty members.”

As an associate professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Morales mirrors the contribution to scholarship and coaching modeled by Anderson. A look at the approach Morales takes in mentorship also shines a light on how students traverse the path to a lifelong scholarship at research universities.

The list of awards presented to Morales verifies that she exemplifies the qualities recognized by the Erin Anderson Award. In 2011 she won the Society of Consumer Psychology Early Contribution Award, the W. P.&nbspCarey Outstanding Teaching Award, and The Victoria Foundation, Dr. Eugene Garcia, Outstanding Latino Faculty: Research in Higher Education Award. In 2012, her talents were recognized at home when she was presented the W. P.&nbspCarey Outstanding Research Award.

One-on-one, on and on

The role of an academic advisor isn’t a formal teaching role, but it’s a bottomless one. Remembering her own days as a doctoral candidate, Morales notes, “When you’re someone’s student, you don’t take a class with that person. It’s one-on-one meetings that move your research forward. It’s looking at data, making sure there is enough for a paper that delivers a contribution. It’s a long process.”

Morales credits her own mentors with teaching her many types of data analysis, honing writing skills, and even knowing what to wear for job interviews when seeking her first faculty position.

Her mentors also taught her how to come up with useable research ideas, which is important. Research, says Morales, is more than a job requirement for an academic. It also needs to be a passion. “The people who are successful love research. It's not work. You want to find the answers. It’s not about deadlines, it’s about discovery,” she explains.

And Morales has discovered some pretty interesting things. For instance, she found out that those little 100-calorie snack packets probably aren’t the handy diet helpers that the calorie conscious think they are. In fact, the smaller-sized portions tend to make people eat more treats than self-serve portions.

Morales also has come to be an expert on disgust … or at least on the part disgust plays in affecting consumer purchasing behavior. She’s the researcher who uncovered what she calls “consumer contamination,” which was at play in her study that showed consumers found an item of clothing to be less desirable when it appeared that someone else had already tried the garment on.

Likewise, Morales found strong evidence for “product contagion.” Would consumers act as though cookies have cooties if you put the snacks beside sanitary napkins on a store shelf? She tested the question and found that, yes, icky items like maxi pads made yummy ones like cookies less appetizing to shoppers.

All told, Morales has published 13 journal articles in top scholarly publications and has eight more under review, according to Duke University’s Gavan Fitzsimons and The Wharton School’s Barbara Kahn and Patti Williams. This trio served on Morales’ dissertation committee when she earned her Ph.D. at Wharton, and they teamed up last October to write a nomination letter urging AMAF to give Morales the Erin Anderson award. The scholars noted that Morales has been cited more than 400 times in Google Scholar and that her work has grabbed the attention of reporters at Time magazine, The New York Times, and National Public Radio. “This is exceptionally rare for a young scholar,” they wrote.

“Andrea has a rock star research record every young scholar aspired to have,” wrote Lana Castro of San Diego State University, Christine Ringler of Rutgers Business School, and Maura Scott at the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business & Economics. These three women now are all assistant professors, and each was mentored by Morales while earning their doctorates at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

Like the mentors who guided Morales, these former Morales students also teamed up to nominate her for the Erin Anderson Award. They wrote: “Andrea continues to be an exceptional mentor, providing an enduring level of encouragement and support, both during our doctoral programs and as junior faculty members. With Andrea on our dissertation committees, we felt as if we had a wonderful coach, cheerleader, and teacher all in one person.”

These words echo the words Morales herself uses to describe her Wharton advisors and their mentorship. “They trained me to analyze data and come up with good ideas, to write and to manage my career,” she says. “A mentor is part big brother or sister, part parent, part teacher, part friend.”

Feeding the pipeline

Filled with gratitude for the mentorship and support she received in graduate school, Morales has always tried to pay the favor forward. “With every student I’ve mentored, I become more and more grateful for my own mentors,” Morales says. “I’ve found myself thinking, ‘This is a lot of work!’ And, I don’t feel like I do nearly as much as the people who mentored me.”

Her colleagues disagree.

“In about 10 years in the field, she has served as a member on seven doctoral thesis committees and as the co-chair of three dissertations,” wrote Stephen Nowlis, a marketing professor at Washington University’s Olin Business School, and another colleague who nominated Morales for her AMAF honors. According to Nowlis, “Andrea meets with each of her students in-person every week and maintains continual communication with them through email and phone calls to make sure they are moving their research programs forward.”

Morales also is known for supporting doctoral students other than her own. She serves on the W. P.&nbspCarey School’s Marketing Department doctoral committee, which requires evaluating comprehensive exams as well as multiple research papers for each student. “This is a thankless job, and many faculties minimize their workload by skimming or not reading the exams and papers,” wrote Nowlis in his nomination letter. “But Andrea takes the time to read each one carefully, writing notes on the pages and providing constructive feedback for each student.”

Her diligence reflects an unwavering approach to scholarship itself, as illustrated in this story recalled by the Wharton mentors who guided Morales in her doctoral program. “When Andrea was a Ph.D. student, she had started a different dissertation project and had invested a lot of effort into experiments that just weren’t working out,” noted Fitzsimons, Kahn, and Williams in their AMAF nomination letter. “On her own, Andrea made the decision to walk away from that project and to instead pursue a completely different line of research on how consumers perceive effort put forth by marketers. This new line of research was where her true interests resided, but it was risky since it was outside the domains of her advisors and was an underexplored area with little previous literature to rely upon.”

The three mentors added that Morales “worked tremendously hard to build a relevant theory and to conduct many, many experiments.” The dissertation went on to publication in the Journal of Consumer Research and was very well regarded, even winning an Honorable Mention Ferber Award, an award given annually to the best interdisciplinary dissertation article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, which goes to show that even if mentors aren’t experts in a student’s areas of interest, the student still is able to prevail.

Perhaps the reason for this resides in one of the most valuable lessons Morales says she took away from her own graduate school mentors. “It’s not the smartest people who are successful in academia,” she says. “It’s the people who work the hardest and don’t give up.”

Bottom line

• W. P. Carey School Marketing Professor Andrea Morales has been awarded the 2013 Erin Anderson conferred by the American Marketing Association Foundation.
• This award goes to an exceptional female marketing scholar known for extraordinary contributions to marketing scholarship and for mentoring the next generation of female marketers in academia.
• Morales and those she has mentored recognize that mentorship is a many-faceted role: part teacher, part cheerleader, part friend.
• Mentorship provides the support and guidance necessary to navigate the complicated requirements of doctoral study and research.