PACIS 2026: Learning, Service, Friendship, and Finding My Place

A quick note before you dive in. This is long. Longer than I meant it to be. If you don't have the time or patience for all of it, here's the tl;dr: I went to a conference, got taken care of by more people than I expected, learned some things about my research and a lot more about myself, and came back kind of undone by how much generosity was handed to me that I hadn't done anything to earn. That's it. That's the whole thing.

For everyone else, this is me being fairly vulnerable and just letting it all out. Not the polished version. The actual one. Written freehand, mostly in one sitting, so please excuse any typos or rough edges along the way.

And, in true academic fashion, this "introduction" was written last. Long after everything below it. :P

A Suitcase Full of Questions

I landed in Jakarta with a suitcase half full of clothes and half full of questions. Loose ones. The kind that rattle around because they don't yet have a shape.

Some were about my research. Some were about my PhD. A lot of them I couldn't even name properly. About identity. About direction. About belonging. About whether I was actually finding my place in this field or just showing up to it again and again.

Before I entered the Doctoral Student Consortium, I had a brief conversation with my supervisor and advisor, Prof. Abhishek Kathuria. I remember him reminding me that I might come out of the experience with more questions than answers. But he also reminded me that I was entering a safe space. I had "got this." I just needed to be myself, be hungry to learn, and be unafraid to ask questions. I kept coming back to that. All week. I don't think I've ever properly told him how much it helps, having someone in my corner who says things like that and means them. :)

PACIS began the way these things usually begin. A little unsteady. A little too bright. Everyone half-smiling, nobody quite sure where to stand. I was with a few others, still finding my feet, when Prof. Sue Brown came over. I braced myself for serious advice. Something about research, networking, career planning. How to make the most of the consortium.

Instead, one of the first things she told us was to remember to have fun and not be too serious.

Not what I expected. But it's the thing I was still thinking about days later. ^^

I'd arrived carrying a fair amount of nervous energy, and her words didn't make the week any less demanding. They just took some of the pressure off my shoulders.

A reminder that learning doesn't always need to happen through gritted teeth.

Sharpening in the Open

PACIS 2026 was full of learning. Just not the kind you can fit into a schedule.

The first two days were the Doctoral Student Consortium. Then three days of the main conference. Across those five days I presented a paper from my thesis, contributed to a co-authored paper's discussion that my colleague presented, sat as a doctoral student representative on a faculty panel, and chaired a paper session for the Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship track.

But honestly, when I think back on it, none of that comes to mind as a list. It comes back in pieces.

A hallway conversation.

A piece of feedback that rearranged something in my head.

Someone's laugh at the wrong moment during a serious talk (usually my own!).

Academic life keeps teaching me it's shaped as much by people as by papers. I keep having to relearn that, and I keep being surprised by how grateful it makes me every time.

At the consortium I was mentored by Prof. Chih-Hung Peng. I presented a chapter from my thesis and got exactly the feedback I needed. The kind that shows you where you've been overcomplicating things while also telling you where to tighten up. I left that room lighter than I walked in, with a much clearer sense of what the work still needed. I don't think I said thank you properly in the moment. I was too busy scribbling notes. I'm saying it now. :)

Thanks are owed to the consortium chairs too. Prof. Qiqi Jiang, Prof. Achmad Nizar Hidayanto, and Prof. Jason Thatcher, for holding the whole thing together so carefully. I don't know how much thought goes into building a room like that from the outside, but I felt every bit of it from the inside, and I don't want to take that for granted.

It didn't feel like a test. It felt like a room where you could be uncertain out loud without it costing you anything. Where thinking half-formed thoughts was fine. Expected, even. That kind of room is rare for doctoral students, and it matters more than people realize until they've had one. I keep thinking about how easily this could have gone differently. A colder room. A more competitive one. And how lucky I was that it didn't.

I'm especially grateful to Prof. Jason Thatcher, who talked about academic life with a kind of candor I didn't expect. No dressing it up. No performance. It helped me think more clearly about the profession, and about the choices ahead, and honestly about the kind of academic life I actually want rather than the one I've been assuming I should want. People don't have to be that honest with a room full of strangers. He didn't have to be. I noticed.

Some of the best advice from the consortium was also about the job market. One line I hope I remember when my own time comes: academic jobs are a matching market. Push yourself, sure. But also know what actually matters to you.

I don't need a perfect place. I need compatibility. Somewhere my priorities can be understood and supported instead of explained away.

It was a generous way to think about the future. Practical, but also kind. And I keep being struck by how much of what I took from this week wasn't really about research at all. It was about people choosing to be kind to me when they didn't have to be. Over and over. Until I lost count.

A Seat I Hadn't Yet Earned

Another big moment was sitting as a doctoral student representative on a faculty panel, organized by the Doctoral Student College and SIG AI, on preparing the next generation of IS scholars in the age of GenAI.

I was nervous. The kind that sits low in your stomach and just stays there.

Around the table were scholars at every stage of a career I'm still only beginning to picture for myself: Prof. Andreas Eckhardt from the University of Innsbruck, Prof. Claudia Loebbecke from the University of Cologne, Dr. Diah Priharsari from Deakin University, Prof. Eric van Heck from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Dr. Guangrui (Kayla) Li from York University, Prof. Sherah Kurnia from the University of Melbourne.

And there I was, trying not to waste the seat I'd been given.

I remember thinking, quite plainly, that I did not deserve to be at that table yet.

And that I'd better not embarrass myself. -_-

What made it easier was how generous everyone at that table actually was. Not in a rehearsed way. Just genuinely. They made room for me in a conversation I'd more or less expected to sit through quietly. I don't think I've fully processed how rare that is, you know? Senior scholars making space, unprompted, for someone who hasn't earned a seat at their level yet. I felt it in real time and I still feel it now, writing this.

Prof. Andreas, Prof. Claudia, and Prof. Eric also gave me time outside the panel itself, in conversations that didn't have to happen but did anyway. I haven't forgotten that, and I don't think I will. There's a particular kind of gratitude that comes from someone giving you their time for no reason other than that they wanted to. I felt it more than once that week. :')

Mostly I wanted to listen. But I also wanted to say something honest. Something that came from where doctoral students actually stand, not just from inside my own head.

What stuck with me was how seriously the whole table was taking GenAI. Not as some flashy new tool, but as something touching habits, training, judgment... The 'slow ' work of becoming a scholar.

Building on what others had already said, I talked about how easy it is to let GenAI make us isolated. To take every question to a tool instead of a person. But this profession runs on knowledge made together. It needs conversation. It needs us testing ideas against other people, letting our thinking get shaped by someone pushing back.

I also talked about protecting reading and writing time. When a tool can generate and summarize in seconds, the slower stuff, actually sitting with a paragraph, rewriting a sentence until it says what you mean, matters even more. Not less. That's not inefficiency. That's how you build judgment in the first place.

And I said something that's stayed lodged in me since. We're living through this transition as doctoral students right now. But in fifteen or twenty years, the decisions editors and senior editors are wrestling with today are going to land on us. So there's some responsibility sitting with us already. To shape the field the way we'd want to inherit it. And to treat the next generation the way we'd hope to be treated.

Afterward, a few people from the audience found me to say something had landed for them. Those small conversations meant more to me than the panel itself did. Less like a performance. More like something had actually opened up. I walked away from that room feeling like I'd been given something I hadn't fully earned yet, and all I could do was be grateful for it and try to grow into it.

A Small Thread in a Larger Weave

I chaired my first paper session at a conference. For the Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship track, an AIS SIG that overlaps a lot with my own research.

I'd chaired doctoral corners before, but never a full paper session, and the difference showed up in small, unglamorous ways. Timing. Tone. The low-key job of keeping a room moving without steamrolling it.

It ended up being fun. The presenters made it easy, generous with their time and their patience. It was a small thing, barely visible from the outside, but it left me feeling more stitched into the community than I'd been that morning.

I'm grateful for something this ordinary too.

Not every meaningful moment has to be dramatic.

Sometimes it's just being trusted with a small job and doing it okay. ^^

The People Who Carried Me Through It

Still, what I keep coming back to from PACIS 2026 is the people. More than the panels. More than the papers, even.

One of the best parts was going through it alongside my sister-in-arms, Ria Sonpatki.

Ria and I have known each other close to five years now. We've watched each other go from timid, unsure pre-doctoral students to people who are, slowly and unevenly, growing more comfortable in their own skin. What started as a work arrangement turned into a friendship I hold onto tightly. I don't say this to her enough, so I'll say it here. I don't know what this journey would have looked like without her, and I'm grateful I haven't had to find out. :') There's something about sharing a conference with someone who remembers earlier, shakier versions of you. Someone who knows what the confidence is sitting on top of. Having Ria there made PACIS feel less like a standalone week and more like proof of how far we've both come.

Shreya, Abhinav, and Neha, the other students working with Prof. Abhishek, were there too. There's a particular kind of ease in being around people who share the same intellectual home. The same reference points. The same quiet standards. We're each working on our own stuff, but we're also each other's cheerleaders, in the unspoken, low-maintenance way that actually holds up. I don't think I tell them often enough how much it means to not be doing this completely alone.

I also want to remember Prof. Rajib Saha's generosity. I first knew him through ISB, from my pre-doc, where he was on faculty. At PACIS he joined us for dinner, and I happened to end up next to him. In the middle of what could've just been a relaxed evening, he gave me sharp, thoughtful feedback on one of my papers. Nobody asked him to. He just did. That's the thing about him. The kindness and the candor come together, no separation, no air of hierarchy. He talks to you like a colleague. I remember sitting there afterward, a little stunned, thinking about how easy it would have been for him to just enjoy his dinner instead. :)

The first person I met at PACIS was my consortium roommate, Yulia. That first connection mattered more than I expected. Conferences can feel like a string of unfamiliar rooms, with this quiet pressure to make something of every second. Having someone to share that first stretch with made everything a little less anonymous.

Then there were the friendships that formed over research. Their own kind of pull.

I met Leon, who'd recently used a method I'm about to try myself. The timing felt almost too convenient. I asked him for his war stories. He hasn't handed them over yet, but he promised he will, and I know he will.

I met Shane, who sees the point of academia in a way that lines up closely with how I see it.

I reconnected with James, someone I'd met a couple of years back and stayed loosely in touch with since. Our research barely overlaps, but every conversation with him is worth having anyway.

And then so many others. Meri, Martin, Marian, Ingrid, Roman, Intan, David, Tim, Forough, and more names I'll keep circling back to. Some conversations were about methods. Some were about the job market. Some had nothing to do with academia at all.

Outside the official hours, a bunch of us kept ending up together. Beverages, bad jokes, and banter about our cultural nuances. Small confessions about where we come from and what we're still figuring out. We didn't try to fix each other's uncertainties. We just sat with them.

I keep thinking about how none of these people owed me any of this. Not their time. Not their honesty. Not their patience with a nervous PhD student still figuring herself out. And they gave it anyway.

There were so many conversations. And there are still more we haven't had yet.

It was humbling. Quietly reassuring too. Mostly, I just felt lucky, in a way that's a little hard to write about without sounding like I'm overstating it. I'm not. I mean it. :)

Walking Out Lighter

There wasn't one big moment where I suddenly felt like a scholar. It didn't work like that.

It happened in smaller pieces. Being listened to properly. Being taken seriously by people who had no reason to bother. Finding peers who got parts of my work without me having to explain it twice. Finding mentors generous enough that it never felt like a transaction. Finding people who could talk research and uncertainty and still crack a joke at the end of a long day.

I came back with more clarity than I left with questions. About my PhD. My research community. The kind of academic I'm actually trying to become.

I also came back a little undone, if I'm honest, by how much generosity had just been handed to me by people who didn't owe me any of it. I keep sitting with that. How much of this week I didn't earn in any conventional sense. I didn't pay for the time people gave me. The feedback. The seat at that table. It was just given. I'm not fully sure what to do with that except try to pass it on, eventually, to someone who needs it the way I did.

Academia is demanding. Conferences are intense in ways that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn't sat through one. Doctoral life comes with its own weight most days. But PACIS 2026 reminded me none of this happens alone. It grows through feedback, friendship, service, mentorship, conversation. The unglamorous, ongoing work of showing up for each other.

I arrived with a lot of questions. I left with a few answers, some better questions, and a gratitude I haven't quite figured out how to hold yet. For Prof. Abhishek. For Ria. For every mentor and stranger-turned-friend who gave me more than I had any right to expect. All I know is I'm not doing this by myself. And I don't think I ever fully understood how much that mattered until this week.

The conference only just ended, and I'm already wondering what I'll keep of it. What survives six months from now, when the details start to blur. What's still there in a year, when I'm somewhere else entirely, maybe closer to finishing, maybe further along in figuring out who I want to be as a scholar. What's still there years from now, when some of these names have become footnotes and others have become the people I call when something good or bad happens.

I don't think I'll remember every panel, or every session I sat through. I think I'll remember the feedback that actually changed something in me. I think I'll remember Ria's face across a dinner table. I think I'll remember feeling, for a few days, like I belonged somewhere before I'd fully earned it, and being told that was fine. That's the part I want to hold onto longest. Not the schedule. Not even most of the work. Just the feeling of being taken seriously, and being looked after, by people who didn't have to.

And underneath all of it, still, is Jakarta. The humidity that hit as soon as I stepped outside. The smell of something fried drifting from a stall near the venue. Traffic that never really stopped, and conversations that didn't either. They just moved with us, from the conference rooms into taxis, into shared plates at dinner, into the walk back to the hotel way later than planned. Jakarta wasn't background noise. It got into the week itself, and it hasn't quite left. Whenever I think back on PACIS, the city comes with it. Uninvited, but welcome. :)

A Quick Close

I arrived with questions. I left with people. I think that's the whole point. :)

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