2024: My Year in Review

Harish Guda

2025/01/08

I realize that it has been a year since I wrote anything on my blog. Perhaps, that’s an indication of how busy/stressful the last year has been for me. I will plan on writing more often this year.

As I did last year, I will break my review into three parts:

  1. What went well in 2024?
  2. What didn’t go well in 2024?
  3. What did I learn, and how can 2025 be better?

What went well in 2024

By and large, I enjoyed 2024 (despite the shocks and stress) – ticking many of my work and personal targets.

Work

  • Research: I had slight success in getting a few positive signals on some of my papers. I received two requests for revisions (at two premier journals of my field, MSOM and MS). While a third paper was rejected, my coauthors and I decided to implement all the recommended changes, and resubmit this work back to a premier journal. These three papers have kept me busy this year. I enjoyed working on all these papers.

    • The paper on non-profit organizations was an interesting paper, both in the context its rooted in, and in the results we demonstrate. We show why scarcity of resources in severely resource constrained environments – like NPO’s in developing countries – may be a blessing! A new version of this paper will be out soon.1

    • The paper on competitive pricing under manipulability was interesting because it gave me an opportunity to understand choice models — a class of workhorse models used to model consumer choice — better. Besides, the paper is rooted in the context of manipulation due to the recent emergence of Gen AI, and presents interesting results on anti-competitive outcomes due to manipulation. Much has been said about the ongoing fake reviews problem in e-commerce. However, I do not see this problem ending anytime soon, so we may have to better understand the outcomes in its presence.

    • A third paper on competitive AI-based pricing (not publicly available) was quite enjoyable to work on (details intentionally omitted).

  • I was awarded WP Carey’s Early Career Research Award (along with my colleague Heng). This has been a big boost to my confidence that my research agenda and work is appreciated within my department and the school.

  • Teaching: I was recognized in the Poets and Quants’ Favorite MBA Professors — I am so grateful to my student Bailey for the nomination. I was also nominated within WP Carey for a teaching award called “Business is Personal” Award.

Personal

  • Family and Travel: I was able to travel thrice to visit my parents this year and spend about 2-3 weeks each time – something I’ll forever be grateful for.

  • Health and Fitness: I ran a ton with the Phoenix Run Club, and a little bit with Sole Sports Group Run. Overall, I am pleased to see my body reacting well to higher mileages (~25 miles/week) this winter. I have enjoyed running, and I hope to continue with these runs in 2025 as well.

What Didn’t Go Well in 2024?

Work

  • Research: Zero published work this year. Whenever I have a year with no publications, it worries me. A frequent piece of advice I get from my senior colleagues is to “smoothen” my output to avoid such long inter-publication delays. This is something I have to actively work on.

  • Teaching: Teaching has been challenging this year due to multiple reasons.

    • My advanced elective on demand planning had an explosion in enrollment (usually a class of 25, but had close to 50 this year), leading to a lack of interpersonal engagement, and often having to cycle through the motions. Personally, I do not enjoy teaching large classes. This “assembly-line”-ization of higher education is something I am not a fan of.
    • I had to travel to ASU’s West Campus (close to the new TSMC factory), with a commute of about 2 hours every session. The West campus strategic location to the rising tech/semiconductor hub in the Phoenix metro is an exciting prospect. However, the commute took a significant toll on me during Fall.
    • Changes to the FT-MBA program meant I had fewer lecture sessions, and it was a challenge covering the material with fewer sessions.

Personal

  • Losing my PhD Advisor: Earlier this year, Dr. Milind Dawande (my PhD advisor) had passed away. This has been a big shock to me. Half of my “weekly conversational time” used to be with Milind. Not having him around has left a huge void.

  • Health and Fitness: The early part of 2024 has been injury-filled, with getting an IT Band injury in February and in June. These injuries have kept me out of running for several months. Traveling to India also meant I had to take breaks in my running schedule, and I may have to miss the Rock ’n Roll (AZ) Half Marathon this year – something I am super bummed about. Also, getting diagnosed with influenza twice within a span of 2 months has been painful.

How Can 2025 Be Better?

Work

  • Research: I am optimistic about the ongoing projects reaching fruition soon. My main targets for this year is to take each of my ongoing research papers to completion in the best way possible. I also need to resist the desires to start new projects while a significant amount of work remains on the ongoing projects. This tradeoff of balancing excitement in starting new work vs. the boredom in closing all holes in ongoing work is a battle I’ll continue to have.

  • Teaching: Mentally, I plan to overhaul my elective on demand planning to streamline the material across offerings of this course in other programs. Something to work on in the summer.

Personal

  • Health and Fitness: I am actively strength training in a gym, along with Strength 50 classes at Orangetheory, in addition to better planning my mileage.

  • Family and Travel: I will have to renew my work visa this year. I am worried if I may not have an opportunity to travel this year. Fingers crossed.


  1. The results in this paper might remind a reader of some of the findings in a fabulous book called Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough.↩︎