Work Experience

[phdhope]

So I am curious to see what people's opinions are of work experience. Is no work experience a drawback? Is three years of work experience as good as 40? Do internships count as work experience? Do certain topics require more work experience? Does some work not count as experience? Note that we are being general and broad here, but specifics can be useful.

[dusklife]

From everything I've read recently, work experience preferences are very very case, school, and discipline specific. I wish I had more info about this myself with regards to certain schools (since I have limited "professional" experience to speak of). Absent of any particular requirement, at lower to mid-upper tier schools it probably comes down to whether or not the faculty of the school in question are willing to take you in given your background. Some schools may have more faculty that are likely to say, "oh, but he only has X amount of actual experience..." than others.

On the most broad terms, is it going to be a drawback if you have little/none? Yes. But is it going to actually keep you from getting admitted from your ideal school(s)? You just can't predict. I suppose this is where emailing faculty could come in handy. From looking at student profiles at tons of different schools, I can say that more admitted students have experience than not, but that could be because it's more rare for a limited experience student to apply in the first place.

Also, I think that trying to determine broadly the optimum amount of years experience is almost like trying to read the minds of various faculty (since there's no standard whatsoever), so it's probably not worth the time. From a logical perspective, after about three to five years of relevant profesional experience there's probably not too much more that can be gained as far as being beneficial to one as a researcher/teacher.

In a field like accounting or finance, for a very top school like Harvard, Chicago, etc. it appears that quantitative background, diversity, degrees, etc. mean far far more than work experience.
I think at these schools, provided that the rest of your background is at par, the best sort of experience you can have is at a place like Goldman Sachs/MS/etc, because 1) they know you'd have a ridiculous work ethic 2) they know/figure you'd have an interest in capital markets (a huge topic of ivy research), and 3) you'd have top-of-the-line industry connections to utilize for your research and as far as a non-academic rec is concerned, you'd be golden

[taxPhD]

I think it varies school by school, like you mentioned.

For accounting, I have noticed that the capital markets heavy hitters (Chicago, Rochester, etc...) do not seem to worry too much about it as much as schools that have a lot of people doing audit or tax.

If you are wanting to teach and research audit then I think it would be nearly impossible to do without working in public accounting first. Pretty much every current audit PhD student I know has at least a few years of audit experience.