Profile Evaluation - PhD in Business Administration / Applied economics (2015)

[abh2015]

Thanks all for reading this post. I am in urgent need of some advice. If you are a current PhD student in business administration or management or applied economics or a professor in these disciplines, I would appreciate your advice.

 

My question - Which discipline should I apply? I can think of marketing (quantitative), operations management or strategy (one professor I contacted suggested strategy). Also what could be the schools that I can apply?

 

My profile - I am from India

 

Age - 36

 

Research Interest - applied econometrics/statistics application in business to gain competitive advantage. I would incline towards strategy. I also like to take insights form different subjects like psychology, sociology, anthropology other than economics and statistics/operation research to gain a richer understanding of social phenomenon.

 

My secondary interests are in operations management, marketing analytics.

 

Education - Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering, REC Durgapur, India (GPA - 62.6%, 1st class), MBA from IIT Delhi with focus on management systems (GPA - 7.417 on a 10 point scale, got good grades in 3 organization behavior courses, a course in manufacturing strategy and the MBA project, decent grades in market research and 3 Information Technology courses, rest all grades are average), 2 year Masters from Cornell with economics and statistics focus (GPA - 3.39 out of 4)

 

GRE - 170 quant, 155 verbal, 3.5 analytical writing (thinking of writing the GRE again)

 

Math/stat and economics courses taken at Cornell - Micro Theory 1 (B+) and Micro Theory 2 ©, Econometrics 1 (B+) - all PhD level courses from economics department

Econometrics 1 (B+), Econometrics 2 (B), Dynamic Optimization (A) - graduate level courses from applied economics department, these courses are also taken by Applied Economics PhD students

Game Theory 1 (B-) - PhD level course from political science department

Statistics for Social Sciences (A), Categorical data analysis (A+), Multivariate Analysis (A) - under grad / masters level courses statistics courses

2 courses in International Trade from applied economics department, one undergraduate and one masters level - both A grades,

Masters level courses in Managerial Finance (A-), Public Economics (A-)

A graduate course in systems modeling (B) from the civil engineering department

Also some courses in political science (not quantitative), average grades in them

 

Recommendation - one prof from IIT Delhi (from IT area), one prof from supply chain (under whom I was a RA at Cornell, that prof has now moved to Penn State), the 3rd recommendation is probably going to be from my thesis advisor at Cornell (famous prof in consumer behavior) or a well known prof from IIT Delhi (in organization behavior), this prof has retired recently, so need to check out

 

Research Experience - Wrote my thesis at Cornell on consumer behavior on a lab experiment I conducted, thesis advisor very well known professor of consumer behavior with wikipedia profile, worked on SAS for my multivariate analysis project, Also worked as a research assistant to professors at the Johnson School at Cornell for almost a year, helped in data gathering, entering the data in excel, data cleaning, and initial statistical analysis with STATA (the prof I worked for was from supply chain and operations, the projects I worked on were on environmental issues and on vendor performance management)

 

Teaching Experience - lecturer in a top 25-30 business school in my country for one and a half years, taught MBA and BBA students courses in business strategy and probability modeling and statistics,

taught working professionals courses in business analytics with R for a top 20-25 business school,

have tutored undergraduate students of Cornell microeconomics, econometrics

 

Industry experience - 6 months in production planning and control in a chemical engineering company,

2 years 6 months in logistics and project management in the largest car manufacturing company in India, also had limited exposure to marketing and sales functions in the same company,

internships at a telecommunication company in market research and in a healthcare company in analytics

6 months of independent statistical consulting

For 2 years, I ran my own coaching center for high school students, subjects taught were physics and maths

 

 

Thanks for your advice.

Edited November 22, 2014 by abh2015

[PhDPlease]

Honestly I think it will be hard for anyone to help you, because you have many interests and no one other than you can know which interests are most important to you. Personally my interests are somewhat broad and interdisciplinary. However, a PhD requires specialization, so at some point you have to sit down and consider which of your many interests you MOST want to pursue, as you won't be able to pursue everything. If you haven't spent much time reading journals, I would recommend reading some academic articles in the various fields you are considering and seeing which methodology/theories/styles you can envision yourself writing in. (At least that was helpful for me, not sure if it would help for you too.)

[abh2015]

Thanks very much for your reply. I think I would incline towards applied econometrics/statistics application in business to gain competitive advantage. I would incline towards strategy. I do like to take insights form different subjects like psychology, sociology, anthropology other than economics and statistics/operation research to gain a richer understanding of social phenomenon.

 

My secondary interests are in operations management, marketing analytics.

 

I was also teaching courses in strategy at a business school where we use to use articles from HBR, which are generally fro practitioners. During my grad school, I have read some economics papers but no research paper on business strategy. Could you please suggest some good ones? Thanks a lot !

[rsaylors]

Like you said Abh, you're interested in Strategy. You should look for management programs that allow you to focus on strategic management.

[abh2015]

Like you said Abh, you're interested in Strategy. You should look for management programs that allow you to focus on strategic management.

 

Thanks rsaylors, but marketing professors also use econometric modeling and use insights from sociology and psychology to model behavior, and some purely use game theory, industrial organization and econometrics modelling. It also seems most quantitative marketing people comes from statistics and economics background. Strategy research is also very much empirical with the use of statistical techniques. So a bit confused between the two - which one to apply. Probably my profile is not suited for operations management where most people from industrial engineering background comes from. Although quite a few professors do interdisciplinary research in business schools. Would really appreciate some good tips on possible programs to aim for. Thanks

[sb29]

I have a friend doing "applied econometrics/statistics application in business to gain competitive advantage". He is in strategy. In quantitative marketing, I think more than econometrics, people use bayesian statistics. I think your interests will be best matched in a strategy department.

 

While it is perfectly alright to have other areas of interest right now, in your PhD, you will have to focus on one (I think someone has already said this). So, based on the information you provided, you should be doing strategy. Along the way, if you feel that there can be something useful gained by incorporating ideas from, say, psychology, you can do that by all means. But your primary research focus seems to be strategy.

[abh2015]

Thanks for the tips. Can anybody suggest the schools to apply based on my profile? Also, GRE scores required for clearing the initial cutoff and breakup of verbal, quant and analytical writing section scores?

[XanthusARES]

Yep what everyone else said is spot on. You seem more strategy than anything else. But I have to agree strongly with PhDPlease, your research interests are pretty broad. I doubt any program will allow you draw from so many sources since methodologies are so varied amongst these specializations. Also just as a quick aside when someone asks you to be more specific copying and pasting your initial response is not helpful.

 

As far as specific papers we generally don't do that unless we have knowledge of the subject and can quickly think of a couple papers that might suit your needs. Since all of our research interests are so different it would actually just be faster for you to look up papers using our good friend Google Scholar. Just use keywords like strategy, competitive advantage and such.

 

We also don't suggest schools to people, or rather we rarely do. Go through the steps outlined in various other posts on how to select schools and you'll find a plethora of information on the subject of school selection.

 

I don't know the GRE, but the rule of thumb generally used for test scores is as follows: 90% on all sections is preferred. The closer to 90% you are the better. Anything less than 80% is considered questionable for most top 20 programs, but will not necessarily get you desk rejected.

 

The rest, my friend, is up to you.

[abh2015]

Got the GRE to 329 from 325 - V (159), Q (170), last minute effort to apply to various schools, as per the ETS grid for score conversion, the equivalent GMAT score is 740, thinking of quantitative marketing after consulting professors, any suggestions on school to apply, thanks