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qwang

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Everything posted by qwang

  1. I've done a visit where I attended their official PhD information session, and by luck the administrator was able to get me a meeting with the department PhD program director that same day. I've done another visit where I directly contacted their PhD program director and was able to meet with him. Both of these cases I eventually got to the interview stage so I'd attribute the meetings to that. As for do's and don'ts, I think common sense is good. Always avoid saying bad things about anyone or anything. Demonstrate a genuine interest in their program however you wish (I think the act of contacting and visiting is already a huge step). Personally, I think demonstrating high English speaking skills and some knowledge of the field is extremely important if you do get a meeting with a faculty. I also felt that speaking with the current students wasn't very useful, so use your judgement there.
  2. From what I've seen and heard from our finance students, that stuff is indeed very mathematically intense. I'd suggest that you look into Stochastic Processes at the graduate level because it can help build some more foundation in the properties of mathematics and I think that's important for theory work or anything on continuous time. You may also want to look into some of the Bayesian stuff, but that's really just throwing ideas out there.
  3. I have recently been making a move into quant marketing from a different department. I didn't have any experience in marketing, but it seemed that my research ideas and interests were more relevant to marketing than my previous department. As a part of my switch, I've been digging more into economics (behavioral economics if you're interested in CB and stuff like game theory and industrial organization if you're interested in quant), statistics (both exploratory and theory-testing methods), and marketing in general (suggest reading Philip Kotler's Marketing Management textbook). As Evergreen states, attending doctoral seminars would be ideal. If that's not an available option, then I suggest taking MBA level courses because in my opinion the undergraduate level courses are a bit too introductory. I would also suggest that you think deeper about which area in marketing you want to focus on, because the different sub-fields have very different requirements and it takes some time and effort to be on the same page as the field.
  4. My understanding is that at this point, the strength of your profile becomes subjective. Whether you did your undergrad at Harvard or at a public school, that's not what you're evaluated on. Many of the PhD students that I know have some form of connection to a faculty in their department before being admitted. Or, their background and interest may fit the bill of a specific demographic that the department is targeting. Once you have the grades, test scores, and solid recommendations, it becomes your responsibility to find the most suitable school for you. And in order to find the school that is most suitable for you, you should initiate a dialogue with them to find out. However, if you don't want to do that, then you should basically apply to any school that you're interested in because you'd be assuming that admission is random. Lower ranked schools would probably give you a higher probability of admission simply because the total quality of applicants will be lower.
  5. The CB marketing department at my school seems to require a strong knowledge of psychology, or at the very least be very good at reading experimental papers and methods. In general, I think you should be careful with your research pitch as a mistake there may get people to think that you're better fit for behavioral economics.
  6. Probably greater than 99% of people who completed grad school do not hold a faculty position. The business school PhD is unique in that it's set up to prepare students for academic positions. Even with business PhDs, many graduates do not become professors, and many more leave before graduating.
  7. I don't think your history in China will hurt you since you have a strong history in your 3 years at Utah. I think the GMAT will be very important to decide where you can go, and I think your English abilities may be judged as well. Based on my experience with some finance students (I'm not in finance myself), quantitative skills are also extremely important, and the more adept you are the better your likelihood of success during the PhD. As for where you should aim for, I think 20-100 would be wise. You'd probably have a good chance with a top-50 school, but personal fit would probably be more valuable than school rank.
  8. There are specific master's programs for quantitative finance. My guess is that they would offer the best route than a PhD.
  9. I don't think you need to worry too much about research interest fits because as long as you don't make it seem like you're unwilling to do anything else, it wont hinder you. Based on your brief description of the project you're working on, I feel like it would be a pretty good fit for the finance departments in business schools, although I'm not in finance so I could be wrong. As for the ORFE departments, Princeton's ORFE department has placed a few graduates into the DSO department at USC Marshall for their statistics positions. But if you truly want to do finance in academia, then your best bet should still be the finance departments.
  10. I hope you're doing proper machine learning and not just some simple run-of-the-mill classification or regression... otherwise the machine learner in me would want to strangle you! My guess is that you should probably specify in your SOP what kind of topics in finance that you're interested in doing for your PhD. My in opinion, research experience is research experience, and it should be helpful even if it is on a rather niche topic (as long as you did a good job of it). If this was the topic that you wanted to do for your PhD, then I second wittmic.
  11. Usually, having substantial research experience will get you serious considerations from most programs assuming that the rest of your profile checks out. With your working paper, I suggest that you submit as much of it as you're officially allowed. If they're interested in you, they'll at least skim it so length isn't that big of an issue. If they're not interested in you, then it doesn't hurt to have a longer writing sample. That aside, I think either choices of your recommenders is fine.
  12. To be completely honest, I feel like you'd have to really badly want to do a PhD to go that route given that you have three kids and have what I assume is a well-paying job. First of all, the workload is significant, at least as much as your job if not more, so making time for your family is a truly difficult task in my opinion. I was old enough to remember what it was like when my parents did graduate school, and it was tough. While the stipend and/or student loans is enough to live on, there is no money for anything else. On one hand, the PhD is really cool, but on the other hand, it's a tough few years for everyone in the family.
  13. Best way to get a top faculty position is probably to be able to publish in the Journal of Management Science. It would be wise to look up faculty at your schools of interest and identify people who are working on topics of your interest while also having a strong presence in Management Science. I like your list so far, but you should probably look to double it, include some schools such as WUSTL, USC, and Purdue, and perhaps a few "safety" schools just in case, maybe Southern Methodist, or Texas A&M.
  14. I would go with A if you're applying to top-50 PhD programs. This is because there is a significant drop off in regards to the amount of publications in "A" journals once you go down in the rankings and therefore recommender A may actually be recognized by the programs you're applying to whereas recommender B probably won't be recognized. Moreover, since recommender A actually knows you, you may be able to help improve your letter of recommendation by providing your recommender with more detailed information about yourself. However, I don't think it's bad to go with recommender B either. Perhaps go with whoever you feel more comfortable with given the list of schools you're applying to.
  15. There are different types of research done in supply chain management. Not all of it have to be heavily quantitative. I would suggest that you first look into the courses that individual programs of your interest requires for SCM and see if you'd be able to get through them. Then, look for less quantitative research papers.
  16. The unhelpfulness of the replies is a reflection of how unclear your questions were. First, all of science uses statistics extensively, including finance. When you talk about research using statistics, you need to define how statistics is being used. Are you doing regression analyses, hypothesis tests, or are you trying to develop financial models? Figuring this out will help you choose an area related to finance that you may want to work in. There are whole disciplines that involve themselves with finance that do very different work (financial engineering, quantitative finance, financial computing, financial mathematics, financial economics, corporate finance, just to name a few) and they all involve statistics. Many of these topics are not explored by the finance departments in business schools. You need to be more specific in regards to what you're looking for.
  17. I think there's a few things involved that you'd need to think more deeply about. First, what was the trend of your UGGPA? Was it trending up as you moved up in years, or was it relatively stable? Next, how difficult was your master's degree? While it's true that US master's programs tend to have highly inflated grading systems, the UK master's programs are often not so easy. In your case, perhaps referring to yourself as "near top of class" is maybe more useful than "4.0 GPA". Finally, do you think that you can somehow get proper research experience (and hopefully a good letter of recommendation) before applying? Having proper research experience is usually a major boost that can probably make up for an otherwise weaker profile.
  18. Do you like Leeds? The university, the business school, the city? Do you like the faculty, their research, and what you can do there? Why did you choose to go there for your master's in the first place? If you go to the US for a PhD, it's very possible that you may not have many choices in regards to location, and some places may be undesirable to you. Yes, the US PhD is better at getting you a job in the US, but if you have to live for 5 years in a city that you don't like, working at a university or business school that you don't like, it may not be worth the investment. It's easy to want to target an institution based on reputation or future career prospects, but usually things only work out if you're somewhere that you enjoy being at.
  19. US business school PhDs are mostly geared towards producing future academics, and that includes teaching. So doing extra teaching work is a favor to you. Getting paid for it is just icing on the cake. If academia is where you want to be, the extra work from the US system is definitely a plus.
  20. Assuming that you do finish top of class in your master's, there will be plenty of opportunities to get a fully-funded PhD position in the US. Since you don't really know what you really want to do right now, I would suggest that you first try to get a real job and see if you enjoy it or not. If things don't go well on that front, you can always start a PhD in the US some time down the road.
  21. Why don't you try to find yourself a research assistant type of position and see if you enjoy doing research. Sure, you can make six figures as an accounting professor, but there's also the 5 years of the PhD where you get very little and work very hard. $50k a year isn't so bad when you're only working 40 hour weeks compared to getting $100k and working 80 hour weeks.
  22. If you're absolutely settled on doing a PhD, I suggest that you look for research opportunities right now. There are two reasons for this: (1) you will gain valuable research experience which will greatly help you understand what CB marketing is all about and of course improve your application profile, and (2) whoever you work for during this time can be one of your references. At this point, since you've already been admitted once, I don't think getting into a program will be a major problem. Instead, it's probably best to think of ways to ensure that you will be successful during the PhD.
  23. I think you would probably be better suited for operations. The current hot trend (and will remain hot for the foreseeable future) in operations is data-driven business analytics, where top-level skills in statistics and applied math are in need. A lot of the current applied work in operations are actually marketing so if that's what you want to do you still have that option.
  24. First of all, I think it would be wise if you make all effort to first "secure" admission into your current school. A T20-25 ranked school is already excellent in terms of education and future prospects and may only be marginally worse than a T10-20 school or perhaps can be better depending on specific research topics. Your GRE/GMAT scores are rather low for finance, and your GPA while good, doesn't scream top of class. Finally, I'm assuming that you don't have any serious research experience nor do you have any publications. Therefore, I feel like unless you have great LORs and an amazing SOP and good luck, T10-20 would be a reach at best. I don't know the specific details of topics in finance as I am not in that field, but based on the profiles of students in finance that I've seen, the competition is extremely fierce.
  25. Usually the position is full-time. A part-time position or request is usually too non-committal to be of real value to anybody. There is more than enough money in business schools to give research opportunities to outsiders, particular in the big name schools. My suggestion is that you contact some people at various places and see if there's any available work and maybe try to set up an interview. These things usually aren't public knowledge so you have to do some personal digging to get somewhere.
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