rowan

I'm not really interested in doing math for the sake of doing math; I'd prefer to have an application, which is what made me think of OM, OR, and MS, because they seem to use lots of math while not ALWAYS doing math for the sake of math (theoretical might). However, I don't know what type of math corresponds with each line of programming. And jobs haha. Also, applied math is too vague of a PhD area for my liking.

It might be ridiculous, but I'm trying to decide on what Business PhD I would be interested in based on the math courses in my curriculum, which seem interesting to me but don't seem to have a direct crossover to business. Some of the courses I have taken/will take are a given for admissions and are used in most of the subjects, but the ones I am questionable on I would prefer to be able to use to focus on an area. Assumed courses: Calc I-IV LinAlg and LinAlg 2 DiffEq Statistics Probability and Stochastic Processes I-III Real Analysis Courses in question: PDEs ODEs Differential Algebraic Equations (including initial value problem) Applied (Nonlinear) Dynamical Systems, including chaos Statistical Mechanics (possibly including SDE?) Complex Analysis Are there any business areas that would use most of the courses in the second list? Finance uses PDEs as far as I know, but are any of the other courses relevant? I would assume that OM, OR, and MS (second two may or may not be in business schools) use them, but to what extent? Based off of my understanding of Marketing, I don't think that it would use any of those, nor would accounting or OB. Would strategy use any of those (I assume no because most of the statements here describe strategy as almost macro-OB)? If no fields use a major segment of the second list, what courses should I consider not taking? Or should I just take them all for "mathematical maturity?"

I'm nowhere near applying, I just like thinking ahead of time. However, I have looked at Stanford's MSE PhD, MIT's OR, Cornell's ORIE, Princeton's ORFE, Northwestern's IEMS, and CMU's OR/ACO, etc. aka top (or so NRC Rankings say). I also looked at their placements, which are almost all a mix of private sector and academia, which doesn't completely rule out something like the Fed or CBO, I guess, but those are the positions that I am more interested in at the moment. If I get an OR PhD, could I circumvent this uncertainty by doing econ research with an econ professor at the institution and including him/her as part of my dissertation advisory committee?

In academia, some of the major people have OR backgrounds, like Alvin Roth, but is this generally frowned upon? And is this route at all possible now, particularly within the public sector? As far as I know, a lot of OR programs have choices to include economics or finance related material, such as a concentration in economics and finance or a PhD minor in one the areas. Looking at several economists that work for the Federal Reserve Board, almost all of the economists had economics or finance PhDs, but some of them had applied math, statistics, or even applied physics. Given an idealistic scenario where a person went to a top OR school and had an economics or finance related dissertation, would the OR PhD be at a disadvantage to Economics PhDs at applying for an economist position? Additionally, would an operations research background be considered a "relevant field" to economics? Alternatively, could OR be beneficial in terms of providing an alternative perspective? note: I posted this as a guest in the open forum earlier not realizing that not many people go there