HorsesInVA

As someone who attends a "top" OB school, I'd say the OP's list is reasonable, not so much in the sense of order but pure membership. MIT is far better at OT, and possibly anyone else in the field, than they are at OB. I can't speak for Yale, having not really met anyone from SOM doing OB/Management only their OT group which is quite strong, but I've met folks from all the others and they are very well established in the field and their departments are highly respected. (It helps many of their faculty have dual appointments in psychology, behavioral econ, etc.) The OP may want to add Princeton's psychology group, INSEAD, or UMich onto the list as well. CMU is quite good as well for research into teams and learning. Duke is more strategy focused. UNC was historically and remains to this day strong in sociology. Also, these schools often have multiple departments that study "management" and you have to apply to one of them also. Stanford has 4-6 (GSB, Ed. School, Psych, Soc. Econ, Engineering's MS&E), Harvard has separate strategy and management groups as well as disciplinary dept's, Berkeley has their GSB, Psyc, Econ, but also a dept. within their E school that does technology and innovation management. I could go on. That said, it will matter what they want to study, as others have mentioned. Certain schools will reject you because you aren't the type they're looking for while others will accept you for the same reasons. Schools are trying invest in students that will succeed within the school's context and resources, and your fit is the ultimately calculus for acceptance. You can certainly shotgun all of them and see what happens, and indeed you will join the ranks of many who do. Moreover, a few may even give you call backs. But if you accept a position at one of these places without realizing what you're getting into, it'll be 4-6 years of pain. Assuming you don't just drop out. So don't step forward if you don't realize what hole you might fall in to.

Having seen both ends of the spectrum (top 5 and top 100), it seems stressful for everyone. QOL just differs largely by location, i.e. anything to do besides grad school?, whether or not you have an SO, if wife/husband/fiance(e) probably higher but not if it's just GF/BF, your strong friendships in the area, and how much your stipend/accumulated wealth is worth in the region. I wouldn't say there's more pressure at the top, just that you're directed toward topics that are more likely to get into A journals. Beyond that, the topics of B and C journals take as much time and stress as the topics featured in A journals. For what it's worth you're not going to hear this from the interviews except obliquely. As a practical matter, no lower ranked school is going to acknowledge they're lower ranked to prospects and certainly not by saying because they're lower ranked they'll make it easier for everyone. Think of it as a "poor" person introducing themselves as "lazy" to someone they're trying to impress. May be you'll get lucky and only have projects soar, but if you're like most of us, they'll dash into the rocks more often then you'll care to acknowledge. The trick is learning to learn something from each collision. Once you figure that part out, the balance gets easier.

@ralph31 A little late to this but speaking as a macro-OB person, which as TM points out is equivalent to OT, I can comment a bit more on your profile. So your research interests hit a smattering of topics that OT folks like but you may want to pick the one you feel is most compelling. For example, culture is a fairly broad topic that has been nebulously explored by a lot of parties. If you want to argue that culture is a form that creates boundaries, then you can look at work that's been done in cultural sociology and boundary processes. The categories and markets literature is another place you may want to consider, but that is more about market judgment/evaluation than within firms culture. If you want to talk about the diffusion of culture within firms via rituals, then you're doing more interactionist theory. Here I'd read the Chicago school of Goffman, Garfinkel, Blumer, and later Randall Collins. You may also take a look at the conversation analysts of Sacks, Jefferson, and Schlegloff. More cutting edge stuff is being done by people like Dan McFarland. Enculturation is also explored by Carroll & Harrison who use a bunch of computer models to argue about diffusion of culture within firms. You can just get their book which compiles all the papers. If you're talking about economic exchange media through cultural embeddedness that's the Granovetter 1985, which is the standard site for the argument that all economic activity is embedded in network ties of exchange. The key emphasis in that paper is that both agency and structure as well as the relationship is under theorized and there is a need to use networks and culture to make better sense of it. It is a critique of both econ as well sociology. However, very few people seem to have been able to really move beyond this paper in any serious way in OT so that's something you may want to take on. Now diffusion is an equally over studied topic. If that's what you want to talk about then narrow your focus on whether you're looking at diffusion mechanisms, i.e. why does an idea travel from one person to the next, who is more susceptible to adopt, etc, You can also talk about how diffusion structure affects the ability to adapt, Heinrich Greve has a neat paper on this on airline parts. Finally, organizational ecology is a quirky field. It's somewhat dead and yet somewhat of a zombie. (n.b. I'm a fan of it) However, adaptation is generally not the process org. ecologists like, but rather it's selection. Generally change in org. population comes from environmental changes. You can study that by arguing how globalization moves faster than organizations may adapt. That actually would let you touch on the world polity literature as well as the multiple clocks literature in org. ecology. Another one you may want to consider is the Evolutionary Econ, approach of Nelson & Winter. An oldie but goodie. Anyway, these are all dense topics and for your SOP you want to just pick one. Skim some of the works involved and that way you won't just be vomiting your thoughts but giving a clearer delineation of them. Best of luck.

@Uncanny I think this isn't a bad profile, though your undergrad may be an issue. Strike that, it will be an issue and you have to explain it to some degree. Consequently, I'd hedge my bets and apply to at least 10-12 schools. While you have a good background that could be used to translate into research you should spend some time wondering what the direction precisely is. As you mention you have no background in strategy or entrepreneurship you are in an MPP program which means you have access to a university library. Use it, read about some of the ideas. Find a few you like and you'll have a better sense of how to write in a statement. You haven't mentioned rec. letters but it seems like this shouldn't be an issue. Rec. letters will also go a long way to contextualizing your presentation as an applicant. Otherwise, good luck!

It depends on what kind of program you want to enter into and what kind of strategy person you want to be. If you want to emphasize more about the politics that affects performance or how politics affects firm performance then choose the first guy. If you're looking at firm performance and its relationship with broader economic conditions, or heck you just want to be more of a straight up econ person doing strategy, you might want to choose the latter. (Might being important because micro econ seems to have a beef with macro econ, and a lot of strategy folks are micro). They both seem comparable honestly, so it goes more to how you want to come across to the people reading your profile and how you think of yourself as a future scholar.

Awesome. Congrats! Just one or two more...

@Henrik So I suspect you'll do well at some schools but not all. It'll boil down to what your statement and profile suggests of you as a researcher. Now honestly, research always trumps job experience, unless your job happens to be research. ;p. National innovation and entrepreneurship is a hot topic now and you can probably get in somewhere with that sort of application. GPAs can be country corrected but the fact you can't good rec. letters is a more serious concern. I'd recommend you get that box checked off first. If you can't, then you may have to take some time do an RAship to get a solid letter writer and get some research under your belt. Your still 26 and in this field, you still have time before you need to apply.

I've never heard of socio-economics but I am familiar with the other programs you mentioned. The thing that has be stated immediately is that they are all different programs drawing on different disciplines. Economic sociology is fundamentally sociology, arguably from the interactionist tradition and one that is deeply critical of econ as done by economists and the rationalist paradigm in general. The word they like is embeddedness and its important to note the econ they all seem to have a beef with is Transaction Cost Economics. If you come from an econ background and want to do econ soc, you pretty much have to be the academic equivalent of a Catholic deciding to be an atheist. (The ones that do this pretty much give a version of this in their application SOP) Business & Psych is really psychology with a focus on judgment and decision. Since U of C psych is part of the house that Kahneman and Tversky built, the whole discipline begins by saying econ people really don't model economic reasoning correctly. They are also in conflict with standard economics over who has the best claim for truth on how human beings make decisions about what's best for them. Any program that does Business & Psychology is just psychology but run in the business school with less work on disorders while using fewer neural scans. Now if you think socio-economics is Freakonomics, then you're trying to get into an econ PhD program. EAP is basically econ. Not applied econ. Just econ, that happens to be in the business school. SHIP is experimental econ in the ed school. And as others point out, you're not going to be remotely competitive if you come in with the basics. Short of you placing high in an international math olympiad, your coursework and GMAT mean you're going straight into the insta-reject pile. The first year coursework for econ is no joke. Your peers all have graduate math courses and research experience under their belt. We're talking people who'd be math PhDs until they realized they wanted money more than they wanted nerd fame. I'd be highly surprised if any of them scored less than 49 on GMAT or 169 on GRE quant. Quite honestly, I don't know who's writing your rec. letters and from what fields, but unless you are the most brilliant person these recommenders have come across in the last 5 years, I highly doubt your chances at a t10 or even t25 school.

Schools at the level of INSEAD is never built around test scores, they're just a threshold for who to ignore. Admission at this tier is built around orientation and preparation to do research. The thing is nothing you've described in your profile suggests a research background or orientation. Note, when I say research I mean "academic" research. To say you "contemplate" is not the same as, "I know how to do academic research". People who get into INSEAD have research experience usually in an RA capacity. The fact you can't articulate the distinction between OB and Strategy, which are very different fields, or explain why you might want to do behavioral strategy, which by the way, as far I can tell is not done at INSEAD, is a sign you're not up to date with the literature. Hence, that's why it'll be difficult for you to get considered. That is the situation. Your competition and where you stack. If you want to be more competitive, you're going to have get some research under you belt. The fact your verbal is poor, also limits your likelihood of getting into OB which emphasizes writing more than it does quant skills.

The thing about entrepreneurship research is that it is really chaotic. I'd say there's more noise than signal in the field, which also means there's a little niche for everybody who wants to get into it. The flip side is you can become pretty siloed in your area. This where the lens aspect becomes more important because when you're applying for a position, people screen you in part based on how you view entrepreneurship. For example, entrepreneurship theory and empirical studies (big data) in entrepreneurship often clash pretty hard, because they come from sort of different traditions. The latter is more econ focused while the former frequently works to deconstruct the economic assumptions about entrepreneurship. So what lens you take is going to affect where you'll get traction when you're on the job market. For schools, I'd say Stanford is actually kind of weird in terms of entrepreneurship, in that lots of different people in different departments with different styles work on the topic. Certainly feel free to apply, but make sure you know which dept. you want to get into. For example, you may do a bit better in their engineering school, rather than their business school, based on your background. Ironically enough, the MS&E STVP program would fit your profile better than say an application to the GSB's Econ or Political Econ group. (Though, the latter isn't a bad choice either) You can of course send an application to their OB group as well. But before you do, I'd read people's profiles to make sure you speak to each with the right words. MIT Sloan is the premier school for labor econ in the country and for some organizational studies in general. I imagine it's harder to get into than Stanford and certainly more prestigious. If Labor econ is your thing, give a shout to Cornell IRB as well. But to the further point, I'd just mention in your profile at some point you're retaking Linear Algebra. Quite honestly, your grades seem set at this point. Delaying a year is something you can do only if you're research gets published, but you don't need it to be considered. Unless your GRE really is terrible, I'd apply now and apply widely. Hit schools through T25 and maybe a few through T50. I imagine you'll get considered by all the places you apply to, but whether or not you get a fly-out is more iffy, especially for the T5 schools. But there's a reasonable chance a T10 school will take you, if you're careful about filling out your applications, and articulate well you're particular orientation toward research.

Besides the fact your linear algebra was a hiccup, you seem to be a good applicant. Probably not the strongest that'll come across people's desks but definitely solid. To your concerns, quite honestly very few people enter business/management PhD programs from "non-traditional" tracts. In fact, the number that come in with a conventional degree in business are practically the exception rather than the rule. (e.g. I have a physics degree, people in our school have degrees in soc, poli sci, engineering, and a number of our faculty studied CS as undergrads) So quite honestly, there are a bunch of applicants with your background and I actually know someone who's transferring from political science PhD to OB PhD in our school. So none of what you're describing about your background is all that unheard of. Basically, what you're describing is developmental econ + entrepreneurship is where you want to situate yourself. If you want to do entrepreneurship in developing economies, there's a large number of folks who do that sort of work too. Where you need to do a bit of self-reflection is do you want to approach the issue from econ, policy, or org theory perspectives. This is because many schools have different tracks for each of these perspectives. You can obviously sample across multiple departments, but at which port does your identity as a scholar call home? Even if you apply to all of them, this is a decision you have to make. As for schools, if you're set on an international approach, you can either apply to schools in Europe like INSEAD, LBS, One of the Oxbridge, LSE or HEC, or you can look at schools in the US that have a strong international program like Wharton, USC, but before any of that, you should ask yourself which discipline's lenses you want to use the most.

Professor X has a great post about this. If he's reading this, he should post he link to it. But some simple points. 1. An official list does not exist and if it does you should not trust it. 2. You should create your own ranking. But basically it boils down to going through the journals or books you like, identifying who's writing them tallying up where they seem to be located at, and from that you get a sense of the schools you like. It might take you a day or two, but the benefit is you don't just blindly shotgun a bunch of schools with generic applications and you get to say why you want to be there. Which makes you all the more shiny and chrome as you seek to enter the halls of academic Valhalla. (Fury Road was awesome)

Well, if you still have any contact with your faculty from back in the day try to reach out to them. Take them out for lunch or dinner, explain your situation, come prepared with a statement, transcript, work highlights that look academic, and anything else that looks like an academic accomplishment. Explain you want to apply to graduate school, why you do, what your interests are, and ask if they'd be willing to write you a letter. The material you bring is going to help them do that. They may say yes, they may say no, but there's a good chance they say yes if you come across as sincere and relatively likeable. But note you have to give them quite a bit of time. Send reminders 4 weeks before applications are due and 1 week before its due. I'd avoid professional references unless as a last resort, and never go to someone who doesn't have a PhD. That's just going to be a waste of the time for you, your letter writers, and anyone who reads the letter. (Assuming they even do that)

I once reviewed a conference paper about who gets published in HBR and the surprising finding was that it generally isn't faculty with all the top publications. Often times, the author who's published is from a low to mid tier school and their publications come out in lower level publications also. The explanation the authors used was that because HBR is practitioner oriented. This rules out large swathes of managerial research, which questions the value of managers and managerial practices. Second the editorial staff comes from publishing rather than straight up academia, so like the editors of People Magazine or The Atlantic, they're trying to interest and flatter their readership. Thus good writing trumps good research design. (Note many in the field would support this statement generally) Lastly, the editorial staff often taps people that they want to write for them. In other words, they read stuff they find amusing, thinks it could be a cute feature and solicits an article from them, which they then edit as they feel is appropriate. This is not to say HBR is fluff, a lot of the stuff they have reads like the research I wish I could write, only that it's a different sort of publication than most academics are trained to write. This is also why many schools don't take HBR as a serious publication for tenure submission. A fact that's just another pebble in the rubble of academic jealousies. Some academics are quite good writing HBR articles and regular academic articles, but it's a talent to be sure and they often take years to develop that skill. Having said that the schools that are good places to look into are those who publish a lot of case material. That includes HBS, but also places like INSEAD, Ivey, Darden, Boston College, at least off the top of my head. As for being a Prof. there's a chance you can get hired but realize your pool gets pretty small, pretty quick. You can be a teaching heavy professor and for many that's a lot of fun. But obviously many will you see as "not a real" academic. Again, academics are petty. As my old boss once told me, what we write is either stuff for tenure, stuff for MBAs, and stuff that moves us to get up in the morning. Ideally everything we write hits all three, but in reality, if we're lucky, it'll hit two, and all too often it doesn't hit even one.

I don't think a masters is going to do you any good unless you get to do some research in that program. Your GRE is low and it will have to go up to 330+ range to compensate for your lack of research. (Not seeing undergrad GPA, so I'm assuming it was not great). The other thing is what do you mean by field? I mean if you want to know more about a field you go to a library and read some of the books/journals they have on the field. If you want to be an academic you have to have an opinion about an area in the field. That is to say, what's your research question or at the very least what are your research interests? Moving from research interests to research questions is an important development for any scholar and it begins when you start filling out applications or think about doing so. So if you can say a bit about your research interests, that will strengthen your profile as well.