BrazilianPhD

You probably have more than enough courses for the application, assuming you got good grades. I doubt they will really take such a detailed look at your coursework, a few more courses shouldn't make a difference. Now, it's nearly impossible to know what is going to be necessary or not. It depends a lot on your research and your advisor. A PhD is very narrow, it's not about knowing a wide range of things. Probably you won't really use 90% of the things you listed. I suggest thinking about the other parts of your application, like research experience and networking with professors to have many professors willing to write you a strong letter of recommendation. And maybe learning a little about marketing, especially the research related to your quantitative marketing interests.

Did you check the job placement of each program? I saw people from Erasmus, HEC Paris and Bocconi getting jobs in academia, so it's certainly a possibility for all of them. But, since you applied to those programs, you probably should have more information about them than I do. See what program has a job placement that is closer to your goal, and don't forget about other criteria like the advisor.

Your profile seems very good. I think the main challenge you will have is to convince people that you're really a match for CB. After all, a lot of things in your profile seem to scream Quant (Econ, Q170, R). So, be careful about that, you probably need to emphasize the parts that are more closely related to CB. The research experience and the letters of recommendation can play a big role. If CB professors with a good reputation say you're a great applicant for CB, that should carry a lot of weight. More psych courses are good, as it helps to communicate your positioning as a CB applicant.

1) Very hard to know without knowing your research interests. And probably only those who are close to your interests can really provide a good answer. My recommendation is to check papers related to your research interests, to see what type of math seems to be involved. 2) A specific research question is too narrow, in my opinion. I think more in terms of concepts, methods, theories. Something that you can build a career upon, a series of papers, something you want to be an expert. You won't be an expert on a specific research question, you need more than that. But you also can't be an expert on the whole area of quant marketing or the whole area of ML, for example, as that would be too much. After that, you can provide some more specific examples, like research questions that you would like to address. For example, I think I basically said that virtually anything related to the marketing-finance interface would interest me. During my master's, I researched how handling customer complaints affects firm profitability, for example. I did provide some examples like that, but I don't remember exactly what I said. 3) I don't know how much things have changed since I applied. The pandemic had an impact, which was different for different universities. When I applied, more than 5 years ago, the average number seemed to be around 15. I applied to 20, but that was higher than usual. After the pandemic, I saw people applying to 25 schools, but I think it's too much.

I'm not in that field, but the ranking we use the most for business PhDs is the UTD: https://jsom.utdallas.edu/the-utd-top-100-business-school-research-rankings/ You can select the journals that are related to your field and then get the rank for those journals. Maybe there is some other ranking more specific to your field, I don't know. But finding the right schools is usually hard work indeed. And many times it's not about finding the right program, but the right advisor. A good program can have some terrible advisors. And some top researchers can work for lesser known universities where they can have more power, influence, and freedom. It took me months to get my list of schools to apply.

I don't see anything that makes me think that top 20 is a good idea. Top 20 is exceptionally competitive, we don't recommend focusing on top 20 even for people with a much stronger profile than yours. Also, this looks like the profile of someone applying for something in industry, not for a PhD. There are too many things that usually are not very relevant for PhDs, like being a marketing & sales manager, unicorns, or being part of sports teams. This is interesting for MBA applications, for example, not PhD. A PhD is often very narrow, so just stating broad interest areas doesn't really add much. You mentioned research, but without many details. I don't even know if this is academic research, or the type of research people do in corporations. If this is academic research, we certainly would expect to see much more details, like conference presentations, papers published, something like that. For Quant Marketing, probably people want to know how good you are at coding, which statistical software you use, and whether you have a strong background in mathematics, statistics, machine learning, that kind of thing. You also didn't mention the strength of your letters of recommendation, another thing that can make a difference. Nobody can really make a list of school to apply, as that is usually very specific for the profile of each applicant. But you really need to better define your research interests in order to look for the right schools for you. Sometimes, the right school can be very unrelated to rank, for example. But research fit is the #1 factor to choose a university, and it's impossible to know the fit based on the broad interests you listed. Right now, I'd say that you are far from ready to apply for a PhD. The general feeling is that you still have the mindset of someone from industry and MBA, and then that you don't really understand what you're getting into. And, given your career in industry, many schools may believe it's better for you to stay in industry instead of switching to academia. You need to think of a convincing answer to explain why you would give up on the type of career you have been following.

I think it's good enough for acceptance. But of course there is no guarantee. You being waitlisted shows your profile is good. 2020 was a bad year, lots of universities were forced to change plans, freeze hiring, etc., due to the pandemic. Even those who could get new people often decided to wait to be sure about the future, or reduce the number of students accepted. I didn't email any professor, and I remember some schools explicitly advising against that. It is a must in other fields, but not in marketing. This doesn't seem to be strong enough. You tell yo don't want advertising, but you don't tell what topic you want and why. You mentioned applying to Marketing Strategy, but at least when I applied a lot of schools made me choose between Quant and CB even though I'm mainly a Marketing Strategy guy. So, I think you need to better position yourself because it's not clear what is your approach here. I don't know what you mean by theoretical, but usually marketing strategy is considered the least theoretical among the research tracks for marketing. So, saying that makes me think marketing strategy can be a bad match for your goals. No. My undergrad GPA was crap, for example. Because my university's grading system is very harsh. Nobody seemed to care. No. In marketing, I'd say it's rare to have someone with a publication. And, if they have a publication, it's probably a low level journal. So, it's nice if you have a publication, but it's far from being a deal breaker. I don't think it's worth it. It can show you persisted, just like it can show that you were widely rejected before. And I don't think this actually proves you're in this for long haul. It may be some evidence, but a much better evidence is a well-known professor saying that in the LoR. By the way, we don't check the posts here often anymore since there is barely anything new. It may be better to send a direct message to some users in the field that helped people in the past, telling them about a post about a profile evaluation.

It's not really my thing, but both alternatives are possible. I'd say that lab experiments are the standard, but you're more and more expected to be able to do field experiments too. CB research typically includes multiple studies, so doing a mix of lab experiments and field experiments can benefit you, make your paper stronger. I'd recommend reading recent papers from journals like JCR to see how people conduct experiments.

Sure. For example, this journal is more behavioral, including theoretical papers and papers based on experiments (which tend to me much easier on the math side, although not on the theoretical side). However, I think having strong math skills is expected for accounting PhDs regardless of the area. I know an accounting PhD student here who was forced to leave the program because they were not able to handle the coursework related to math.

Hi Tod. That's great, congratulations! Let me know if I can be of further help down the road. Right now, it's time to celebrate.

Quant/Strategy, not CB. Not R1, but I was really focusing more on a balanced school. I have a lot of work experience and teaching experience (and I don't want to waste or stop doing that), so many R1 universities are not really a great match for me. And the university is also a great match on a more personal side, my own personal interests and goals for life. Like you said, the important thing is to do something that makes us happy. Maybe I could get into an R1 if I waited another year, but it didn't make sense to me.

Congratulations! Just like you, I got help here from the beginning, and I accepted a job offer recently. It's great to see other people in this hard but very special journey.

I don't think there should be another platform. Either you are missing something or they really messed up. By the way, I guess you meant University of North Texas, right? Don't get the university name wrong in your application.

Well, the strategy you mentioned now sounds a lot closer to my own strategy: "developing my own ideas and conducting my own research" and "come up with relevant research ideas to show that I can also think like a researcher." If you think like a researcher, you should be able to talk in terms of research questions, like I recommended. If you think like a researcher, you should pay attention to laboratories and things that matter to get research done, like I recommended. If you think like a researcher, you don't speak in generic terms, you are very precise about what you want to accomplish. The only thing is that, if you have relevant research ideas, but the school can't help you with those ideas (because they don't have a good advisor, the right resources, etc.), then your ideas are still useless for the school. You can think like a researcher, but that doesn't mean you are the researcher that the school wants. My overall approach is based on being good match. So, I try to explain what is my purpose (in research, career, life, etc.) and why the school is a great fit for my purpose. Anything the helps to show we're a good match for each other. So, I don't know enough about you to give you a specific answer. But, if I didn't have industry experience, I would use any kind of experience or knowledge that can help to show a good match. Even with industry experience, I use anything that can help to show a good match. Regardless of having industry experience or not, we make decisions all the time. We see people making decisions all the time. We are discussing how to decide a strategy for application right now. So, no industry experience doesn't mean no exposure to the challenges of decision-making. Regardless of having industry experience or not, we are consumers and were are exposed to marketing actions all the time. It's impossible to be really unaware of marketing. Most PhDs don't have industry experience, and they are still getting new ideas all the time. They are still able to see the problems, and be motivated to solve them. Having no industry experience is no excuse to not have a clear purpose. Especially for CB, the problems of the real world are not typically the concern. CB researchers are very theoretical, a lot of what they do is based on gaps in the literature, not problems faced by professionals in industry. Things are changing, CB is becoming more worried about industry, but it still the research track in marketing that is most distant from industry. If you were really focused on industry experience or problems of the real world in marketing, I would not recommend CB. Let me try to give you even another example of the things I might do in your place. Maybe I saw Wikipedia constantly begging for donations, and then I became curious about the customer behavior when customers see something like that. How do they decide if they would donate or not? If they decide to donate, how do they decide the amount? What is the psychological phenomenon that drives people to donate to Wikipedia? Do they do that because they are thankful for all the help Wikipedia provided? Do they do that because they are afraid of losing Wikipedia? Do they do that to have a feeling that they are doing something good? What experiments I could run to investigate that? What scales would I use? How would I control for all the alternative explanations? I'm sure I could get several research proposals just based on something small like this. No industry experience necessary for that, and I'm not even a CB person. Then, I could explain my motivation to research something like that, as someone who grew up poor in a third world country, living in a small city that didn't even have a library. So, I would have a personal motivation to help organizations like Wikipedia. And then maybe the professor is an expert on donations. And maybe the university has a laboratory where I can create simulated versions of Wikipedia, manipulating how Wikipedia asks for donations. And maybe the university is where one of the founders of Wikipedia was a PhD student. And maybe the university is located in a city with a strong community of Brazilians like me. And maybe the history of job placement looks perfect for someone like me, who is more into a balanced type of school instead of R1 universities. So on and so forth. Like I said, anything that helps to show I'm a good fit. I keep piling them up. It can be related to work experience, research experience, personal experience. It can be something I read. It can be something that happened with someone I know. It can be a hobby. This is just a quick example that I created since your research interests and methodologies are so different from mine. But it should give you an idea about how I market myself. And in my opinion it is much more convincing than saying you want to do research, even though that's not my type of thing. You should be able to come up with something much better. I'm now in my last year, and I followed the same strategy while applying for jobs. I got a job at a university, and a brief experience I had in another field 20 years ago was much more critical to get a job than my industry experience in marketing. We are marketers. We are expected to know about this. How to sell an idea? What are the needs and wants of our customers? How do schools make a decision? What's my segmentation strategy? How am I positioning myself to have a competitive advantage, and stay ahead of other applicants? For example, when you say you are young. Is that what schools want? Is that going to give you a competitive advantage? If not, that's not a good selling point for your application. I know I'm repeating myself over and over again at this point, but it's all about giving the schools convincing reasons to why they should accept you, and not one of the other hundred applicants they have in line. As long as your strategy leads to that, I think it's great.

In that case, I would go back to the big picture. In the end, schools are asking the question: "why should I extend an offer to you instead of another applicant?" Research fit tends to be a big part of that. Wanting to do research is a given, nobody should apply to do a PhD if they don't want to do research. If you say you don't know about marketing and the world because you're young, schools probably will conclude that you're then too young to do a PhD because you don't know yet what you want to do. They may conclude you're not ready for a PhD, even if you love research. Be careful about that. If you don't know now, it's not easy to believe that you will know after you get accepted. It's not like the school can make you turn 30 years old and make you understand marketing like magic. My coursework barely included marketing, I can't say the program taught me much about marketing. If you get accepted and the professor asks you to present a list of research proposals, what are you going to do if you don't even know your research interests? A PhD is not like undergrad or masters, where professors tell you what to do. My advisor approved and advised me on my research proposals, but I had to think of them first. I had to make a list with many research proposals, he shot down most of them, and then I worked on the proposals that survived. So, with your answer, you're giving reasons for the school to not accept you. Because you're almost saying you're not ready for it because you're too young. Then you need to find something else that would be compelling argument in your favor, and not against you. If you haven't done so yet, I recommend talking to the professors who are going to write your recommendations, to develop an application strategy. Find a good answer to give when schools ask "why should we accept you and not someone else?" You want to do research, but that's also the case for the other applicants, so that can't be the answer.