elsenot

I disagree. For very best schools your verbal GRE will be off putting for CB. Try and get above 95th percentile. Research experience would only matter if it leads to a good letter from someone they trust.

You learned not to lie which is a good thing. Given you did best thing now is to decline now quickly. Doubt anyone will remember.

The school cannot officially ask you to say yes or no before April 15. It could be that the faculty are not aware of the rule. Or perhaps the school is not in the US. Often though these apparent breaches are just misunderstandings.

Unless a school requires you to submit separately a SOP and PS I do not think that you need to change tactics or the basic framework of the document on the basis of how it is named.

Most advisers will be very humane about this. Your real constraints are going to be the timing of your required classes in the first and second years. Even then, I can't imagine any issues about you leaving to join your spouse outside of term time, as long as you work your adviser to make sure that you are productive on your RA. I think though you will need to mentally commit to spending term time at your university during your third and fourth years because otherwise I think it is too easy to get lost and not make progress on research.

What matters is one question which is "Where do you rate the student among the students you have taught or advised" (or some variation of that). You need to get an "exceptional"/top 5%/top 2% rating on that on whatever scale the school uses. Online applications systems now force professors to answer that question so they can't be lazy and get their assistant to upload their LOR. The "ranking" question matters as a screening device. Then all that matters it the content of the LOR.

I think the GRE score will be below the cutoff for many of the top schools. One thing to think about is whether the Wharton professor knew your GRE scores when they were nice to you? I think though that you may have some success in 10-25. I would personally not apply to backup schools but redo your GRE and perhaps apply again next year if you don't get in.

I don't think there would be bias against the location of the school, though you would need to make sure you had well-known letter writers and signal strenuously that you would do well in a US MBA classroom.

Please don't cut your hair.

In general you would need to: a) Be prepared to do the work as a volunteer. Funding for such a position (where you are not a student or a post-doc) would be hard to manage in most university accounting systems, unless you are part of a formal "predoc" program. b) Be prepared to do something quite manual. You don't have the skills yet to contribute to the more technical sides of the work. You might have the skills to do a literature review, but that would be risky for the professor involved as literature reviews are hard to do well and they may have to redo your work. In general, volunteering to collect data (whether it be manually or through a script) is most likely to get you a position. c) Focus on making it clear that you would be an asset from the very beginning - you don't want to come across as someone who pesters people.

It is perfectly fine to not go on a campus visit if you are accepted. There will be no negative consequences. If you have not been accepted to a university then not attending a campus visit would have the same negative consequences as not making time for a job interview for any job you wanted to pursue.

I would drop the letter from the supervisor and try and find two more academic letter writers. I might also be wary about multi-methods research in the SOP. That is great in practice but most academic research tends to follow one methodological paradigm and you want to signal you understand that.

Leave it off. I would not take it as a signal of anything apart from the person being insecure about their intellectual ability. You don't have to have that high an IQ to get into Mensa so it is not a signal of intellect.

I think a nice way of checking whether my assertions are correct is looking at the most recent crop of Assistant Professors who got tenured (and denied tenure) in your chosen field. Work out how many of them have blogs.

I suspect this thread will disappear but I realized I should have more assertive language. 1) Your aim before tenure (whether as a PhD student or as untenured faculty) is to get 10 famous academics at schools with an impressive letterhead to write letters saying that you are great. This will be a function of your publication record and perhaps impressions they have of you from meeting you at conferences. 2) Writing a blog on academic matters (rather than something you are doing for fun) does not help in the slightest with 1). 2) After you get tenure, then write a blog. At that point you can worry about impressing a broader set of people.

You need letters from your current Professors saying that you are doing exceptionally well in your current courses. Just having letters from undergrad or masters professors would make an admissions committee suspicious that the reason you want to switch is that you are not doing very well in your current PhD program. Does your school have a business school? If so go and chat with Marketing Professors there and ask if they will be on your committee and help you go on the marketing job market. No need to switch programs then.

The place the professors got their phds from does not matter so much. What matters is their letterhead now. Choose the one with the best letterhead.

Do not contact faculty if your reason for doing so is you think it will influence your application positively. It will not.

I would avoid mentioning anything that has got less than 8000 cites on Google Scholar.

1) I would mention a Professor you would like to work with. As long as they actually are still actively at the institution. 2) I think the list below is too long. It also may lead you to sound glib. Instead I would focus on what kind of research you want to do and why that institution is a good match for that type of research. Specificity is good if you can show that you actually know what an academic research question might look like. 1. How you decided to go for a PhD in that particular discipline. I wouldn't talk about that. 2. Why you choose that discipline over others (if no experience in that field) Again, I wouldn't talk about that. 3. Why you choose that school (professors, location, ranking, facilities, mission statement) You are choosing the school because of the close match between the Professors' research interests and yours and the training they give you. No other reason. 4. Which professors you wish to work for (if you are going to a school for 1 professor, you better make it clear you want to work with him/her) This is good but make sure they are actually at the school and active. Don't talk about Professors who have left. 5. Highlight particularly important or unusual accomplishments that adcoms might want to remember or might not understand too well If adcoms don't understand the accomplishment chances are it is not that relevant. Only exceptions are country-specific honors which you should translate to a ranking. 6. What general type of research you are considering. Be very specific here. Signal you know what research is. 7. Your expectations during the program. Don't talk about this. 8. Your career expectations after the program. Don't talk about this. The presumption is you want to be a Professor doing research. 9. Any unusual blips on your otherwise beautiful resume (though be careful how much time you try to excuse your horrible undergrad GPA) Excuses are rarely convincing. 10. Anything you might have done to prepare for the career choice. If you have worked with Professors on research projects emphasize this. If you have taken extra math courses mention this. Otherwise most stuff is irrelevant. 11. Anything in particular that you feel the adcoms should know that would make you stand out.

I woudn't mention your weaknesses explicitly. Just dwell on why you have a burning desire to do academic research at that school.

You need to do the TOEFL test. There is a discrepancy between not wanting to do a redundant test and wanting to do a PhD program. The first two years of a PhD program are full of redundant tests.

I would redo the GRE and try and score more highly on the verbal. Even if the test is changing next week. Maybe you will do better on the next version. I think it would be a bit of a problem and would count against you, and my guess is that it is easily improvable. Given the potential difference in ultimate training and placement that you would get from doing better on it, a bit more effort is worth it.

Rankings are reasonably meaningless. Which ones are you using? A school could easily jump from 10 to 25 depending which one you used. In particular, you do not want to use MBA rankings or research rankings which do not adequately control for size. I would instead look at what proportion of the Professors are either involved editorially in the major journals, or are publishing regularly in journals like Mkt Sci, JMR, JCR etc. That would be a more reliable guide as to "research quality". Which school wins on that count?