Behavioral

Finance programs are getting more and more difficult to get into; this has translated to increased expectations in terms of math prep going in. I'm not sure about Kansas, but the bigger name-brand b-schools (like WashU) will attract pools of applicants that have had the equivalent of real analysis+.

Most of those schools do not offer terminal master's degrees in clinical psychology.

I get 8 hours of battery life from my stock battery after 150 full cycles (~9 months). I hardly ever use it when it's not plugged in, though, but 8 hours is plenty for what I do.

star2014, you're a Kellogg ... PhD? Anyway, same here. I'm finishing up my first year and I lived in Evanston. It's a great city, but so is Chicago and its many neighborhoods.

Surprised you didn't take the Booth offer As long as you make your research relevant and applicable to marketing/consumer behavior or management/organizational behavior, you'll be fine. A very recent example of a top placement from Psychology -> top business school is Kristin Laurin from Waterloo. She published with Aaron Kay and Graianne Fitzsimmons (both at Duke Fuqua School of Business with Kay only recently moving there from Waterloo Psychology) on topics that translated well into organizations (justice, inequality, system justification, etc.). The more typical route, though, is Psych graduates doing a 1-2 year post-doc at a business school (something like Florida Warrington's PDB program) then going to a business professorship (one example is Hal Hershfield who went from Stanford Psychology -> Kellogg Management and Organizations -> NYU Stern Marketing). The transition to a business professorship is a bit tougher for non-business academics (compared to those graduating with PhDs at business schools already), but it's quickly becoming more and more common, which is good for the field in developing more theory (though possibly losing out on applicability and managerial implications).

You're imbuing a negative connotation to the word when the word (alternate, alternative) is the best word to describe these other careers. It's not that getting a TT job is supposed to be best, but it seems to be the most common route people expect to take when going into a PhD (cross-discipline differences aside with just looking at the academe as a whole).

Either works. The more relevant the research to your interests, the better--but some experience is better than no experience, so don't overlook any opportunity to do paid work.

I know I'm not Eigen, but I use EndNote mainly because my program provides us with a site-license for the laptops we received from our department. If it weren't for that price issue, I'd personally go with Mendeley.

At top schools, we don't get to actually teach any MBA courses, so we're always the ones who just TA/grade all the courses. At schools where some senior PhD students teach, MBA students will TA for other MBA courses.

Of course. I had the intentions of eventually applying to PhD programs at some point or another (I was involved in a bevvy of research as an undergrad, did two honors theses, and took some doctoral seminars), but wanted to make some money post-grad first--maybe 3 years or so. It was only after 5 or so months that I realized I hated my job and wanted back in a school ASAP. My letter writers weren't the happiest since they asked me earlier that year if they should start preparing their references for me, but I told them they had 2+ years before they should start drafting--they ended up each having maybe 3 weeks before the first deadline came up! Anyway, I love research. I also simultaneously hate my non-research job options (double majored in joint math/econ and psychology--there really isn't too much outside of business, analytics, and programming that I can do that doesn't involve research). It's a win-win with me going back to school in a discipline with high starting academic salaries.

#1 factor into getting into a (good) MBA program is work experience. Any decent school will require 3-4+ years to be admitted (except for some very exceptional cases coming straight out of undergrad or for those with absolutely terrific work/internship experience).

True that. I'm at a top business school and surrounded by people who will ultimately be in school for two years for a degree that will net them as much (and for many, more) money as I would doing a job that is (in my opinion) still easier than doing top-tier research (i.e., publishing only in A-level journals). That said, however, I worked in consulting for a short while and figured it definitely wasn't for me--even with the nice little salary I earned and all the traveling I did. The fact that I can do what I love (academic research) and get paid a decent amount is the best of both worlds.

I don't know about you, but I'm definitely avoiding the workaday world. I had my taste of management consulting and hated it--bring on the academia!

I did just about everything you could as an undergrad (involved in research, double majored, double minored, and took several doctoral seminars) and besides the PhD seminars and my theses, my undergrad did very little to prepare me for graduate school. The mere fact that so far (2+ years after graduating) that I'm the only person from my Psychology honors cohort in a PhD program says a lot about my program's cohort effect, even though I went to a top-20 school for Psychology that many of its students felt were "too fast-paced" and "too tough".

I decided to apply around mid-November before even having taken the GMAT (business PhD programs prefer the GMAT over the GRE) and missed out on some key deadlines to some of the schools I would have liked to apply to. It's hard to say if I would have chosen any of them over my current program (it was my top choice among the schools I met deadlines for), but other peripheral features besides just school fit/quality would have come into play (e.g., me choosing Stanford over Northwestern for climate's sake).