haiwanglei

Hi dreamer33, I understand your frustration and I will try my best to answer your questions. First thing first, are you on the CB or Quant? The following responses are based on my experience as a quant candidate. No one really know what is the most important criterion in Marketing Phd application. It varies by schools. It does vary by school. But I guess there are three common factors to get into the top schools: 1) GPA (above 3.5+) and GRE/GMAT (above 90%) . 2) A strong plus if your LORs are from professors who are known by the admission committee. 3) It is hard to tell whether research experience and work experience is important or not. Relevance is the king! There is no single recipe because everyone is different. I am working in the industry for a few years and have been wanting to get into academia for a long time. It seems that work experience is not critical in the PhD application since a lot of admitted students are straight out of school. However, they might have very cool research experience during their undergrad or master's education. I am very lucky to make it into a top program probably because of my unique background in machine learning. Previously, I have some rigorous training in both econometrics and statistics. Yet, I don't know what the committee likes about me. I don't have any academic connection with marketing programs. Although I got interviews from two top5 programs, I was rejected by all the other lower-ranked schools I applied. I don't think I am overqualified for schools in the range of top10-20 but they didn't even give me an interview. That said, rejections don't mean anything. If you have solid background and still want an academic life, you should hope for the best and reapply next year.