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).

*Points to various Social Psychology PhDs in business schools* Heck, even in just my own department there are 7 marketing professors with PhDs in Social Psychology. And the b-school pay (and subsequent opportunities for consulting) is pretty generous relative to other academic disciplines: http://docsig.org/index.php/who-went-were/who-went-where-and-salary-surveys

I use EndNote and have different folders for my bib files, which I use for my different programs of research. I can just select all the citations from one of my folders and use "Copy Formatted" to create a document in Lyx (I'm not as hardcore as you true LaTeX nerds!) instead of having one giant bib file that doesn't differentiate between my Paper A and Paper B citations.

Pretty sure GMAT is pretty much preferred by all business schools--even the ones that do take either.

All the guys (including me) in my department love Mad Men--but then again, look at our department.

Ah. My bad, then. I've just bumped into some of these professors while attending guest talks and thought MEDS was at least a bit representative of the discipline in decision sciences. I guess Kellogg and SGSB are just frank outliers.

I don't know much of the trend across business schools, but Diermeier did get his first academic job (1994-; PhD in 1995) at Stanford GSB (with courtesy appointment at the Stanford Poli Sci department) before moving to Kellogg several years later.

Agreed. It's a waste of time if you think it'll directly aid you in career development. It's a nice exercise, but ultimately should be reserved for when you have time to spend on other activities (i.e., post-tenure).

But if a candidate can get into a funded Masters, I'd argue that they would also be competitive for funded RA positions. If one isn't balancing their time and energy between research and classes, I'd imagine the one not in school would get more quality research done given the same amount of work hours. I really only recommend a Masters to someone with a low undergraduate GPA or to someone coming into psychology from another discipline that needs coursework under their belt. The level of mentorship should be the same as you'd be working closely with 1 or a small group of professors in the lab you get hired in.

I'd say an RA would be ideal. Your undergrad GPA would make the Masters an expensive way to gain research experience, and the coursework would likely not transfer over to a future PhD. And I was 23 when I was accepted to PhD programs, though I started on research during my Sophomore year of college and had success with poster/paper presentations and had an R&R at the time.

How much isn't the best question to ask. Demonstrated research ability is contingent on both quantity and quality--if your position is only you helping collect and analyze data, then I'm reluctant to say that it will be enough to get into a program as competitive as Cornell's PhD program (though this experience will likely be enough to get you into other less competitive programs). Top-tier PhD programs in Social Psychology usually admit people with excellent research experience (many with either publications in major academic journals; most seem to have at least a few poster presentations at national conferences; just about all have at least two+ years of research experience, with many of them actually having full-time positions as lab/research assistants). If you browse through a lot of the threads on this forum, you'll see profiles of people who got shut out of all the schools they applied to (some applied to 10+) that had multiple publications, Masters degrees, 5+ years of research experience, etc. If you set your sights and aspirations to something other than a Top-20 Social Psych PhD program (with more heated competition with applicants wanting an Ivy pedigree), then all this research may not be necessary--however, if you do want a strong shot at an academic job post-doctorate, you should be working towards the long run, getting quality research experience, and deferring graduate studies until you can get into a strong and reputable program. Graduate admissions is already competitive enough, but the academic job market seems to be just as (if not more) competitive after you get your PhD.