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Behavioral

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Posts posted by Behavioral

  1. i want to go to a b school afterwards...

    Surprised you didn't take the Booth offer :P

    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).

  2. 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).

  3. Eigen, just curious, but do you use Endnote at home? I've only been able to use licensed versions of it on campus computers, but the software is awfully pricey.

    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.

  4. Ha, fair enough, although I imagine your motivations also include a desire to do research and/or teach--not exclusively real-world avoidance (which is what this article seemed to insinuate, at least to me). :) I suppose I'm speaking from the perspective of having haunted the Government Affairs/Public Health forums, with far fewer people interested in academic careers long-term.

    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.

  5. I stand corrected. I do maintain, however, that pursuing a Ph.D is an extremely inefficient way of trying to get rich (in terms of cost/benefit).

    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.

  6. Man, this article misses the mark on so many levels. I've never gotten vibes from this forum that people are trying to avoid the "workaday world"... quite the contrary, we seem to love discussing our various motivations (almost ad nauseam). Also, focusing so heavily on the results survey is inane.

    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!

  7. 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".

  8. 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).

  9. I would extend that to "If you're looking to get paid well... ever".

    *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

  10. 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.

  11. Yeah, although I don't think I'd call Stanford GSB's political economics a business school in anything other than name, and it looks like he was cross-listed in the political science department. I also want to continue to stress that both Diermeier and Feddersen (as well as Austen-Smith for that matter) are really unique/exceptional scholars from whom I think one should avoid making any generalizable inferences. Some of the top formal theorists in the world have ended up at Stanford GSB polecon and Kellogg Decision Sciences. Outside that very, very small subset, I don't think you'd find many other examples of this.

    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.

  12. I think Diermeier and Feddersen are pretty far from typical, and weren't hired "straight out of their doctorate." Moreover, Kellogg's Decision Sciences is kind of an outlier amongst business schools in terms of willingness to hire formal political theorists.

    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.

  13. I agree with what @Behavioral is saying, but there are some schools that offer funded Masters programs in psych, and with your GPA (and hopefully high GRE) you'd probably be a good candidate for merit-based scholarships. If I hadn't gotten into a PhD program this round (my second year applying), going for my Masters first was my plan.

    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.

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

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