Behavioral

Yup. When I was applying to business schools, my GMAT was supposed to take 3-6 weeks to reach schools, but the ones I specified on test day received them in about 1 week or so.

Being a PhD student in a business school has its perqs -- mainly the ability to mooch off not only the free food the faculty and department get, but also the food the MBA students get

I did two -- one for economics (analytical paper on negotiations games) and one for psychology (gender differences in economic behavior). The two were related, so it wasn't much of a dampener since I only did one lit review: I just created a model for my econ thesis and ran experiments for my psyc thesis. And best of luck with the marketing professor.

Society for Consumer Psychology Las Vegas, NV February 16-18, 2011 All deadlines have passed

There's also a self-selection bias, too, involved with SLACs. SLACs have 'brand names', but they're definitely not at the same national level as big universities. Those who even consider applying to SLACs for undergrad are a pretty niche bunch, and from my experience (yes, purely anecdote) come from families whose parents (at least one) had attended one.

Luckily for me, there was a pretty strong movement towards academia.edu for my field stemming from a conference last year.

My undergrad advisor would get dozens of emails around Fall from students who've taken his class over the years asking to write a letter for them since they received an A in a class he taught.

Stanford's application fee was $125 for Marketing, too, but I didn't apply since I missed the deadline. Phew, since I got into my dream school and probably wouldn't have attended if accepted anyway. I used that money to buy myself a nice coat for this midwest winter.

He meant 5+ poster/paper presentations and 1-2 pubs. At the time of applications (only a few months after I graduated), I had 6 poster/paper presentations (all but one at national conferences), 2 conference proceedings/publications, and 1 paper in R&R at a top behavioral medicine journal. If you're applying to elite programs, my profile was pretty typical if not lacking. Especially for Social Psych, a lot of students take a few years off to be full-time RAs or lab techs to get more substantive research experience since admissions has been getting more and more competitive every year. I didn't apply to a Social Psych PhD program, but I did apply to and got admitted at Carnegie Mellon's Social and Decision Science PhD program, which is as competitive as a lot of the elite programs in other Experimental Psych programs. The people I met during flyouts typically had a publication or a few papers deeper in the review process at top journals (JPSP, Psych Review, Psych Science, etc.).

That's research. Being able to draw connections between papers and develop broad ideas and future research is all research is about, especially in CB. You didn't create an experiment or produce new data, but that's more logistical than fundamental. Being a good research requires being a good analyst, which means you need to be comfortable reading the literature (for hours and hours and hours and hours on end) until you can become quite compotent in a topic. Only then can you even begin to feel confident that your experiment will 1) work and 2) be unique/novel. Submit your thesis. I don't know how long you think it is, but after spending the first two months reading anywhere from 4-8 articles/day has made me insensitive to length of papers. Before a journal publisher formats a manuscript, a double-spaced 12-point font Word document is typically 40-50 pages before becoming a 13-14 page paper in JCR or JMR for example, which is the average length for a paper in either journal. I looked at one of my honors theses from undergrad and remember thinking how long it was -- it'd only be around 12 pages once formatted to a journal's format. So yeah -- submit your thesis. Your CC sounds expensive. California CC's are something like $26/semester unit, so that's why I mentioned them. If they're that expensive in PA, then yeah, skip them. I know it might be stretching you thin, but try to do research (even if on a volunteer basis) and solicit a letter from the professor that takes you in. Even if you're the top student in a class, the letter will be average at best since the professor may not be able to speak to your ability/potential to conduct research given your relationship is limited to the context of a classroom environment.

You co-authored a paper without doing research? How does that work out? Haha Anyway, having a thesis already places you ahead of a good amount of applicants at non-elite universities. At many of the schools I visited outside the Top 10, the majority of interviewees were career-changers with MBAs who didn't have any research experience at all. Anyway, talk about those research studies in your SoP and really position it such that it shows that you like and want to do research as an academic. That's something that I don't think you should even attempt to just put down as another component of a CV since the experience is so rich and needs proper development. And I hear you on the parents issue. Both my parents are immigrants and neither graduated high school, so even college was a completely foreign (no pun intended) concept to them. My mom still thinks my doctorate in business means I'm going to be a physician for business people. They were supportive of whatever I did, though, so there wasn't much friction in that respect. If your loans defer through part-time enrollment, why not just take 2 online classes at a community college or something? I did that to push my grace period out a little longer so I can just lump-pay all my loans. I was traveling for work a lot, so I couldn't do the standard class thing, so online was the perfect way to go for me.

I went to a fairly large R1 public school (~20,000 undergrads). I did something like this for a final project for an I/O Psychology course. The study was just an exercise to see how to formulate a research question, figure out how to collect and analyze data, and how to give a research talk. Overall, it sucked because most of the class was not interested in doing reseach or anything close to it.

Yup! And the only PoliSci people in Kellogg right now are both UofR grads (Diermeier and Feddersen), so they seem to be doing well for non-PoliSci placements relative to other schools because of the focus on game theory and analytical modeling.

Similarly, you can 'follow' academics on academia.edu and get updates when a new paper by that author is published

I'd briefly talk about it in my SOP. It kinda seems like you'd be padding your CV if you placed it there

Yup. I did consulting for the better half of a year between undergrad and grad--it's one of the main reasons why I don't complain about what I'm doing right now!

My old roommate from undergrad is at UofR for formal modeling/poli sci. He always told me now niche the program is, but he was one of Slantchev's students at UCSD, so he was definitely taboo-seeking.

Anytime. I research the hell out of any big decision I make, too. The other forum (and perhaps the one most appropriate for this discussion) is http://www.urch.com/...s/phd-business/ I may have mentioned it in the other forum, and if I didn't, I don't know how it slipped my mind. I post there quite a bit, too, and the board gets a decent amount of traffic. Lastly, even at my school where our stipend is pretty generous, it's not discouraged to take out loans just so people can 'enjoy themselves' more. The average (heck, even the minima of salaries in 2011) salary for a PhD in marketing completely trumps the average MBA salary even at top schools (mean and median starting assistant professor salaries are around $130,000/year [and this is collapsing across all universities, and not just R1]; the absolute minima last year was $70,000/year, which is definitely not a bad chunk of change considering you don't pay for tuition; check out the salary reports on AACSB and docsig.org for more stats). If paying back non-federal loans means you have to take out minimal graduate student loans, then that might be a more attractive alternative than pushing back your career X years, taking on debt for a Masters, and the opportunity cost of not making professor salary. Regardless, though, it's ultimately your decision. You know your situation better than I ever will, but I just see going for a Masters a waste when you know a PhD is your career goal; most people who have MBAs and are now in PhD programs figured out they liked research after the fact.

Is that you, Mitch?!?!

You and I have talked on the other grad school forum--I got by under a different psuedonym there. Your profile (given solid 700+ GMAT and well-constructed statements of purpose) should get you into T50 and even some marginal T25/T30 depending on what research you're interested in. For example, if you're really into JDM, Florida or Colorado would be great fits. If you get your current paper published or at least well into the review process (at least R&R), then that'll play in your favor as well. Regarding the international student thing: as a business school, yeah, internationals completely outnumber Americans. In marketing departments as a whole, it seems pretty balanced, and even skewing a bit towards Americans. In CB only? There are a lot more Americans than internationals. The reason why business schools have a lot of internationals is due to the more quantitative tracks (Finance, Econ, Strategy, Quant Marketing, MIS etc.) attracting Chinese/Indian applicants. The behaviorally-oriented ones (CB and OB) attract a larger slew of American (both US and lots from Canada) applicants, partly the reason because the US really promotes psychology more than just about any other country in the world. This, along with other factors, seems to create this weird distribution; but I don't think there's a bias against Americans--it's just an artifact from the types of applicants for different programs. Lastly, depending on what your monthly payment is for your loans, you might be able to still pay it off while in school without taking more loans. Right now, I'm living in a 1BR/1BA apartment and am paying a mortgage on a house my mom's living in on the other side of the country with just my fellowship. Nominally, I have a pretty large stipend, but I live in a pretty expensive area (Evanston/Chicago); other schools with much lower costs of living give nominally smaller stipends, but adjusted for buying-power, you make more than I do here. Some schools are completely nuts and give their students LOTS of money in a relatively cheap city (Rice University and Washington University in St. Louis fund all their students at a high level in comparison to their city.). BSchool stipends are among (if not the) the highest in all of academia, so if married couples with children can scrape by on a Psychology PhD stipend, then I'm pretty sure you'd be able to, too, on a business school stipend.

All my professors (both undergrad and now in my doctoral program) said it's not a make or break. All else equal, the one that had a broader pedigree will probably win out, but there's nothing inherently wrong with academic inbreeding as long as your program is respected and there's good research being done there. UNC will be fine -- plus I know of a good amount of students doing work at Duke and NCSU (I did an REU in the Econ department there a few summers back), so being in the RTP is one of the academic havens in the US (some others being SF Bay Area [stanford, Berkeley], LA [CalTech, UCLA, USC], Chicago [Northwestern, Chicago], NYC [Columbia, NYU], and Boston [Harvard, MIT]). At the end of admissions, if you're most comfortabble with UNC, I don't think anyone will hold that against you. Talk to your professors about it, too, if you still have qualms about it.

And those are some expensive fees. $1300+ for 11 schools? I applied to 11 programs last year, and think I was right around the $1000 mark taking into account everything you mentioned. Some schools were pretty bad in terms of application fee (I think Cornell was like $125), but a lot of the public schools I applied to were like $50-$60. Also, some Psych programs don't pay for your flight out, and some only cover a portion/fixed amount of the flight, so take that into account.

Who are you applying under at U of O? Back when Ellen Peters was still there, I considered applying under Slovic et al so I could collaborate with the researchers at DRI.

At the last marketing conference I went to (ACR), it was extremely lax, especially given that it's 1) a business conference and 2) there were a lot of industry vendors and firms looking to recruit there. There was ample alcohol served throughout the conference for various sessions, receptions, and luncheons.

What ktel said. I find the Tea Party completely nonsensical and find the OWS to be too vague. I'm for the restructuring of certain financial institution to prevent gross misconduct by bankers and corporate execs, but too many people in the OWS right now are advocating for explicit re-distribution of wealth, which I am not for one bit. Capitalism has some blatantly obvious problems, but so does socialism in the way it's governed in modern (and limited) society. And just because you are passionate about a topic doesn't mean you can't argue with a more neutral voice and using such sweeping generalizations (anti-OWS => pro-Tea Party? really?). I commend people who use their personal beliefs to advance the knowledge and opinion of others, but only when it doesn't sound so accusatory.