<p>I'm currently a student at a top 15-20 MBA program who is concurrently pursuing a joint degree in public policy in the same schools top 10 public policy program. Though I was only and average student as an undergrad (I studied the subject my parents chose for me, not the one I was interested in), now that I am in grad school I have been a very good student (near 4.0 GPA for the MBA, >3.8 for the MPP so far). Infact, I have been so captivated by the subject of management, particularly organizational behavior, and decision science/strategy, that I am now considering pusuing a Ph.d.</p>
<p>So I have about a year and a half left to complete both masters, and in that year I would like to do whatever I can to maximize my chances of gaining admissions to a top management Ph.d program (defined as top 20). I'm looking for advice on what I should be doing. So far here's what I have:</p>
<p>1) Minimize student loan debt. </p>
<p>Status: Done. Scholarships, a research assistanceship in the policy school, savings, and the proceeds from two management consulting internships will keep total debt to under 30K.</p>
<p>2) Get the best grades possible.</p>
<p>Status: So far so good. See above.</p>
<p>3) High GMAT and/or GRE.</p>
<p>Status: In good shape here. GMAT well over 700. GRE quant may need work - currently 770. Total GRE score is good.</p>
<p>Here's what I'm thinking I need to work on:</p>
<p>1) Get some kid of research experience.</p>
<p>Status: I have a research assistantship next year. What else should I be doing? Is it necessary to have publications to your name to get into a good Ph.d program? Does anyone have any experience as to how to accomplish this?</p>
<p>2) Fix my undergrad GPA.</p>
<p>Status: Not sure there is anything I can do here. I have about a 2.95 in engineering from a top 5 engineering school. Is it possible to improve this at all seven years removed from UG? Will it matter?</p>
<p>Other lingering questions:</p>
<p>What are the top Ph.d programs for organizational behavior and/or decision science? I assume that management Ph.d rankings track pretty closely with MBA rankings.</p>
<p>Is work experience, specifically in management consulting, benefitial for a Ph.d applicant? If I get a fulltime offer after this summer would it be benefitial (other than from a financial standpoint) to spend a year or two at a decent management consulting firm (not M/B/B, but not that far removed)?</p>
<p>Does age matter for Ph.d admissions? I would be 31-33 (depending if I work for a couple of years first) at the time of matriculations.</p>
<p>If anyone has any answers or advice for me it would be much appreciated.</p>
<p>Well, be careful that you’re pursuing a PhD in management for the right reasons. Being an academic of management is completely different from being a practitioner: in fact, so much so that I would argue that having an MBA may actually be a minus, because it provides a completely misleading view of what management academia really is. Suffice it to say that what you will be doing in a PhD program will have almost no connection to practitioner’s work, especially in the two fields you mentioned: organizational behavior and strategy, so much so that many PhD students, and even some faculty, will joke about how useless they are to the real world. </p>
<p>If what you are interested in is the practical implementations of strategy or OB, then I would very strongly suggest that you work for a consulting firm. You should enter a management PhD program only because you are seriously considering becoming a business school professor. Any other reason, and you would just be wasting your time. </p>
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<p>It’s pretty darn hard to get academic publications in the management literature before you start a PhD program. Heck, there are people who have not only finished their PhD’s but have been assistant professors at Harvard Business School for several years who still don’t have any academic publications. The turnaround times for publications in management literature are arguably the slowest of any academic discipline: it may sometimes take upwards of 2-4 years from submission to final publication date, and that doesn’t even count all of the pre-submission time of actually completing the project, writing the paper, and then probably circulating it internally within your own department and also presenting it at conference to get feedback. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the management job market is such that it often times makes little sense to be published in a low-level journal. As a young researcher, if you can’t get a paper published in journals such as Management Science, ASQ, SMJ, Org Science, AMR, or the like (and all of these journals have miniscule accept rates), then you’re often times better off just keeping it as a working paper rather than publishing it in a low-tier journal. The reasoning has to do with market signaling: if you have only (or mostly) low-tier journal articles, than the job market will take that as a signal that you’re probably never going to get any papers into top journals, but if you don’t even have any publications at all, then there is still a chance that you might get into those top journals. A bizarrely perverse incentive indeed.</p>
<p>A far more realistic goal is to simply equip yourself with the academic literature. It’s probably sufficient to simply understand what the latest papers are in your field of interest and have some tentative research question that you feel the literature has not addressed. It is also nice if you can rattle off some important papers that are relevant to your work. For example, if you are interested in organizational innovation, then you should know Tushman & O’Reilly (1997) and the “ambidextrous” organization, Nelson & Winter 1982, Bower & Christensen 1996, etc.</p>
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<p>Not that closely. Like I said, MBA programs are completely different from PhD programs. The most obvious case would be Dartmouth Tuck, which doesn’t even have a PhD program. </p>
<p>Moreover, a lot of good work is done outside of business schools. For example, Kathy Eisenhardt is one of the top academics in organizations and strategy, and Eisenhardt & Martin (2000) is one of the most highly cited papers in the history of SMJ. But she’s not even at a business school. Her position is in the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Department, which is different from the Stanford GSB. So if your goal was to work with her, you would have to apply to that program, not to the GSB. Similarly, a lot of excellent work of organizational behavior and decision sciences is conducted within pure sociology and psychology departments. For example, some of the biggest names within the social networking and organizational theory literature are Frank Dobbin and Peter Marsden, both of whom are at the Harvard Department of Sociology, not at Harvard Business School. </p>
<p>It’s difficult to really answer the question of who are the “top” departments. I think it is far more useful to ask what are the top departments for you, and in particular, for the kind of research that you want to do. As an undergrad or an MBA student, it is perfectly fine for you to simply choose a name-brand “top” school, because all of them will provide a perfectly good generalist education. However, PhD programs are quite different. It is extremely important for you to choose a PhD program that does the type of research that you want to do, otherwise you are going to be miserable indeed. As a second-best alternative, it also may be good to choose a large program with a wide-spanning faculty so that you can maximize your chances of finding research that you will like. Schools like Harvard, Wharton, and Kellogg come to mind. What is risky is choosing a “high-ranked” program that is quite small, only to later find out that you don’t really like the type of research that they do, for now you’re going to have to transfer and that may be tough. </p>
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<p>Has almost no value at all. MBA programs care about experience. PhD programs do not. {I think they should, but, what can I say, they didn’t ask me.} </p>
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<p>Personally, I think this is probably the best path for you. If you find out that you don’t like it and still want academia, then you can apply. But, like I said, management academia is completely different from management practice. </p>
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<p>Makes almost no difference at all. There are people who are admitted in their 40’s.</p>
<p>I highly recommend sakky’s advice. Most posters here are not familiar with Business PhD admissions. I also want to add that if you’re really into organizational behavior and economic organization and social stratification, apply to the sociology and psychology PhD programs. Many of the top-ranked schools such as Harvard, Michigan and Berkeley have excellent social science programs (check this link out as an example: [Program</a> Areas - UM Department of Sociology](<a href=“http://www.lsa.umich.edu/soc/graduate/areas.asp#7]Program”>http://www.lsa.umich.edu/soc/graduate/areas.asp#7)). You will find that many professors do not have a Management PhD but a PhD in a traditional field like sociology, economics, and engineering. By all means, try out management consulting. If it doesn’t work out, you can apply to academia.</p>
<p>Thanks for the great responses. I think my first step is going to be to review the faculty roster here at school and find a few professors whose research interests me and then go speak with them about thier work, and how they got to be where they are. I have a break coming up in a few days. That will probably be a good opportunity to start reading some of the relevant academic literature and narrow down an area of interest. </p>
<p>Fortunately I’ve already had some consulting experience and another intership lined up for this summer. I enjoyed consulting work quite a bit, but the lifestyle is difficult, and during a few of my engagements (all of which were short timeline, high burn projects) I kept wanting to go deeper into the fundementals behind what we were doing. Still, I think that the most likely path for me at this point is to spend a couple of years in consulting post-MBA. Maybe I’ll love it (or get used to the money) and thats where I’ll stay, who knows, but I get the feeling I’ll want to come back to academia eventually.</p>