Working toward Organizational Behavior PhD in a LAC

Graduate School
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<p>I'm currently attending a liberal arts college that does not offer a business program. Can I major in psychology or sociology and go straight into a business PhD program in Org. Behavior? If so, what are the steps I need to take during college?</p>

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<p>Yes. Many people do exactly that. </p>

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<p>It’s all about demonstrating research potential. Hence, you should be involving yourself in psych or soc projects that have a strong chance of being published. Neither grades nor GRE scores matter that much, as long as they aren’t terrible. What matters is that you are working on projects that can potentially produce papers of publishable quality.</p>

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<p>Thanks, sakky. Does that mean doing just a minor on psych or soc is not a good idea, then?</p>

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<p>That would strongly depend on what your major would be, and, more importantly, whether you have a coherent research-oriented ‘story’ that you could tell the adcom. For example, much of the new research in sociology - particularly with social network analysis - has recently become highly quantitative and computational in nature. Hence, I could definitely see somebody majoring in, say, computer science or applied mathematics and minoring in sociology being admitted to a top OB program, especially if that person has conducted interesting research work.</p>

<p>As a case in point, consider Reginald Smith. He wrote a paper that computed the organizational social network of rappers (that’s right, rappers), as computed by collaboration on rap lyrics, and apparently found that 2Pac, Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, and the Wu-Tang Clan were among the most socially central of all rappers. Basically, he downloaded and compiled a dataset of lyrics from various rap websites, wrote a snippet of software to scour lyric authorship data and then clean it for misspellings and other textual errors, then used a set of freeware network-analysis software tools to calculate social connectedness. His paper was published - with Smith as single author - in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics. If you don’t have access to a journal database, you can find the working paper version here on arXiv: </p>

<p><a href=“http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0511/0511215v4.pdf[/url]”>http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0511/0511215v4.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>What that shows is that faculty support, while obviously helpful, is not really necessary in order to engage in organizational behavior research. All you really need is an interesting setting, such as the community of rappers, and knowledge of analytical tools. Remember, Smith published as a single author.</p>