Summary
If I were to distill the PhD admissions experience and advice into a few salient points, they would be these:
- Get a 700+ GMAT score and get research experience with a marketing professor, even if it’s on a volunteer basis.
- Seek out a marketing professor advocate who will give you critical feedback on your statement of purpose, research interests, and target schools/professors of interest.
- Lock in your research interests and your methodology (CB/experimental, modeling, strategy, qualitative) for the benefit of narrowing down schools and positioning yourself, but remember that many students change while in the program, so don’t stress.
- Figure out WHO you want to research with as a way of picking schools. Contact those people ahead of time and express interest in their research, ask good questions about their research, propose creative ways of extending their research. As important as your profile is, I believe that relationships result in more interviews and admissions than any other factor.
- Remember that the admissions process is weird and unpredictable. You will be rejected. You will be disappointed. Stay upbeat and remember that it only takes one school to let you in.
Resources for Marketing PhD Applicants
I recommend the following for help during the admissions process and beyond:
- The American Marketing Association’s list of all marketing PhD programs. This list has just been updated, so all of the links work now!
- URCH – This forum is a great hub for conversation around business PhD programs. The activity level is up and down, but you can get solid answers to questions here, meet other hopefuls, and learn some invaluable advice from the archives [search ‘marketing’]. It can also be a source of misery when you see someone post about interviewing at a school that you applied to.
- Grad Cafe – “The Survey” is a place for people to post admission updates (acceptances, rejections, interviews) for all different programs. Just search for “marketing” to filter down to the relevant list. While only a fraction of marketing PhD applicants will post here, it can be a good benchmark for when schools are starting to make moves. It can also be depressing during that gap between your application submissions and hearing back from schools. (Check out the Grad Cafe forums for some interesting threads on grad life in general).
- List of marketing journals by “star” rating – Marketing journals get broken down into tiers based on their “Impact Factor.” If you want an idea of what it takes to be a great researcher and what kind of research earns tenure, read the “4 star” journals.
- DocSIG – This is the special interest group site for marketing PhD students. The crown jewel of this site is the “Who Went Where” survey, which most job market PhD students participate in, showing which where students are end up and great stats on everything from publication records to starting salaries.
- “Getting What You Came For” – This book was recommended to me by my mentor marketing professor. I bought it and you should too. While not specific to marketing PhDs or even business PhDs, it contains a ton of valuable information that begins with admissions and extends far into the academic career.
