Business Research?

Question

I currently am a junior at a small university in East Texas. I have a few research oriented courses under my belt and plan on attending either UNT, UT Arlington, or an Ivy League for my doctoral studies.

My question is, are areas such as career/personality or entrepreneurship viable topics for a professor of business? For my short college career, I've been really interesting in the individual and career selection and start up businesses/private businesses.

Organizational Behavior is a tertiary topic I also would like to dabble in. I've read various journals and abstracts on topics in Finance, Accounting, Economics, and Marketing, and they really bore me. I just don't have an interest in those fields. Another field that bores me is Operations Management.

Is there any hope to find something interesting with the topics I have listed above?

Answer 1

I'm a little worried that you are bored by so many topics; most people who go on successfully for doctorates have a strong intellectual curiosity, which would mean that even if this is not your area of expertise, you shouldn't discredit it. Furthermore, all of these areas are related to one another. I'm in marketing, but got the idea for my dissertation from an organizational behavior class that I took.

Okay, having said that, there is no such thing as a doctorate in business which has as its focus career/personality. Within either management/human resources or marketing, you can do work that includes these topics, but it is not a discipline on its own. Entrepreneurship is a little different. It is a discipline which has been emerging for the past decade as one offered in business schools, but I don't think that any of the better schools actually offer doctorates specifically in that field - you generally get your doctorate in something like Finance and do your research in entrepreneurial organizations to get a position in that area.

The one area you mention in which programs exist is Organizational Behavior. There are a number of schools which offer this, but make sure you go to a good one, because this field is NOT one which is hurting for faculty, so getting a job may be more difficult than in most business fields.

I also want to caution you to look more broadly into your choice of schools for a doctorate, as it can make a huge difference. UNT is generally considered, at least in my field, to be one of the weaker doctoral programs - they seem to put out a lot of candidates, but many of them don't seem to be very well-trained. UT Arlington doesn't seem to have a program in my field at all, so I can't comment on how they are perceived in other areas. As far as the Ivies are concerned a few, like Columbia and Wharton are highly-respected; for others, many other schools, including state schools like the University of Michigan (or, in fact, UT Dallas and UT Austin), have stronger reputations than the Ivies do. Don't get trapped into looking at the university's overall reputation and assuming that means a strong Ph.D. program in business.

Answer 2

In terms of the topics, yes -- they are viable and can be profitable.

In terms of your choices in graduate schools -- I want you to smack yourself on the forehead and ask yourself what the hell you are thinking.

If you want a PhD, you should go to the best school that you can get into. UNT and UTA are at the opposite ends of the spectrum from Ivy League schools. Getting a PhD in Business Administration at UNT or UTA will not get you a good academic job, and will not get you as good a non-academic job as an MBA from a top 15 school.

As for Ivy League schools -- many of them don't offer PhDs in BA. Wharton (Penn) has the best Ivy League program -- and is probably third or fourth overall. Harvard, Cornell, Yale and Columbia are all respectable. Dartmouth has a great MBA program -- but no PhD program. Princeton and Brown do not have business schools.

Most of the best PhD programs in Business Administration are not in the Ivy League. They include: MIT, Chicago, Duke, Berkeley, Northwestern, UCLA, NYU, Michigan and Carnegie Mellon.

You should also know how hard it is to get into these programs. The program I got into at Berkeley gets about 300 applications per year and accepts between four and nine. Wharton, Chicago, MIT and Harvard are even tougher to get into. Lots of qualified students do not make it in.

In Texas, UT-Austin or Rice would be the best schools to go to. Your best chance may be with large state universities.