Thoughts on the Ph.D. Program

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Thoughts on the Ph.D. Program

• Rajan Kadapakkam
• Professor of Finance

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Thoughts on the Ph.D. program

• Building a Community
• Orientation
• Course Work
• Research Assistantship
• Teaching Assistantship
• Dissertation/Research
• Job Market
• Faculty Issues

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• Building a Community
• Successful Ph.D. programs have a strong sense of
  community
• Ph.D. students are really like junior faculty and
  need to be treated as such
• Dinners with faculty visiting from other schools
  personalize those journal names

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Community - 2

• Crucial to have strong network within a cohort
  and across cohorts seniors are really unpaid TA
  s for doctoral courses
• Preserve institutional memory for accessing
  databases, using software, literature indices,
  etc
• Important for our faculty to interact with
  students on informal basis

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Orientation

• Library Resources
• Journal Search, Table of Contents Email services
  - ECONBase, Ingenta
• Social Sciences Research Network, etc. for
  working papers- WWW
• Database Access - manual listing databases with
  brief description and access procedures

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Orientation-2

• Timeline for a Ph.D. student with emphasis on
  research and job market preparation
• Copy of faculty CVs
• Streamline process for Network access, Web page,
  Duplication privileges, etc

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Course Work

• Clear understanding of basic topics - First
  course extremely critical
• See the big picture - pieces of a puzzle
  (Rubinstein)
• Understanding of how topics relate to each other
• Breadth versus depth - Much better texts
  available for special areas
• Relevance of supporting course work - chance for
  us to be better

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Research Assistantship

• Ensure that the student understands the project
• Be clear about specific tasks that the student
  has to work on
• Be sure that the student has the skills to
  accomplish the task
• Be clear on authorship rights right at the outset
  - first, second, none

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Teaching Assistantship

• University wide teaching seminars for GTAs.
• Bulletin board for interesting news stories that
  can be discussed in classroom some textbooks
  provide these services will be an issue for a
  lot of students without practical experience
• Teaching notes from faculty and seniors

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Dissertation / Research

• Encourage questioning of assumptions in published
  papers
• Assign papers with flaws for courses - let the
  student discover the flaws - important not to be
  in awe
• Narrate how your publications came into being
  from start to finish
• 3 essay format for dissertation - provides
  diversification

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Research - 2

• Remind that genius is 99 perspiration and 1
  perspiration
• Perseverance is important to weather the
  downturns
• Regular meetings to discuss/present research
  progress (brown bag?)
• Students should have a clear idea of the range in
  project completion times

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Research - 3

• Every student should maintain a research ideas
  folder
• Do not underestimate creativity - at least 3 UH
  students had a JF paper within a few years of
  graduation
• Healthy underestimation of publication process -
  but do not count chickens before they hatch
  -Balance will depend upon each person

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Job Market

• Conference deadlines
• Detailed understanding of application process,
  arranging for references, etc.
• Writeup on WWW for a top finance department (AFA
  / FMA)

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Job Market -2

• Ideally, job market has to be the most
  interesting paper written by student
• Healthy underestimation of job prospects
• can make or break careers
• After-market support is important

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Faculty Issues

• Incentive for working with a marginal student -
  who is going to pay the price? Nothing more
  depressing than a 7 year student
• Incentives for elite/high quality/quality
  publications with students
• What systems will we have to get feedback for
  improving doctoral seminars? Student evaluations
  are not likely to work in this case

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Faculty Issues - 2

• Faculty politics within/across departments and
  interaction with students
• Request for transfers across functional areas

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Faculty Issues - 3

• Decentralization of decisions on Graduate
  Assistantships? Will help recruiting
• Decentralization of Ph.D. admissions in the
  future? Reduction of committee work
• We are recruiting junior faculty
• Efficiency of operations to make time for
  additional workload of mentoring Ph.D. students