Wondering what is the workload in a Ph.D program in business ( Management or Marketing) ?
How many ours a day/week do you put in ( including classes and work at home)? Do you work also on the weekend? Are summers off or do you need to continue your Ph.D work?
Do you work less hours after the first two years of the program? How many years it actually takes to finish the program? what is the average age of students in the program?
Thanks for your comments!
I don’t have a PhD in business, but I do have a PhD and I have some acquaintances who did PhD work in business.
I think that most PhD students would say that on most weeks, they probably put in between 40 and 60 hours of work. That’s including coursework, research, and teaching (if any). Business PhD students don’t always have to teach or assist with classes, so that might be something off your plate. But you’ll probably see that time fill up with research.
Most PhD students work on the weekends most of the time. When I was in graduate school, starting in my fourth year I vowed to take one and a half days off per week (I chose one weekend day and one weekday evening every week). I didn’t always get the half but I usually got the weekend day. Earlier it was more difficult to take weekend days off. The work tends to follow you around.
Generally, you do not get summers “off.” You don’t have courses to take, but you are still doing research over the summer and building that CV up. I don’t know if business PhD students do internships; the ones I do did not, but they did research with their advisors or at other programs over the summer. After your second or third year once your classes are over you might be studying or writing your dissertation over the summer.
You don’t really work fewer hours after the first two years, it’s just that your work shifts around a bit. In your first two years you will spend most of your time in coursework, and so you’ll feel a lot busier because you’ll have actual assignments and deadlines to meet. In your third year you’ll take exams so there will be studying for those, although that will be self-directed. In your later years, you won’t have classes, but you should be just as busy if not busier. You’ll be working on your dissertation - and if your goal is academia, you’ll also have other research projects and papers that you’ll be working on simultaneously.
Business PhDs tend to be a bit shorter than your average PhD, from my observation. Generally I’d say they take around 4-5 years to finish. But it really depends on your program and your dissertation, as well as your own perseverance and other obligations you have. I don’t know about average age. The business students I knew were older but not much so: they tended to be in their mid-to-late twenties when they started the program. So they had had a couple years of experience and sometimes (but not usually) an MBA or an MS in another business discipline.
Thanks so much for your comment. Did you meet students that have kids ( I have 2 kids)? I’m 46 - does it make sense for me to start a program? will I have chances to be admitted and if yes, will I be hired when I graduate and in what type of institutions will I be able to find a job?
I know lots of PhD students with kids. Sometimes it takes more time, but I see it as not much different than having another demanding job (like being a physician or lawyer) with children. You actually have more flexibility, but less money of course.
Your age shouldn’t prevent you from getting admitted anywhere. Shouldn’t. There may be some professors who may have concerns about your employability, since the tenure-track job market does sometimes tend to favor newer/younger graduates. They, frankly, have more years to give an institution. Still, even if you begin in your early 50s you can still give an institution 20-30 years, and business is a bit different than regular academia.
Apparently, business is one of the few fields in which there are actually shortages of well-qualified faculty candidates, so with a PhD in management I think getting a job should be…not easy, but not necessarily insurmountable. What type of institution you can find a job at really depends on where you get your PhD from. The more prestigious your PhD, the more options you have.
and then I’ll compete with PhD graduates who are 20 years younger than me. Will they be preferred due to longer shelf life?
Perhaps. It really depends on the individual search committee making the decisions. It also depends a lot on your background - if you have owned your own businesses and have a wealth of real-world business experience that you bring to bear on your research, that may count at some places.