The Economist - Christmas Issue - Lucky to be in Business School

One of my favorite past-times during the Holidays season is to read the Christmas issue of The Economist. There are lots of "not-so-serious" articles on a wide range of topics that makes for an excellent reading.

In the next three posts I'll talk a bit about three of them that drew my attention.

The first ones is about life in academia and the unmatched expectations of doing a PhD (specially in humanities).

It must be really difficult to finish your PhD in Literature and have no place that would have paid you no more than 40k USD / year anyway. Not mention the fact that currently it takes about 7-8 years to get a PhD in those fields. A newly minted Finance PhD in the US gets around 170-220k / year. European salaries are much lower than that (apart from LBS and INSEAD) but still much better than what a humanities PhD would get.

I've been very lucky to be in a field where PhDs are highly paid (thank you Wall Street and the City for raising our outside option value) and that it is something that I love. At least in my case, the expectations I formed over the five years seemed close to what I ended up getting.

What a month!

I apologize to my few readers for the lack of action in this blog. I've spent only 5 days in the past month at home and it has been difficult to find time to post. I hope to publish a few interesting things I've saved over the next week or so.

Anyway, I have spent the past 10 days in the US working with my co-authors in Georgetown. It is amazing how working face-to-face really speed things up. As usual, progress was slower than expected, but nevertheless we did good work on all the papers and should be able to submit at least one before the end of the year. DC is really a great city. Very international, full of good restaurants and with a very nice vibe. I highly recommend a visit to anyone.

Qualities of a Sucessful PhD student

Sometimes I have MBA students interested in pursuing a PhD or just curious about what it takes to get one.

This article is spot on in describing what are essential qualities of sucessfull PhD student in any field.  I particularly agree with this:

"There's a ruinous misconception that a Ph.D. must be smart.
This can't be true.

A smart person would know better than to get a Ph.D."

I hope that my blogging helps to make me a better and more productive writer...