Hello, folks! Shibuya back again.
Today I will tell a little about
my experience as a Marketing PhD
student here in the US.
I started about 1 year and 6 months ago
and I will share what
happened here with me
since 2017
A PhD is comprised by
several different activities,
I will comment on each of them in turn
The first part is
the required coursework.
Out of the total period of 5 years
expected for a PhD,
the first 2 years are
often dedicated to taking classes
that are deemed necessary.
The academic year in the US has 3 semesters.
In the Fall and
Spring semesters,
you need to take at least 3 courses.
Each course has 3 hours,
so you stay in class for about 9
hours a week. In the Summer semester,
it's more optional, some people
take courses, some don't.
The requirements are no so strong.
The courses you take depends on
your research area.
In my case, Quantitative Marketing.
What usually happens?
Out of the 3 courses in a semester,
1 will be a Marketing course,
like Marketing Strategy.
1 course will be an Economics course,
taken at the Department of Economics,
not the business school.
The third course has more flexibility,
it depends.
Although we stay in class for
9 hours, those courses
require much more time
than that. Most of the
work we have is outside
of the classroom. We have to solve
lots of problems, read lots of papers,
do lots of exercises,
there is a lot to study.
So, the time we spend for those courses
is much more than the 9 hours
we theoretically have.
The level of the courses usually are
very high, both in
quality and difficulty.
We deal with the state of the art
in science, we often
study in classes some questions
that even the professors
have a hard time solving.
We talk a lot about the current hardships
of academic research, what are the
difficulties we face,
what are the challenges to overcome,
what are answers we are still seeking.
So, classes are much more
about discussions, than
reaching a definitive solution.
So, courses are diverse and heavy,
and they require a lot of
work, dedication,
and time.
The second part is studying in a more
independent way. There are lots of
things that you need to learn,
but there will not necessarily be
a course to teach you them.
For example, in the
courses from the Department of
Economics, you need a knowlegde
of calculus.
If you are god at solving things like
matrices, derivatives, integrals, that's ok.
But if you are'nt good enough,
You will need to study that by yourself,
to be able to follow the classes.
The professor will not stop
to explain what is the determinant
of a matrix, or what is
a derivative, a second derivative.
The professors assumes that you
can follow that, that you can
understand that kind of math.
Another example is software
and programming languages that
you need for data analysis.
We had exercicies to do
for the Econometrics courses that
needed to be solve, for example,
using MATLAB.
But the professor never
taught MATLAB,
how to code in that language.
If you don't know,
you will need to study MATLAB
to solve the problems. Without that
knowledge, you will not be able
the problems.
In my case, a long time had gone since
I last coded anything.
worked with programming, or
anything like that.
So far, in this period of 1 year and 6 months,
I had to deal with codes in
MATLAT, R, SAS, SPSS, STATA,
a number of languages
in a short period of time,
that you need to know at least a little,
to do the activities you need for a PhD.
And you will need to study that
by yourself, you often don't
have a course available at the university
to teach you those software
and programming skills.
The third part of a PhD is to
work as an assistant.
You're not only a student, you also
have to work. That job
can be very diverse, it's hard to provide
details about everything.
To give an example,
the job may include grading exams.
I assist some professors
who teach classes. And when there are
exams to grade, they can give
the exams to me
to provide grades to students.
Another job is
when there is an exam,
I go there during the exam
to check and to
provide any support that may be
needed during the exam.
Another example is a research symposium
that we have at the university.
Each student helps to organize part of
the symposium. Some will
take care of transportation,
some will be responsible for the food,
or take care of the guests.
We share the responsibilities for the
symposium, this is on
the PhD students' shoulders.
The last and most important PhD activity
is research. And that part of research
will depend a lot on each person.
Each student will have a different
experience, as each one's research
will be different.
Some of my experiences with research.
In my case, I got accepted to the PhD program
with a professor appointed to be
my advisor.
This can change over time,
but the expectation is to have one person who
will be my advisor for the
whole period of the PhD. That makes things easier,
because from the beginning we can
talk and plan how things will
develop during the PhD.
When I started my PhD,
we talked about it and he said
that in the first year I should
focus on the coursework and on learning
to code, especially
the languages we were
going to use in our research.
Basically, SAS and R.
In the beginning, it didn't make much sense to
work with research, because I still
didn't know to code,
or the tools and theories.
So, I wouldn't be much of a help.
Because of that, I still don't have much
research experience, I have been
doing my research project for approximately
6 months.
Oftentimes, a PhD student will
join an existing research project
being conducted by the advisor
or someone else from the university,
In my case, my advisor said
there was no current research
project undergoing that would
fit my characteristics.
Then, instead of joining a project,
we started a new project
from scratch,
that I needed to lead.
We talked about what are
my research interests,
the topics I'd like to research,
the subjects I'm attracted to.
From those conversations, he was then able to
provide more specific instructions,
clear orientations about
what I should do from that moment.
I started to read papers
more closely related to my area,
to study commands and
statistical procedures that are
better for my circumstances.
More importantly,
about databases that the university
and the professor
have access to, and that might be useful
to answer the research questions I have.
So, it was a matter of
match the things that I
wanted to research with the resources
that are available from the university,
particularly datasets.
What can I answer with those
datasets? And then
I started to develop my research.
Since my research is still in the beginning,
I will not give details about
what I'm researching.
But I have a huge dataset,
with millions of rows of observations,
for a long period of time,
with a very big sample.
I have been working to analyze that
for a few months since
we talked about conducting
this research project.
Right now, what I have is a
huge dataset,
that requires huge amounts of work
to clean the data, manipulate it,
make all the calculations.
The dataset needs to be
analyzed using two programming languages,
SAS and R,
and I need to constantly learn
how to use those languages
to solve the specific problems
I find every moment.
This research work
tends to take all my time.
I don't have weekends,
holidays, vacations.
Most of the time I'd have "free",
I'm using to conduct
my research, as it's easier to
do that in those times, instead
of doing simultaneously with coursework,
symposium,
exams grading, etc.
I try to take every opportunity
to work on my research.
For example, last weeek I intended
to post another YouTube video,
as my plan is to try one video per week.
But it was simply impossible,
I had too much to do.
On some days, I spend 12 hours, 15 hours,
analyzing data, coding,
calculating,
all that stuff to deliver results.
So, if sometimes I take long to
make a new video,
it's probably research taking all my time.
I have until April to deliver
a paper based on
that research, so I have a limited time
to show that I can
handle research work.
I talked about many different things,
about my PhD experience,
since I started 1 year and a half ago.
It's diverse and a little
chaotic, but I think this reflects
what happens. Things sometimes
get out of control,
too many things happening at the
same time, and you need to balance everything.
Many activities, many responsibilities.
That's part of the learning process,
to deal with the pressure,
with the workload,
from several areas, several people,
involving several skills.
You develop quickly as a consequence.
It has been an intense period,
a period when I learned and
grew a lot.
To conclude this video, something important
to talk about my experience.
Doing a PhD is a lot of work,
it is exhausting, challenging.
But the department,
the professors, the administrative staff of the
university, they are amazing when it comes to
providing support to students.
We see a concern about
our performance, our personal life,
our health, both physically and mentally,
if we are being able
to handle everything.
See how they can help.
It's hard, they know that,
and they are willing to support us.
That makes a big difference.
It's different from doing
something hard without support,
my experience here is doing hard work,
but with a lot of support.
People here work very hard,
and they want to help us in our studies,
our research. There is a team of
professors really
extraordinary here at the university.
So, I'm very grateful.
That's what I had to tell today,
see you all in another video.
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