Doctoral Programs

In ten days, the class of 2013 will participate in Commencement. On May 30th, 15 of our doctoral students will graduate and begin their professional careers as faculty members, scholars, and researchers. Of the 15 graduates, 12 have accepted an academic position and 3 are going on to industry jobs. The academic placements continue to be strong with placements at Stanford, Wharton, Michigan, Cornell, MIT Sloan, and HBS amongst other great schools. I look forward to watching all of our graduates grow professionally and make their mark in the world.

Congratulations to all our graduates:

Abigail Allen (DBA A&M), Ethan Bernstein (DBA MGT), Sen Chai (DBA TOM), Stephanie Hurder (PhD BE), Ben Iverson (PhD BE), Fern Jira (DBA TOM), Hoan Lee (PhD BE), Jeffrey Lee (DBA MKT), Mary Carol Mazza (PhD OB), Anoop Menon (DBA STR), Anna Milanez (PhD BE), William Schmidt (DBA TOM), Vaughn Tan (PhD OB), Robert Turley (PhD BE), and Melissa Valentine (PhD HPM).

And, while we will be sad to see those 15 students leave HBS, we are excited to be working on welcoming 27 new doctoral students this coming August. Of the 27 incoming students, 55% were born outside of the U.S. and 33% are female. Coming from a variety of academic backgrounds and professional experiences, this class is very diverse and we look forward to having them on campus to begin their development as scholars who will make a difference in the world.

On May 2nd we held our annual End of Year party on the Wyss lawn. We hosted about 100 students, faculty, staff, and family members to an afternoon of great food and drink. It was also an opportunity for the doctoral students to announce the recipients of the Faculty Mentoring Awards. Nominated and selected by current doctoral students, two faculty members, one tenured and one junior, are selected each year by a student committee. This year, the students honored Kathleen McGinn as the Senior Faculty member and Anita Tucker as the Junior Faculty member recipients. We thank Kathleen and Anita for the support and guidance they provide to our students.

That's it for now. See you over the summer...Regards, John

It's been a while since my last entry. This is probably the busiest time of year for the HBS doctoral office and we've increased the activity level with the introduction of our BEST course.

In January of this year, 54 students participated in the inaugural offering of the Business Education for Scholars and Teachers (BEST) Foundations course. This course, the first in the three course BEST series, is designed to provide doctoral students with an introduction to the language and functions of business while also exposing students to new ways of thinking about their individual research agendas. All in all, BEST Foundations was a great success. We received positive feedback from students and faculty. In particular, students found that learning about the various business functions provided many of them with new ideas about research and the integration of other perspectives into their own research agendas. Additionally, there was a great cohort-building effect that resulted in students from different programs collaborating in new ways. As we delve further into the feedback we received, we will likely find several ways to make improvements to next year's class.

In addition to the launch of the BEST course and completing our annual planning cycle, we are also finishing up with our Admissions decisions and making final notifications to applicants. This year, HBS received 816 doctoral applications for our eight programs. While this number is down slightly from last year, there were three programs which saw increases in the number of applications - Organizational Behavior, Management, and Accounting and Management. As expected, the quality continues to be strong across all of our programs and it was difficult to make the final decisions. We look forward to hearing from the admitted students...preferably with an acceptance of our offer. We'll see them all in March for Admitted Student Day and will do our best to convince them that HBS is the right place for each of them.

In the meantime, we are always happy to share news about our current students. They continue to be busy with research that is catching the attention of the Harvard community and beyond. Recently, Scott Lee (HPM) was profiled in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni magazine Colloquy(see pages 4-5) for his remarkable research on health care workers and health care delivery in Africa. Also, Tiona Zuzul (Strategy) and Vaugh Tan (OB) were featured in the Harvard Gazette for their collaborative work on how people innovate in an unstructured market in India. These are but a couple of examples of the great research being done by our students.

All the best, JFK

2012 has been a great year for the HBS Doctoral Programs. Under the leadership of our faculty chair, Kathleen McGinn, the first formal program review in over ten years was completed and approved with a strong endorsement from the HBS faculty. The key innovations that came from the review included the replacement of the longstanding MBA course requirement with the introduction of a three-course series called Business Education for Scholars and Teachers (BEST), the addition of a formal teaching requirement, and the renewed focus on rigorous quantitative methods training for our students. All of these innovations are aligned with the mission of the HBS doctoral programs - to educate scholars who make a difference in the world through rigorous research with relevance to practice.

The first course of the BEST series, BEST Foundations, will be launched in January 2013 with 54 students enrolled. We're excited by the potential of the BEST courses and will be able to expose students to the language and functions of business while simultaneously providing a foundation for research that will influence leaders, organizations, and markets. In subsequent years, we will launch the second and third courses of the BEST series, BEST Integration and BEST Teach, respectively. BEST Integration will provide students with additional exposure to the language and practice of business on a global, integrated scale. BEST Teach will prepare students with the skills to design and develop a course and exposure to best practices in classroom teaching, both case-based teaching and other traditional teaching methods.

In the Spring, we accepted a great incoming class of 25 new students to the doctoral programs. Also in the spring, 23 students graduated, joining the ranks of the HBS alumni. While graduation is a bittersweet moment in many regards, it is always great to see our graduates leave HBS and begin their academic career. Over the summer the 25 new students arrived on campus and have had a great first term.

This Fall, we introduced an expanded Job Market preparation series. Historically, HBS has provided students on the job market with presentation skill training focused on the delivery of an effective job talk. This training has been well-received over the years and this year we introduced two additional modules to the training, one on the effective use of presentation slides and the second on the development of a structured story to convey the key points of the job talk. This expanded series has received excellent feedback from the students who participated and we're looking forward to seeing how successful our students will be on the market.

On December 3rd, we began the evaluation process for selecting the incoming class for the Fall 2013. While very much in the early stages of the process, the quality of the applications is truly impressive and it's exciting to see so many great candidates. Stay tuned for the results.

Finally, the doctoral programs held our annual holiday party yesterday. In addition to sharing the holiday spirit, we also recognized five students for excellence in doctoral student research. The Wyss Award, recognizing HBS Doctoral Students for outstanding research while enrolled in an HBS doctoral program, was awarded to Ethan Bernstein (DBA Management), Anoop Menon (DBA Strategy), and Melissa Valentine (Ph.D. in Health Policy - Management). The Martin Award, recognizing students in the Ph.D. in Business Economics program for outstanding research in their field, was awarded to Dmitry Taubinsky and Bob Turley. Congratulations to each of these students.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to another successful year in 2013.

Best, John

It's hard to believe that I welcomed my third class of new doctoral students to HBS this year. In my three years as Executive Director, the Programs Office team has accomplished many things that we are all proud of. For me, two of the most visible accomplishments each year are the new entering class and the graduating class. They represent the new and the old, the beginning and the end, or the turning of a page to a new chapter in life. This year, we welcomed 24 new doctoral students to the School. Almost half the entering class (44%) are women, 32% are from outside the U.S., and 1 in 4 are minorities. Each of them have great academic credentials, intellectual curiosity, and personal drive. We're thrilled and proud to have them join our community and we look forward to their future success.

And while we help the new and current students get into the routine of a new academic year, we are also looking to next year's class. As many of you know, the admissions application is now available on line for interested prospective students. The application is found at: http://www.hbs.edu/doctoral/admissions/. The application deadline is Monday, December 3, 2012 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Please be aware that we do not accept admissions applications submitted after the deadline.

I hope many of you will have the opportunity to meet representatives of the HBS Doctoral Programs at recruiting events this year. This month, we will be participating in two DocNet events; one in Washington, D.C. and one in Atlanta, GA. In November, we will be attending a DocNet event and a Ph.D. Project event in Chicago, IL. I hope that you will be able to either join us in one of those cities or on-campus for an information session.

As I mentioned, one of the visible accomplishments of each academic year is seeing students graduate and go on to new chapters of their lives. As we do each year, students on the job market are able to take advantage of a training program aimed at preparing them to give their job talks. This year, I am happy to report that we have expanded that program. We have retained the presentation delivery aspect of the workshop and have added two new modules; one focused on the preparation of slides and one centered around the idea of storytelling. This three-part workshop will provide our students with the ability to deliver their job talk papers in a clear and compelling manner with a presentation that is supported by effective slides and a narrative that is concise and yet powerful. We look forward to seeing the results of this investment in the coming year.

I hope all of you are enjoying the autumn weather.

Best wishes, JFK