What kind of credentials does one need to be an adjunct professor?
Just saw this now.
I doubt an MBA will give you much more finance knowledge than you would get doing the CFA, so if you are thinking MBA as a stepping stone to a Finance Ph.D., I wouldn’t recommend it. An MBA does help you with job prospecting though, so it can be useful for that, provided the institution has enough cachet.
An MS in statistics possibly would help, but if it didn’t work, it would lead you further away from things Financial without a lot of effort to stay in touch with the community. If you like things mathematical, there is more mathematics in the world than the mathematics of money, so that’s a possibility, though still not great.
I think the course that suits what you are talking about would be to do an MFE (Master of Financial Engineering). At that point, you might be well suited to a Ph.D. program if you chose to go there, but would still have salable skills in Finance. The one concern I’d have is that there was a glut of financial engineers a few years back. I’m not sure if that glut has continued or disappeared, so you would want to check on that.
As for adjuncting, it’s only good for two types of people: 1) grad students and recent Ph.D. graduates who need teaching experience, and 2) professionals with experience who really really enjoy teaching. It’s definitely not a way to support yourself or a family. Also, most employers will not appreciate the need to give you the flexibility that is required for being an adjunct, and it is a lot more work than expected. So if you do it, do it for love, not for money.
^
Thanks for the response. Hm, MFE seems very interesting and would be a good hedge vs. statistics if I have a change of heart and do not purse PhD. But as another potential option, it seems like a lot of the finance PhD programs are very heavy into economics. Would a Masters in Econ (not applied) be a path you’d recommend?
Also, do you know of tier 2 schools accepting people with no MS or MBA. Just BA, finance and CFA and work experience? Or a part-time online MS as I continue to work? As you can see, I’m trying to see if its possible to avoid large debt from MS.
If you are accepted into a PhD program without a masters’ (which is common in the US), your first years will be doing courses. After you pass the courses and then some kind of comprehensive examination or oral examination by professors, they will give you a Master’s degree and advance you to Ph.D. candidate (ABD=all-but-dissertation) status. So I wouldn’t worry about not having a master’s or not. It may be different outside the US.
Even if you have a Masters’ degree in a subject, they will look at your previous coursework and will probably want you to take whatever courses they feel you are missing from how they would qualify you and/or take some test to prove you know your stuff, so there will be a bit of coursework.
If you do a Ph.D. program, most high-quality institutions will likely fund you with a scholarship, including funding for Masters’ work. It won’t be enough for a lavish lifestyle and if you’re married with children, your spouse might feel pinched, but it should be enough to survive as a student.
Professional Masters’ degrees (like MBAs and MFEs and JDs (technically a doctorate, but in practice a professional Master’s degree) and MPAs) are different. Those are the ones that tend to rack up tons of debt, but the assumption is that the professionalization will pay off in higher comp that can repay the debt (that assumption may not be true, but that’s the idea). Professional degrees are profit centers in universities. Academic degrees are generally cost centers, but are effectively a kind of CAPEX expense designed to ensure a future supply of qualified teachers.
Very insightful. Thank you very much bchad. Great advice. Now back to the think tank!
agreed, responses are totally subjective here. My two cents though is don’t do a PhD unless your passion is teaching
Hey again bchad.
Sorry to bother, but after looking into dozens of finance PhD programs it seems a large portion of the coursework is micro & macro-economic theory and econometrics, which are very calculus, math intensive focused. This scares me as I don’t think my current math skills (B.A finance, 3.5gpa from your typical state college and three levels of CFA for what its worth) are anywhere near that level and quite frankly I have doubts if I can succeed in retaining such advanced material.
Sooo, kind of a weird question with likely no clear answer, but in your experience either via your own students or students you know, must you be super intelligent in order to succeed with this material? I consider myself of average intelligence with a slight above average tilt for analytical related things, but of course work hard and all that good stuff. Could a MS or MA in economics either online or brick & mortar degree act has a successful bridge to the advanced PhD courses for someone like me or just a trap to only later get ambushed by reality?
Academic economics is all about using mathematics to make economics look like it’s as solid as physics. If you’re afraid of the math, then you may not want to go down that path.
I personally think the assumptions required to make the mathematics work is often too distorted to be a useful portrayal of reality, because people forget what the assumptions are and when they are broken. But that doesn’t change the fact that the discipline is largely about who can build the most intellectually satisfying model and then solve the equations that come out of it.
All that said, is it just that the math looks scary? Or do you think you are truly bad at math? Often times the coursework will help you get a grip on it so the reality isn’t quite as scary as it looks. Statistics/economietrics is strange because the way the math is used is very different than most other contexts in which you see it (other than perhaps probability).
If the subject matter interests you, and you want to go a less mathematical route, you can try looking at things like economic history, which in my opinion are pretty valuable. However, it’s an advantage in the job market to point to a bunch of mathematical squiggles and say “The reason you are losing money is that you don’t understand this equation; hire me and I’ll make it work for you.” The guy on the opposite side of the table often is too embarassed to say they don’t understand what you’ve said and gives you points for intelligence that you may or may not actually have.
Lol, so true.
I don’t think I am truly bad at math. I have always scored above average in math even when I was at the stage of not carring about school when I was younger, so my brain must not hate math to badly. I guess when I look at an advanced econometric books my brain spins a bit as this math is completely foreign to me. I think if I am going to do a PhD that I must take the math head on because it is a weak area for me and every program I looked at deals extensively with it so I can’t hide from it. In your opinion, do you think an MS or MA in economics act as a nice bridge to PhD for someone like me?
I would go all in for the Ph.D… An MS or MA in Econ is not all that useful. You’ll be overqualified for a lot of stuff and yet when people actually want economists, they will want Ph.Ds and you will come up short for that. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds, unless you’re just in it for the knowledge.
In any case, if you don’t already have a Master’s in Econ, you’ll earn one along the way, so if you decide to bail out, you may bail out with an MA after coursework. If you start by doing a terminal MA program, you’re just going to have to apply for a Ph.D. later and deal with the uncertainty of getting into a program. Why not get into the program for the whole shebang first, and then you can abandon the Ph.D. if you find it’s not for you.
If you really are worried about the math, then you might look at whatever local college or community college there is and see if you can take some kind of general studies math courses in the areas you’re concerned about. Most likely that would be calculus, linear algebra, statistics, probability, and that sort of stuff.
If you haven’t done probability or stats before, it can be pretty intimidating to open up a stats book. It’s often hard to figure out how to work with all those summation formulas in a way that gets you to an answer, so having a course where someone takes you by the hand and walks you through it can help a lot. Probably the most useful stuff will be linear algebra.
Remember that they will teach you the stuff that they think you need, so as long as you’re not someone who crumbles at the sight of a calculus derivative, you can probably hack more math than you think you can.
I had an economics colleague that said: When you read a mathematical economics paper, you usually need three passes. The first pass is where you absorb the argument and get a general sense of what the structure of the math is going to be. Then on the second read, you go through and examine how each step actually works and how they get to their answer (usually there’s one or two steps that seem really bizzare or hard to penetrate) Then on the third read, you ask yourself if those steps are legitimate or make any strange or unwarranted assumptions.
When my friend said that, I was greatly relieved… I figured most economists could figure out all the math in those published articles on the first try. But most don’t, unless it’s an unusually simple argument.
I thought about going straight to a PhD program, but when I look at the resumes of current PhD students across the U.S. (posted on several universities websites + LinkedIn), almost every single one had some type of Masters in econ, stats, finance, etc. The ones that didn’t had some weird thing like already a PhD in engineering or B.A. finance 4.0 from top 3 school in US. This lead me to believe that (1) My admittance rate would be lower than average, which is already low and (2) I would likely be far less prepared for the first 2 years of courses thus increasing attrition. I’m I correct in this thinking? Or is it not a meaningful enough difference to justify MS?
Also to your one point. What is the overlap of MS or MA Econ classes and PhD first 2 year courses? Its hard to tell, but it seems most Master econ programs have like 4-6 concentrated micro, macro, and econometric courses from beginner to more intermediate, while PhDs have similar amount but ranging from intermediate to advance in difficulty.
That’s a good suggestion about the community college thing thanks. Maybe could even do online courses, but again I wonder if this gives me little chance to get into a reasonable college (no tier 3 or less).
Thanks again!
The community college suggestion is to give you the confidence you need to do the math in an Econ Ph.D. program. That’s it. You don’t need to send the transcripts or even mention it in your application if you don’t want to. Or mention that you took them in your application essay if you like.
As for the Linked in stuff… you can’t be a Ph.D. candidate until you’ve done the coursework. After the coursework, they give you an MA or MS or something. Before you get that, you can’t say you are a Ph.D. candidate. This is why they all have that rating. Many (if not most) of those candidates were admitted to the program without an MA and simply got it along the way. The ones that were admitted but don’t have the MA yet simply aren’t allowed to say they are Ph.D. candidates (the way you can’t say you are a CFA L3 candidate until you’ve passed L2, even though you are in the program).
So I wouldn’t worry about that stuff.
As for overlap, what happens is that the Ph.D. program has courses for you to take across a range of subjects deemed important to the discipline, and when you pass enough of them and complete a comprehensive examination or special project like a master’s thesis, they will give you an MA. At that point you become a Ph.D. candidate (also known as ABD - all but dissertation).
There really isn’t a big difference between an academic master’s degree and Ph.D. coursework. It’s all MA stuff. There is a difference between practitioner MA programs (like MBA, or MPA, or even JD) and more pure academic programs, because the pure academic programs focus more on the intellectual history of the discipline, how to criticize existing work, and how to construct research projects, whereas the practitioner programs mostly focus on ensuring that students have familiarity with using the tools and concepts being taught - less focus on the criticism and intellectual history stuff.
If you already have an MA in something else, then they will look at your coursework for that MA and decide whether that is an equivalent to anything that they require in their program. If it’s good enough, then you won’t have to retake that course. So lots of engineers will pass out of some of the math requirements, but they’ll still need to do econometrics.
I see what your saying, very helpful. Also, I don’t know if you’ve gotten the chance to make admittance decisions, but I can only get 1 former professor for a reference the rest being former supioriors. Everything I’ve read says letters of recommendations are weighed fairly heavy. Do you think this would be an issue?
If your superiors have Ph.Ds, I don’t think it will be a huge issue. The main thing that’s important in a Ph.D. reference letter is to instill confidence that the candidate has the mental and emotional chops, along with the grit to get through the program, and so it helps a lot if the person who is writing the reference clearly understands what is required beyond just being smart and a hard worker.
Most Ph.D students (including those starting without a masters’ degree) are given some sort of funding/fellowship support, so the school understandably does not want to provide that support for people who get to the dissertation stage and never finish.
So a good reference makes the following points:
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X is one of the smartest and most perceptive students/people I have run across in a long time on topic Y (or perhaps in general)
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X is a hard worker and highly motivated to earn his/her doctorate and has the grit to finish the program on time. I saw this when he/she did X2.
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X is clearly interested in a specific research topic Z that is important to discipline Y and your program is an ideal training ground for them to make meaningful contributions to the field.
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I give X my full recommendation readily and without reservation.
Its fine if one of your references doesn’t have a Ph.D but it’s definitely helpful when the author clearly has an idea of what kind of work goes into the program and what is required (intellectually and emotionally) to finish it.
Ok great info again bchad. I thank you very much. Back to think tank for me 