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TehRaio
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Joined: August 19th, 2014, 3:29 am

Quant background want to teach in business school

August 4th, 2015, 3:02 am

Hi,hypothesis: I am almost done completing a PhD in an area of Statistical Physics which studies how financial crashes happen.I have programming skills, and enough mathematical finance to become a quant. However I want to teach and do research in finance in a business school.I don't want to be a physics professor because many physics topics in my area are not interesting to me, and theoretical physics positions are hard to come by anyway.I have heard of a Post-Doctoral programs which allow PhDs in other disciplines to teach in business schools (http://en.grenoble-em.com/aacsb-endorse ... ss-program) but I doubt that's gonna cut it. Based on my limited research on linkedin and google, legit business schools don't have to resort to people with such qualifications.I am considering doing a second PhD. My rationale goes this way: I'm possibly going to work for 30-40 years, why not spend 3-5 additional years in school, and achieve what I now truly desire?Please tell me how stupid this sounds. What alternatives (beside 2nd PhD) do I have?What should I keep in mind in devising such plan? have at it be honest :)
 
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bearish
Posts: 5188
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Quant background want to teach in business school

August 4th, 2015, 9:43 am

It sounds like you have a pretty realistic idea of how business schools work. You will, most likely, not have a big problem finding *teaching* opportunities with your background, but it is extremely hard to break into the finance tenure track as an outsider, at least at high ranking US business schools. Your idea of a second PhD is not crazy, especially if the graduate student life style agrees with you. I know a couple of people who took this exact path successfully: Bob Goldstein at Minnesota and Jiang Wang at MIT. You may want to try and reach out to them and get their perspective.
 
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traderjoe1976
Posts: 2
Joined: May 19th, 2006, 9:50 am

Quant background want to teach in business school

August 5th, 2015, 2:53 am

It is actually quite common for Finance PhD programs to receive applications from people who already have PhDs in Math and Physics. It should work out quite well for you and a tenure-track position is guaranteed immediately after the PhD because they are producing less than half the number of PhDs as there are vacant positions which is why you have these shortcut AACSB programs where you don't really get any exposure to Finance research.Getting the tenure-track position is very easy and almost guaranteed immediately after you get the PhD.But getting tenure is actually very hard. The standards are extremely high. You may find yourself 11 years from now with a Finance PhD and with six years as an Assistant Professor getting rejected for tenure and then debating whether you should move out of academia and to Wall Street.
 
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TehRaio
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Posts: 0
Joined: August 19th, 2014, 3:29 am

Quant background want to teach in business school

September 22nd, 2015, 12:45 am

@traderjoe1976 and @bearish thanks for your inputs.I would like to ask another question:I have read quite a bit about what a professor's work and life duties entail, and this is something I committed to achieving.After doing some research I figured that many of my research interests available in a finance department at a business school are the same as in a Mathematics department (see asset pricing, derivatives, market microstructure).I know that there is a higher scarcity of academic jobs for Math PhDs than Finance PhDs,and also that the remuneration for Assistant Finance professors is much higher (at least in the US).Based on that small analysis, would it make sense for someone like me to pursue a Finance PhD instead of one in Mathematical Finance? On top of my head I would say yes but I would like to know if there is something else that I should consider. Is there a drastic intellectual difference between doing finance in a business school as opposed to a math department?
 
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bearish
Posts: 5188
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Quant background want to teach in business school

September 24th, 2015, 2:37 am

Viewed through a traditional career lens, i.e. money, prestige, job security, etc., it would seem that a traditional finance PhD would trump a math finance PhD any day. Viewed up close, though, there are subtle differences that may work the other way, depending (I think) heavily on the level you get to play at. Teaching is almost certainly more rewarding (from an intellectual perspective, given your background) on the math side of town. While finance PhDs are fair game for all sorts of abuse, you really don't want to try to put calculus in front of an MBA class, which can be fairly limiting. They are the paying customers, and they know it... Perhaps counterintuitively, undergrad business students have a bit more tolerance for math, but they are not usually very good at it. Research, at the highest end (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Chicago, and a handful of others) isn't all that different. Really deep and important insights are valued, whether published in Econometrica or the JFE, even if the math level means that any regular finance professor is unable to comprehend it. In the next level of the pecking order it is different: there are probably a couple of hundred business schools that consider themselves just outside the top 10 (or twenty if pushed) who will be very insistent that you get 4-6 papers published in a very short list of journals (JFE, JF, RFS, and maybe JFQA) to qualify for tenure in the finance department. Once you get to the third (or fourth, or whatever) tier, they may in fact be very accepting of any and all publications, including in math finance journals. While the mainstream finance journals have a relatively high tolerance for math content, they are much more likely than the math finance journals to insist on empirical content, which tends to involve hard work (preferably done by RAs) but often also requires funding to get your hands on the data in the first place.
Last edited by bearish on September 23rd, 2015, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.