School List Update

Rather than narrowing down my previous list of 16 psychology programs this weekend, I have actually added in four others - Michigan, Illinois, Penn, and Cornell. These schools have decision-making programs that look interesting but that I didn't include in my earlier round when I was focusing on social psychology. Oops.

I would not have guessed that Ohio State has the #3 ranked social psychology program in the country (per US News &World report), but I had thought the program looked fantastic (at least for my interests) on their web site. Hmm, I wasn't expecting Ohio State to be a "reach" school. (Regardless of how much one believes that these rankings reflect the actual quality of the schools, they do constitute an important part of our shared, constructed reality about which schools are very good/desirable and which are less so. Even if you believe that the rankings are mostly a reflection of how good psychology professors think these schools are, and what the hell do they know about hundreds of different schools, the rankings still matter, since one's job prospects in academia are greatly influenced by the perception of how good your school was.)

After many, many tedious, headache-inducing hours, I have looked at 30 of the 57 marketing PhD programs on my list also. God, so many of these programs sound terribly boring. There's a surprising amount of variation in the background requirements of these programs - some are extremely quantitatively oriented and want a lot of math (application of social psychology - use percentage of current students who are Asian men as a proxy for the degree to which the program selects on and emphasizes mathematical ability over all else; Robert has independently come to this same conclusion with economics programs), some require a masters degree (preferably an MBA), and a few require competency in a programming language (this is usually for those taking the quantitative track rather than the behavioral track I am interested in). And the programs themselves vary a lot too, of course, but it's often hard to really tell much about the details from what they put online. I would like to be able to use the criterion "Immediately reject any program that will require me to take financial accounting, principles of management, or business policy and strategy" but the schools can be damn cagey about the specific requirements of fulfilling the programs. Failing that, I would like to just eliminate them all from consideration, but I don't know that I can do that yet. I had almost gotten to that point when I read some information for students interested in consumer psychology that strongly suggested we look at marketing programs rather than just psychology programs. So OK. There may be a couple of them worth looking at very carefully and eventually applying to. The process of getting there is turning out to be rather painful, however. And I've only done even a cursory glance at about half of the schools listed. I may have reached the point where I need to get serious about the remaining schools left to investigate and just decide, No, there is no way that this program could be better enough than the ones I've already identified as serious candidates to justify my having to live in Mississippi. Hell, I am willing to do that right now. 2 down. 25 to go.