I am doing a DBA with a British university, part time. I am planning my next steps too. I think, if you are doing a PHD, first, you should not be going through newspaper for job vacancies. You should have a headhunter, you should have association, you should have lots of network, so that people know what you are doing. Also, if career is important to you, please choose the right Phd topic carefully and make sure that it has bright future instead of personal interest. For example, my thesis is Real Estate Finance - because I think Asia will have a property boom (or bust) and it will have lots of activities (I could of course be wrong...) )

For the 3 uni that I applied to,all of them asked the employer to sign off a form. It is a big investment, so the key is why do it?

If you are full time or self employed, you need to disclose it. The school is very strict. They receive over 1000 applications every year and only take 30-40 people because they need to allocate you to the right supervisors. And 1 professor can only supervise 2 PHD/DBA students. They dont have so many management related professors that suit everyone's interest. Based on past records, the drop out rate is 30-40% a year. So a class of 30 people usually left with less than 10 after 3 years. AND many people choose this school because they are strict.

The reason why they want the employer to sign the acknowledgement form is that if you miss the 1 week residency in UK, they will fail you i.e. you need to repeat the whole year. That is a 11,000 pound punishment. So, they make sure their asxx is covered.

I think many people underestimate the stress of doing a DBA. All of us are working and relatively senior in the company. Over 50% have children. Most of us do DBA because we want to publish or we want to write something new for our industry (I do it because I want people to call me Dr, so that I can lan si). I can assure you that if you are less than 30 years old with say 5-6 years experience, you will get no where with a DBA unless you are in consultancy business. But even if you do, you might as well invest that 5 years in your networking. That day one girl graduated with a PHD in Finance from University of Hong Kong (which is a good school), 28 years old asking for HK$20,000 salary. That is what you get if you dont plan your research degree properly......

A DBA with MBS will cost you around RM400k. A DBA with other foreign university will cost you around RM200,000. A world class MBA will cost you around RMB300k. If you are 30 years old, its either you just completed a MBA or you dont have an MBA. So it doesnt make sense for one to do a DBA at this age. If you are 30 with an MBA, you should try your very best to build your career, which is the reason or objective to get a MBA. The purpose of doing a MBA is to make money. I know it sounds terrible. But if an MBA does not make you a lot more money or open new doors for you, then the MBA is wasted (which is why you see that a lot of good schools compare their students pay before and after the course). Let me be a bit long winded. Assuming you work for big 4 accounting firms. After 4-5 years working, you realise that it is hard for you to switch into a good big firm (by that I mean, Google, JP Morgan, BCG go down all the way to Capitaland Singapore). You do a MBA with UCLA, that course is supposed to open doors for your investment banking (or consultancy) career or MNCs in Singapore or HK or Dubai or Sao Paolo. This is why you pay RM200-300k for a course. You want to make that money back. So, if you ask me, and I know it sounds harsh, one must not do a MBA with schools that rank outside of Top 50 in the world. Because it is a waste of money.

DBA is different. Assuming you are 30 years old. You tell your boss you want to go UK to study DBA (like me). He might sack you (he might not because Malaysian people are nice. But I might). If you go, who is going to do the work? At the age of 30, you are supposed to do handle a team/task, bring a deal back to the firm, build your network, fight and OT till 2 am etc. This has got nothing to do with whether one is overqualified or something like that. It simply means that you have not given your best in your career till you are so free that you can go do a DBA.

Just my view la...a lot more can be said on this.

This post has been edited by juniortok: Jan 22 2015, 01:17 PM

I understand our differences. I was merely encouraging those people who do a PHD/DBA to plan their career path too. Because I have seen a lot of people, especially those from Malaysia (myself included) being very passive in their career planning. We somehow have this attitude of "I study hard, and good job will come", which I see a lot of talent wasted.

There are of course people like you who prefer to stay on the academic side and focus on research. I respect that too, just that I wont do the same given my personality. I met a guy at a function around last year. He had been doing research into battery for 15 years, and you can imagine someone like me would have thought 'What a stupid topic. you have not got anything to do meh?'. The guy is now so rich because of the electric car boom in Asia......

So, you never know. ))

This post has been edited by juniortok: Jan 22 2015, 01:22 PM

No no no, I am very interested in my topic, otherwise, I wont do it. I might have written it in my replies to others etc. Dont know.

If you read it again, you will see that I just said we must plan the career or the publication side of things as well. Not just research.

Hahahah starbucki, I don't need to justify. Forum is meant to share personal experience, it's not consultancy. You make the best decision for you. ) u r the one asking, I was merely replying.

I actually notice the reverse. I found that many companies are hiring PHD now due to the Big Data trend. I was just having a drink with the MD of an online hotel booking last week, they hire 6 PHDs just to try different things (marketing experiment, data analysis). I dont know if he was drunk, he said that they pay these geeks US$300k p.a (not fresh grad, after a few years in the company). As long as you have good technical skill and build your network, you will find something interesting. I also know that various developers in China are hiring PHD to run their market analysis. Multi-factor model, elimination of noise and factor analysis seem to be the trend these days. If you read chinese, this is what is on the internet - starting pay is around RMB 400-500k for fresh PHD grads:

碧桂园集团“未来领袖计划”，一个为青年才俊量身定做的高端人才品牌项目，旨在吸引：地产相关专业博士，由碧桂园高管亲自担任导师，通过系统的复合式人才培养模式，将人才在最短时间内培养成企业中高级经理人。现在已有诸多来自哈佛、麻省理工、斯坦福、帝国理工、新加坡国立等海外名校，以及清华、同济、浙大、东南、天大等多所国内高校的优秀人才加入碧桂园。

This post has been edited by juniortok: Jun 16 2015, 12:11 PM

Ha ha ha, there are a lot of weird people on the internet....