Amidst trips to Scotland and Anchorage and visits from family, I've been preparing for my "special field exam," which was looming over my head all summer. The special field exam consists of you reading a boatload of papers, and then you get to sit in a room with three professors for an hour and a half while they ask you questions about the papers. If you do well enough, you pass and you officially become a "Ph.D. Candidate," which means that the only thing left to do to get a degree is write a dissertation. If you don't pass, then a Ph.D. might not be right for you. As it turned out, my reading list was 240 papers long (covering behavioral, corporate, and consumer finance), with each paper averaging about 40 pages or so of pretty dense material. After slogging through all of that reading all summer, I took my test the last day that Brady and McCall were here and passed! Wahoo!
Since I didn't get an MBA before coming to Harvard, I still have to take 5 MBA classes in addition to writing a dissertation. I started getting those out of the way this semester, which began yesterday. I've got three classes this semester: Financial Intermediaries, Private Equity, and Entrepreneurial Finance. As I posted before, MBA classes are vastly different from Ph.D. classes, and I still feel like I'm getting the hang of them. I think if I switch to my snappy dress shirts and polish up my Excel skills I should be fine. Should be exciting!
7 comments:
Way to go! Ryan had to take a qualifying exam for his phd, and it was a beast as well. Glad you passed!
Congratulations!! I'm sure it still seems like a long road ahead of you, but you are sure truckin' down it!
Paul says:
"That's not a picture of Ben!"
(with great disappointment in his voice.)
And he says:
"Way to go, you stud."
Congrats on all that hard work and on passing the field exam. Sounds horrifying to me.
Conggrats, Ben! What an accomplishment. Hope to see you sometime on the HBS campus.
Yay Ben Master of Economics!!!
Congrats! I am excited for you! Good luck with the rest of your work.
Yeay! Good job. That sounds like a big step forward! But I can't say I'm surprised that you passed because you're a smart guy and you know how to work hard--you're a winner! (Right? Jenn didn't you have a mantra like that that you used to recite?) You're BOTH winners and I have no doubt that you will be successful in anything that you set out to do!
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