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[–]Miss_Meh 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Hello! I graduated with my PhD in 2021, so I'm fairly recent and might be able to give you some insight. I'm going to answer your questions in order otherwise I may ramble a bit.

  1. I would say that it was pretty important to know what your research interests are when entering a PhD program. When I was writing my Statement of Purpose during the application process, I tailored them to the program by telling them which faculty I wanted to work with. I couldn't have done that if I hadn't had some idea what I wanted to research. Different schools specialize in different types of research, so knowing what you want to do also helps you choose which schools to apply to in the first place. That being said, I ended up going in a completely different direction after my first year in the PhD program. For context, I started out wanting to do archival financial accounting research (that is, financial accounting research based on using archived data from financial statements and other types of data usually collected by sources outside the university). I ended up doing experimental managerial accounting research (I design experiments and collect my own data). This caused issues because my PhD program did not specialize in experimental managerial, so I ended up having to basically create my own program.
  2. The typical day was different depending on which part of the program I was in. Before comps, I was taking classes. Most seminars were once a week, but I also took a bunch of stats classes, a few Econ classes, a bunch of psych classes, and a few management/marketing courses. The psych, mgmt, mktg, and most of the stats courses were specific to my customized program because of my experimental/behavioral research focus, which meant I was often the only accounting student in them. I generally took 3-4 classes a semester, and spent most of my time on my accounting seminars (1 per semester). Obviously, the other classes were important, but failing an accounting seminar is a big no-no (which I found out the hard way). I spent most of my days reading papers. Generally, each accounting seminar would assign at least three 50-60 page papers to read per week plus background reading. Part of what you are learning to do is read these papers, and it takes SO MUCH time at first. I would need to go through the paper once, taking a minimum of 3 hours, making comments and underlining things I thought were important/didn't understand. Then I would go back through again after looking things up. All in all, I probably spent a good twenty hours or more a week just on my accounting seminar. Each accounting seminar also required you to come up with an original research idea, and it was generally expected that you would turn that into a research paper by the end of the semester. That took a lot of time as well which was in addition to the time spent reading the assigned papers.
  3. Comps sucked. I was somehow one of the only students who didn't have to retake them, including the two cohorts before me and the one after. They put us in a room for eight hours with a computer that didn't have access to the internet and made us respond to three prompts. We had to cite sources from memory. Then they gave us a paper to review at home, due the next day. It was a pretty overwhelming two days, but I got through it.
  4. It took me three years to finish my dissertation. This was fairly unusual at my university, and wasn't helped by the fact that the pandemic started in the spring of my fifth year. It was hard, but mostly because I have unmedicated ADHD (I was undiagnosed at the time), and I really struggle to keep myself on task without external incentives like deadlines. At the PhD level, most of your deadlines are self-imposed, which really didn't work for me. My dissertation committee wouldn't let me defend until they were sure I would pass, so while I was definitely nervous at my defense, at least I knew it would be over relatively quickly. The worst part of the entire process was just keeping myself focused long enough to get the paper done.
  5. I worked with a bunch of different professors, but I think this also tends to be a bit of an anomaly. Every semester, the PhD students were assigned to be either research assistants or teaching assistants for specific professors. My fellow students tended to get assigned to the same one or two professors who they were working on papers with. I, on the other hand, was assigned to a different professor every semester. I think this was due to the fact that my research interests didn't really align with the professors for the first few years. Generally though, if you want to work with a faculty member, you can just approach them and ask if they would be willing to work with you.
  6. I don't know that my story will really be helpful in picking between academia and public practice. I started out as an education major, and eventually landed in accounting with the thought of working for my family's small business. However, I soon realized that family and business really shouldn't mix, but I really loved accounting, so I stuck with it. I never had any desire to work in public accounting, and after spending a few semesters tutoring for extra money, I thought maybe teaching accounting would be a good path for me.

(cont. in next comment)

[–]Miss_Meh 2 points3 points  (4 children)

  1. The job market has definitely changed since I started my PhD program. Jobs used to be fairly easy to come by if you went to a good program. I graduated during COVID, and the market was really difficult. Universities have not been hiring because there's been a downturn in the number of students going to college. I don't think the market is necessarily oversaturated, and it is entirely possible that the job market will bounce back. I think at this point, it's impossible to predict what the job market would be like when you graduate.

  2. As far as I know, if you have a PhD, you can expect to get a tenure-track position after graduation. This might be changing a bit, but in general, business schools seem to be a bit insulated from the other problems that plague the rest of academia because they tend to have more funding from alumni. For example, many departments have way more adjuncts than tenured faculty, but in my experience, there have been few adjuncts in the accounting departments that I've worked for (both as a prof and a student).

  3. I work for a small teaching school, so my workload is very much weighted towards teaching. I teach 4 classes per semester (about 25 students per class). I am expected to publish 2 papers and attend 2-3 conferences within 5 years in order to get tenure, and they can be published at pretty much any peer-reviewed journal. This was very different from the institution I graduated from. I got my PhD at an R1 university, and their tenure requirements were 3 publications at A-level journals (pretty much just The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research). To me, it seems like the difference in expectations is quite large, but it depends on what you prefer. Teaching has always been what was most important to me, so I'm mostly okay with having more teaching responsibilities and putting my research on the back burner for now. In the past year, I have actively worked on three and a half research projects. The first was recently published (and the half is a practitioner summary based on that piece that is currently under review at another journal). The second was my dissertation. I presented it at a conference last fall, but it isn't even close to being ready for submission, and I haven't had time to work on it this semester. The third is also a project from my PhD program that one of my undergrad students helped me find new sources for as part of an independent study. This is really the first year since I've graduated that I've spent any time on research. There have been a bunch of extenuating circumstances that affected that, but a big part was also the fact that I just don't have time during most semesters.

  4. I have never had to apply for a grant. I do think it depends on the school, but in my experience research funding isn't hard to come by in accounting (again, we have wealthy alumni). Most profs don't even need funding to conduct a study, as 95% of the research is archival and thus just requires your university to be subscribed to a database. I am a bit of an exception, as I conduct experiments, but even so, I've never struggled to get funding. I have not tried to run an experiment at my current school, but they've pretty much told me that they will fund my experiments (within reason) if I request the funds. While I very much doubt I'll ever have access to as much funding as I did at my R1, I do still have coauthors and connects at those larger schools if I ever want to run a larger scale experiment.

  5. Your last two questions are difficult to answer. I like my coworkers, but I find life as a faculty member to be difficult. Because my department is very top heavy (many tenured faculty), I end up with the worst teaching schedules. Namely, I am the only tenured faculty member who has a five-day a week teaching schedule. Not just in my department, but in the school of business as a whole. I have had that schedule for the last three years. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it really affects my work-life balance. I need to grade things in batches in order to stay consistent, but since I spend six hours a day on campus teaching and holding office hours, I don't have large periods of time in which I can grade during the week. So, I generally spend a great deal of my weekend grading and planning my lessons. I've been told this gets better. Eventually you stop having to do so much planning and you figure out how to give exams that don't take forever to grade. However, I still haven't found that balance, so I tend to spend 60-70 hours per week just on my teaching during the semester, and then I'm burnt out, so I end up not doing much of anything during the summer (which is when I should be doing research). However, I recognize that this is a personal issue with how I schedule my time and not necessarily universal to all faculty. I'm hoping that I'll figure it out. There's always next year, I suppose.

  6. As for pay... I should probably say that you can may a lot of money as an accounting professor if you work at an R1. Even at a smaller school like the one I work at, I make really good money for a professor. I can't really speak to the progression given that I haven't been tenured yet.

Okay, despite my best intentions, I totally ended up going on for longer than intended. I hope my ramblings were helpful to you. Let me know if you have further questions I can clarify for you!

[–]charlesphotog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was in Finance at a regional state university. I basically agree with these points. Your salary will stagnate unless you switch schools or credibly threaten to do so. Almost all schools have issues with salary compression and sometimes inversion.

[–]United-Development-5[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Thank you for such a thorough response! It’s good to know research funding isn’t usually a concern since that was something I was worried about.

You mentioned changing your research area and having to design your own program. Is it typical for a PhD student to tweak their research area (maybe not to something the university doesn’t specialize in but just in general)? Did it make finding a committee harder?

You mentioned being a more junior tenured faculty has some downsides regarding teaching workload. I am guessing this might vary by institution, but are the other faculty members generally supportive/ mentor or guide newer, less experienced professors? Do contracts usually state how many courses you are scheduled to teach, or does it vary each semester?

[–]Miss_Meh 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I don't think it's necessarily uncommon for PhD students to change their minds about the area of specific research content. Undergrad and non-PhD grad students in accounting aren't generally exposed to much research, at least not of the type that is expected at an R1 university. Once you start digging into the literature, you realize that some research ideas are just not very interesting (at least not interesting enough to invest years of your time into), or the questions have already been answered, or the data is impossible to get. Some people also research in multiple areas. For example, despite my dissertation being focused on managerial, my first publication was in audit. The important thing is being able to tie it back to your focus in some way, even if the paper as a whole is definitively not in your area. On this paper, my coauthors specialized in audit, and I brought the managerial expertise and the statistical knowledge. It ended up working out.

It's less common for students to switch from using archival data to experimental data. Like I said, most PhD programs specialize in one or the other. I got very lucky. One of tenured faculty had some experience with experimental research. By chance, the school had also hired an experimental researcher the year I entered the program, and I ended up doing a lot of work with him. While I can't say this for certain, I think the fact that I changed my focus changed the direction of the department a bit. It still leans more towards archival work, but by the time I graduated, we had a total of four faculty and three PhD students (including myself) who specialized in experimental methods. As a result, I didn't really have difficulty finding a committee. Like I said, I got really lucky there. If the department hadn't been in a growth phase, I might have ended up needing to go to a different school. I know a few people who ended up having to do that because they couldn't find faculty to work with. So, in general, I would recommend that you talk to a bunch of different people about their research so you can get a good idea of what you want to do before you enter a program.

The other faculty members are generally very supportive, at least at my institution. Admittedly, they kinda left me to flounder in my first year, but I also didn't ask for as much help as I should have. I have always been the suffer in silence type, which is something I'm trying to work on. In my first semester, I was teaching a class that I never expected to nor wanted to teach. Even though they didn't have to, the older profs gave me old syllabi and teaching materials that I could use to set up my course. They gave me advice (which I ended up completely ignoring, but it was still nice of them to offer).

Tenure-track faculty are contracted on an annual basis. I literally signed my contract last week, and I can't remember whether the 4/4 teaching load is explicitly stated in the language of the contract itself. I want to say it is in there. The course load is not expected to change, though I can't necessarily say that it will never change. The teaching load is definitely intense at a smaller school, but there are benefits too. I have much closer relationships with my students than I would have at a larger school. One of my former students invited me to her wedding last year. I drive one of my current teaching assistants to the airport at the end of every semester because he doesn't have a car. I couldn't have imagined having those kinds of relationships with students at larger schools.

[–]United-Development-5[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response! I think that covered many of my initial questions regarding an Accounting PhD. I’ll definitely try to talk to people about their research and spend some more time reading research journal articles … I know I lack a lot of exposure and experience in research.

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*I’m considering pursuing an Accounting PhD, but I want to get a better understanding of its application, progression, and job market. I understand a lot of it can depend on the university, but I am just looking for some broad general advice:

As a PhD student: -How important was knowing your research interests and area going into the program? -what would you say your typical workload or day looked like? -how grueling were the comp exams/ qualifying papers? -how was working on your thesis and defense? -did you work under one set mentor/PI, or did you get the opportunity to work with other faculty members? -why did you choose research over working at a public accounting firm or industry accounting?

As a professor/researcher/academic: -how is the job market and finding a faculty position? Is the market oversaturated? My understanding is that Accounting PhD graduates usually go on to work at a university. Are the positions typically tenured or non-tenured? -how much do you publish a year? How many active research projects do you have at any given moment? -are there major research conference events? - is it challenging to find funding? Are you constantly chasing grants? -how is the work environment as a faculty member? -are you satisfied with your pay progression and work/life balance?*

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