Jeffrey Larson
Doctoral Candidate of Marketing
The Ph.D. Experience
Nobody grows up saying they want to be a business school professor, so almost everyone in a business PhD got there through a serendipitous series of events. My experience was no exception. I came to Wharton after an undergraduate degree in statistics. I found that my planned career in actuarial science (crunching numbers for insurance companies), while a good lifestyle career, was not inherently rewarding. When I learned that marketing professors got to use statistical models to investigate exciting problems, I knew it was the route for me.
Of course, the first semester in a PhD program is always difficult. For most people, it’s their first experience being among a group of people who are in many ways smarter than they are. Despite the difficult schedule, I immediately started a research project with Eric Bradlow and Peter Fader. Due to Wharton’s many practitioner connections, we had a brand new dataset that followed people’s travel paths through the grocery store. It was one-of-a-kind data, and we were the only ones with access to it. Eric and Pete were determined to help me get my publication count started early, and pushed me at every step. It was exciting when the paper was finally accepted for publication and I received calls from reporters and radio hosts to comment on the paper.
Throughout my first two years, I was astonished at the breadth of interesting problems being worked on by marketing professors. Statistical modeling wasn’t the only option. One could be an economic modeler, an experimental psychologist, a statistician, an anthropologist, or a combination of them all. I became increasingly interested in behavioral decision theory, a field that seeks to describe human decision behavior in its true state, rather than in the sweeping normative assumptions of economics. Only at a place like Wharton, with the faculty’s experience in such a wide array of subjects, could I have been given the option to transition from being a modeler to an experimentalist. The transition has not been easy, but because of the faculty’s support, as well as the number of courses offered by the many related departments, I was able to take courses in both statistical modeling and behavioral foundations, without short-changing either one.
A marketing PhD is not for everyone. It requires a lot of hard work and discipline, as well as an ability to find new and unexplored areas of study. But for those who, by fortuitous circumstance, end up here, know we have found a field with many exciting areas of study, and the flexibility to add knowledge to all of them.
