PhD Program

Advice From Students

Lynn Wu
Second-year PhD in Information Technologies

The difference between being a doctoral student and an undergraduate student is the change in structure. Undergraduate and masters programs tend to have a more rigid structure, while doctoral students have more freedom to explore different research topics. Most of what you learn prepares you to do cutting-edge research in you area of interest. Even doctoral students within the same department take different classes, depending on your interests, so it is important to know your passion and design a curriculum that bests suits your research needs.

The best aspect of the MIT Sloan PhD program is its interdisciplinary nature. In my first year, I was exposed to many topics outside of my areas of expertise, and I was able to look at my research from novel angles. Because the other PhD students at MIT Sloan have vastly different backgrounds, they often provide me with novel perspectives, and their constructive criticism has been critical to my recent publication.

Zev Eigen
PhD candidate, Institute for Work & Employment Research

The MIT Sloan PhD experience is different for everyone, even within a subsection of a department. This makes the program uniquely challenging as a broad gamut of approaches, philosophies, methodologies, and subjects of research sometimes comes into focus simultaneously, but often in complementary ways.

The result is a bountiful buffet that suits those who prefer self-service to being spoon-fed from a limited menu. There are clearly trade-offs and pitfalls to this approach, but for the most part, I feel like one of D.H. Robertson's “islands of conscious power” in an ocean of “unconscious cooperation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk.”