harshdod7 wrote:
Looking for Ph.D. in Financial Economics/Finance/Economics
BE-Industrial Engineering (GPA- 7.3/10.0)
MBA-Finance (GPA- 8.5/10.0)
At present MPhil-Finance (On Scholarship)
India
No Work Ex (Two internships)
GMAT: 700 Q49 V35
Six Sigma Black Belt
Kindly suggest a list of colleges.
Thank You.
List of colleges is the kind of thing people usually can't really provide you for a PhD.
A good choice of colleges to apply for a PhD is basically the combination of two things: generally the overall strength of your profile, and specifically how well do you match with programs you are applying.
The information you have provided give us some idea about the general strength of your profile. Again, it is not bad, but I don't see anything extraordinary. For other things they would be impressive, but for a PhD not that much. I think it really will depend on the results you get from your current MPhil to see if your profile is stronger than it seems. If you are able to get more research experience instead of just a thesis (an academic conference presentation, for example), and if you are able to get strong letters of recommendation from well-known professors. If you can't get any of that, things are harder.
For Finance and Economics, successful applicants are usually extremely good at the quantitative side, so even a Q49 is pretty average for them. It's crazy, I know, but at least some top schools expect to see a perfect Q51. I'm a Marketing PhD student, but I take some quantitative courses at the Department of Economics and my GMAT Quant score is also 49. And I am one of the worst in class for the Economics courses, my grades are about the mean of the class minus one standard deviation (so, well below average). And no, that's not because I'm a Marketing guy, as my career was focused on Finance before the PhD (my MSc was in Finance, for example).
That's the easy part I can tell you. But I can't help you about matching with a program, not enough to provide suggestions of colleges. What you have to do is to understand what are your research interests, and then look for the faculty whose interests are similar to yours. And then see what schools those researchers work for. And then guess if your strength is enough to get into those schools. And then see other aspects of matching, like location, value of stipend considering your financial needs, and so on. That's a lot of work that requires a deep understanding of who you are.