Program Benefits

The Smith PhD Initiative includes a number of components designed to offer its doctoral students an unprecedented degree of compensation, resources and benefits. These include:

• Stipends: Incoming PhD students will benefit from a stipend of $24,500 during the academic year and, contingent on satisfactory progress demonstrated during the year, supplemented by a Dean's Summer Fellowship of $8,000 -- totaling an annual stipend of $32,500. Renewal of this stipend and summer fellowship can occur for up to five years and is contingent on satisfactory progress each year toward completing the doctorate degree.  Additional stipends will be available for doctoral students who advance to candidacy within three years and who publish in top-ranked "A" level academic journals.
• Travel and Research Support: In order to increase doctoral students' research output and improve placement prospects, doctoral students will have travel-related costs (transportation, lodging, food, conference registration fees) covered-- up to two conferences a year-- when their papers (as co-authors with faculty or as solo-authors) have been accepted on the programs of prestigious rigorously peer-reviewed professional conferences. Additionally, once the global economic crisis has eased, doctoral students will be provided additional funds to use for purchasing research-related resources that are unavailable on campus or unobtainable in other ways that the students need to be maximally productive in their scholarly work. Essential research-related resources such as a personal computer, computer support-services if needed, private cubicle with desk- and filing-cabinet storage are provided to doctoral students up through the fourth year in the program. Additionally, the PhD Program Office space provides students with private conference rooms (with beautiful views of campus), private kitchen facilities, including oven, stove, microwave, and a purified water dispenser (that is continually refilled).
• State-of-the-Art Facilities: PhD students will enjoy a dedicated suite and offices in a newly completed wing of the Smith School’s Van Munching Hall, opened January 2008. The PhD space was funded by William A. Longbrake, a 1976 doctoral alumnus now vice chair of Washington Mutual.

The Smith School’s PhD program, rated # 13 in the world and # 6 in the U.S. by the Financial Times (2008), has grown in both numbers and reputation over the past 10 years. The doctoral program is global and attracts a very diverse group of PhD students. Right now there are approximately 100 students who represent 17 countries; about 69 percent are international and about 46 percent are women.

In recent years, graduates from the doctoral program have been placed in such institutions as:

• Georgetown University
• Indiana University
• University of Toronto
• Instituto de Empresa
• McGill University
• Nanyang Technological University
• National Taiwan University
• Notre Dame
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• University of California/Davis
• University of California Los Angeles
• University of Iowa
• University of Minnesota
• University of Southern California

Students regularly present papers at national as well as regional conferences and have papers accepted in major academic journals. Over the past five years, 99 percent of Smith’s PhD students have been successfully placed directly after they graduate—about 80 percent as tenure-track assistant professors at an accredited university, and the rest as researchers in either private or governmental organizations.