关于北美商科PHD申请的一些建议

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最近发现问问题，寻求定位的人很多，但是发现很多同学确实不了解phd申请……下面这些是我今年年初回复一个帖子的内容（基于我自己的见闻和经历），觉得现在可能对很多同学有帮助，尤其是那些打算以北美master为跳板，或者即将或者已经拿到北美master正在申请phd的人。祝大家今年申请好运。

1.  Your undergrad GPA, your TOEFL, your GMAT are all very very important. For some schools, they care more about your undergrad performance than your grad performance. These scores will be key factors determining whether you could pass through the screening process. At the same time, try your best to get the highest gpa you can for your master study. It will help if you do not have an outstanding undergrad GPA. Gmat should be at least over 700. For top 20 schools, an over 750 gmat score is very common among chinese applicants. TOEFL should be well above 100.

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2. Work with professors on some research projects. It'll be better if your master degree requires a thesis. If not, get yourself involved in some serious research projects that your professors are doing, or expose yourself to as many research opportunities as you can.

3. Regarding referrence letters, although this time you may be able to get them from US professors, you have to make sure that these letters are not useless. Lots of professors in US universities will agree to write you referrence letter if you take their classes, but they will just simply write down their evaluation based on your performance in class. Don't forget that the admission committee is more interested in your research potential, so you'd better have at least one referrence letter emphasizing your research ability, which means you need to find out one professor who could evaluate your research ability.

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4. Read more papers, get to know your research interests better before you apply for the phd and the people who are doing similar research as your interests in the field. Now that you've got a master's degree, people are expecting you to have a better sense on the kind of research you want to do than undergrad students.

5. Spend more time on writing your statement of purpose.

6. Do more research on the b-schools that you are going to apply for. Try to read through each professors' research interests, and at least some of their recent publications. One suggestion I got from my former advisor is that you should not only go for the big names, you should go for the most productive professors in the field.

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7. Be optimistic and confident (but not over confident) all the time.

8. No one knows you better than yourself. Before asking any questions here, please do some research on previous application cases on this forum or check the admits' backgrounds on each schools' websites.

Good luck! ;D