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[musea]

As I troll the forums reading about people's experiences in applying to graduate school, I've read a lot about how positive it can be for applicants to have research experience in the form of research assistantships.  It occurs to me that I see a lot of internships for management, marketing, and accounting fields at my school...but not research assistantships.  We have several TA's in the PhD programs, but none of them seem to be RA's either.

So, how does a management-related field provide this experience to potential PhD students.  Is it just my school that doesn't have them?  I'm interested in pursuing a PhD in accounting...is work experience akin to research experience in terms of my learning to put technical concepts into practice or is there some other preparation I should pursue prior to applying?  I know I've read about the development of some "postdoc" programs in management-related fields...can anyone shed light on those?

Thanks, in advance, for any information you can share or light you can shed on this topic!!

[charlesr]

When I was in grad school usually we were RAs the first year and then became TAs.  Not many people had both types of assistantship simultaneously.

Based on my personal experience I would say that the dearth of undergrad business RAs stems from a lack of interest on the part of the students, few of whom are interested in PhDs, and from the students lacking relevant skills, such as programming or statistics.  I am in a quantitative business field.  The only assistance most undergrads could provide me is data entry.  That being said, if a student approached me about RAship I would be interested.

Ask some of your professors if there is anything you could do.