Helping students see themselves as PhDs speaks to the core of what teachers do. “We’re helping someone project a future,” says Charles Lee. | Illustration by Yifan Wu
Stanford GSB’s predoctoral fellowship is helping the next generation of academics jumpstart their careers.
In 2015, Zanele Munyikwa had a tough decision to make. As a computer science major at Duke, she was torn between heading straight into a PhD program in the emerging field of computational social science — or taking a two-year detour with the Stanford GSB Research Fellows Program. She chose the latter and joined the second cohort of Research Fellows.
“The PhD’s already a long journey, and a pre-doc lengthens that,” Munyikwa admits. “But I felt this combination of coursework and research would help me figure out what I was interested in.”
She was right, and credits the Stanford program with giving her clarity. Munyikwa eventually received a PhD in information technology from MIT Sloan School of Management. “The second time I applied to graduate school was much more targeted toward a specific set of research topics and career goals,” she says.
In the Stanford program, prospective PhD students acquire skills and experience by taking graduate-level coursework and helping Stanford GSB faculty with research. The goal is to strengthen the pool of PhD students — and eventually, the faculty pipeline — with close mentoring relationships and practical research experience. The combination of mentoring, experience, and Stanford coursework also bolsters fellows’ applications to highly competitive business PhD programs.
“It’s a way to have another asset in your application,” said Juliette Coly, another fellow who’s now working toward a PhD in Economics at Stanford.
While there’s no shortage of pre-doctoral programs, the Stanford program distinguishes itself with its objective to make PhD programs accessible to more students. For Munyikwa, the program did more than prepare her academically — it helped her see herself in academia. “Having someone who looks like me in a faculty position matters,” she said.
Read the full, original story to learn more about the Stanford GSB Research Fellows Program.
