UCLA Anderson’s Ph.D. Steward

Earlier this year, UCLA Anderson Dean Tony Bernardo announced that Associate Professor of Marketing and Behavioral Decision Making Stephen Spiller would assume the role of faculty director of the school’s Ph.D. program. Spiller, who took over the position on July 1, succeeds Professor Marvin Lieberman, who served in the role since 2018.

Anderson’s world-renowned Ph.D. program produces graduates who go on to publish groundbreaking research, teach at prestigious universities and have successful careers in private and public industries. Spiller has long been involved in program. Since joining the faculty in 2011, he has served on 16 doctoral committees, including three as chair or co-chair. He has also served as Ph.D. liaison for the Marketing and behavioral Decision Making areas, taught multiple iterations of three different doctoral seminars and been involved in numerous doctoral symposia.

A distinguished scholar, Spiller received the Association for Consumer Research’s Early Career Award in 2019 and the Eric and E Juline Faculty Excellence in Research Award in 2018. He was named a 2017 MSI Young Scholar and a 2023 MSI Scholar, and was a finalist for best paper awards from the Journal of Marketing Research (2018) and the Journal of Consumer Research (2020). His research focuses on the psychological processes governing how consumers plan, allocate and represent their time and money.

Q: Why don’t you start by describing your responsibilities?

I’m trying to be a responsible steward of the program. All of the hard work comes from the students and from the faculty teaching the courses and doing the mentoring. That’s what makes the program great, it’s where the quality really comes from. I get to be in the fortunate position to take a 30,000-foot view of the program to see if there are adjustments we can make in order to enable everything to proceed smoothly.

On that front, there are a number of different dimensions we’re working on. We want to ensure that we have the program structure in place to enable successful progression, to see that we’re getting the right students in the door, that we’re helping them in their coursework and enabling them to have what they need to be successful and eventually take Anderson’s research culture out into the world.

Q: Is there a typical Anderson doctoral student?

The students come from a variety of backgrounds. Some have done prior research. Some have spent time in industry consulting. Some come straight from or nearly straight from their undergraduate schools. It’s a highly competitive application process that’s very selective.

We consider the students’ academic history. We review what they’re proposing their research moving forward might be, what sorts of problems they’re interested in, who they’re interested working with.

And what we’re really asking ourselves is, “Is this someone who’s going to be able to make an impact in the research world?” And then we try to support and develop their ideas once they’re here. It’s a fully funded program, so students receive a full tuition and a stipend. They also work as teaching assistants during their program, so they get to develop both their research side as well as exposure to what it would be like to teach in an MBA classroom.

Q: What are the parameters of the program?

We have somewhere around 80 Ph.D. students at any one time across all the different academic areas of the school. They are training for roles to conduct independent research that advances our understanding of a variety of issues in the management world.

It’s designed as a five-year program, so it is a long, meaningful investment by the students in their careers and by the school in the students. From the research perspective, the program is also a big draw for faculty. It’s an opportunity to work with great Ph.D. students and to engage in a meaningful mentoring process that extends not just over the years that students are here, but often as they go out to other leading business schools. That mentorship relationship continues for years to come.

Typically, the program begins with about two years of coursework, and then the students move into defining what their dissertation research will be, and that really is what launches their research agenda for maybe a decade — when they start to scope out how they’re going to make their mark in helping us understand critical problems and their solutions.

Q: How are students in different areas of study accommodated?

There are differences among how the eight areas of study in the Ph.D. program work. Each of them has their nuances, and there are slight differences in how those programs operate.

So, different skill sets and elements of training are required for these different programs. But there are shared commonalities across programs, too. For example, students across several of the more quantitative areas in the school take a shared econometrics core sequence that enables their statistical training. Having it shared across multiple areas rather than each area independently repeating it for their own students affords the best training possible. Along those lines, I started a course a few years ago teaching data analysis geared toward students engaged in more of a psychology tradition of research.

We’ve seen some movement over the past few years in places where we have the opportunity to find commonalities and build on strengths across areas rather than each of them operating as a separate independent silo. I would like to see what more we can we do in that direction to try to build these links across different areas.

Q: Anderson’s MBA students often focus on team assignments and, by their nature, MBA programs lend themselves to networking. What’s it like in the doctoral programs?

There’s absolutely a strong a strong sense of a cohort. But I would say that there may be less bonding from networking, and more from a formative set of research relationships that students carry with them for decades to come. It’s considerably smaller than the MBA program and so it has a close-knit feel to it. There might be only a couple of students admitted to an area within a year, and they and the students just ahead of and behind them form this tight bond that serves as a network to rely on. It forms a strong, bonded cohort, perhaps more so than what we would otherwise think in a traditional career.

It’s an intense program and there are long hours involved. The coursework can be very difficult. The research process itself has a few rewards, spaced out at long intervals, with lots of rejections and negative feedback throughout, just in the course of submitting papers.

And because of that, often the close-knit cohorts within a Ph.D. program serve as social support for one another. You make strong connections that last you throughout your career.