Executive Ph.D. in Business Administration, Dr. Stephanie Royce - Oklahoma State University

Hi I'm Stephanie Royce and I'm the Director of the Executive PhD program. Okay and do you mind going a little bit into detail about the PhD program, how it differs from the regular PhD in Management program? Yeah well here at Oklahoma State, you can get a PhD in Business Administration, and maintain your full-time job. So the executive PhD program is a three-year program, it's pretty condensed. It goes year round, spring, summer, and fall semester. The way it differs mainly from a traditional PhD, it's the same 60 hours taught by the same faculty, but because it is compressed into three years, the students typically don't have as much opportunity to do as in-depth research. Therefore when they graduate they may or may not have as many publications and don't have as much research experience.

Okay so when they're coming into this program, what type of candidate are you looking for? The candidates typically are very high achieving, mid-career, not necessarily executives, even though we call the executive program. It's really a program for working professionals. It's people typically mid-career that are thinking "what do I want 

to be when I grow up? or after my career, after I kind of start slowing down.." and many people say "I think I want to go into Academia, higher education and teach students. Bring my experience from industry, into the classroom," and it's a very valuable thing for universities to have.

Do you mind going over the structure of this program? Well it's hybrid format, and it's formatted specifically to accommodate working professionals, different from the traditional PhD program where the students reside here on campus, and live here full time, and go five years. It's compressed into three years. The way we do it is, students come to campus once a month for a residency. It's three days typically Thursday Friday and Saturday and then in between those residencies they have synchronous and asynchronous courses. Either Zoom meetings with their cohort or pre-recorded lectures and then when they come into campus they collaborate with their classmates and their faculty. One of the really special things I think about the program is it's a cohort based program, so these residencies when they come to Stillwater, typically they're in class all day long so it's pretty intense but then there's receptions in the evening, opportunities to collaborate with faculty.

How does this program differ from the other PhD or executive PhD programs? Well there's really not that many executive PhD programs offered in the U.S. There's maybe a handful. What makes ours really, I think, stand out is that we are ACSB accredited and we are an R1 research institution so that with that brings a lot of credibility with the degree program, and like I said, there's just not that many in the United States.