The Cambridge Judge Business School PhD programme
The Cambridge Judge Business School PhD programme is designed to:
- Prepare you for a rewarding academic career in a business school
- Enable you to research independently and contribute to ongoing debates
- Empower you to impact society through your research and engagement with business.
Masters + PhD structure
The route to a PhD consists of a nine-month masters degree, followed by a PhD degree of three to four years.
From the start of your masters degree, you’ll join one of eight PhD pathways. Each leads you to specialise in a particular discipline of Management Studies.
Financial support
All PhD and Master of Research students, as well as some MPhil research students, receive full funding through University or departmental scholarships.
Students in the fourth year of their PhD receive funding conditional on their progress.
We offer scholarships for UK and EU research students, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC).
The wider University of Cambridge offers additional funding sources for domestic and international students.
Hello, I’m Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville, and I’m the director of our PhD programme here at Cambridge Judge Business School. I’m glad you’re exploring the possibility of a PhD. And we’d like to tell you a little bit about how our programme works. The goal of the PhD is to train students who are aiming to become research oriented faculty members at one of the world’s leading business schools. We also aim to help you develop your own independent research and contribute to lively academic debates in the field of management and business.
Finally, it’s important in our programme that you develop research that has an impact on society through your deep engagement with real world business and organisational problems. It’s really important to know that we operate a little differently from some other programmes, and we do not have direct entry to our PhD programme. This is because the PhD is part of a five-year programme of study, which begins with one of our master’s degrees, either the MPhil or the MRes degree.
On your MPhil or MRes year, you’ll learn essential theories and methods needed to conduct research for PhD. As well, you will have a chance to explore if a PhD in a career as a research academic is the right one for you. When you complete an MPhil or an MRes with us, we also get to know you and you get to know us, meaning that in the first year of your PhD, you hit the ground running conducting research, while you also learn some additional essential methods and research literatures.
We will work closely with you as a PhD student to mentor you and developing your research skills and identity. Our PhD and research master’s students also benefit from the fact that Cambridge Judge Business School is a vibrant place for wider scholarly exchange. In addition to our own leading faculty members who regularly publish with students in top journals in their fields and who hold senior editorial positions with those journals, we also regularly host visitors from around the world who are doing cutting edge research. We hope this helps you consider if you will be a strong fit for our research programmes.