Balance your coursework and research with the right resources
At Gies, the Accountancy PhD program involves a full-time integrated program of coursework and research. A faculty mentor together with the Director of the PhD program will meet with incoming students to determine customized course plans, including the option of early registration in the summer to secure any necessary math, economics, or accounting background courses.
Courses that set you up for success in research and the classroom
Coursework during the PhD program provides an in-depth understanding of the accounting environment. This is necessary for identifying accounting questions and problems that are interesting from a research standpoint. Meanwhile, underlying theories and research tools frequently originate from source disciplines such as economics, finance, psychology, and statistics.
Thus, the Ph.D. program is designed to provide you with a blend of accounting and source discipline courses. Moreover, the program incorporates many electives providing students the flexibility to support their specialized research interests.
Making your research development our priority
Program requirements ensure that students start performing research-related activities early in the program. A point of emphasis is the development of co-authored projects among doctoral students and faculty members. Our current group of Illinois doctoral students and faculty members have about 20 co-authored research papers. Many of these papers are targeted to and published in the top accounting journals in our field. To facilitate and enhance our collaborative environment, we offer many platforms where students can present their working papers and ideas to the faculty and other doctoral students and receive helpful comments.
The culmination of the program is a dissertation, which provides students the opportunity to develop an original research paper that contributes to the accounting literature. Most of our admitted students complete the entire program in five years.