The job market for academic positions in finance is focused on the annual American Finance Association meeting in January. Newly minted Finance PhDs use the conference, which was held this year in New Orleans, to meet face to face with potential employers.
Sébastien Michenaud was pleasantly surprised to receive a positive response to roughly half his applications. Indeed, he received so many interview offers he could narrow his sights and focus only on the very top Schools in the US and Europe.
Those interviews resulted in no fewer than 7 offers for assistant professorships in North America alone. Sébastien set out on a 4 week interview tour before finally choosing the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University in Houston.
How did he decide, given such a wide field of choice? "I preferred [the Rice offer] over the alternatives because of the young, dynamic faculty and the prestige of this small private university".
Last year, Sébastien won the Swiss Finance Institute Doctoral Prize for his work on the impact of financial analysts on corporate decision making. His doctoral work is supervised by Professor François Degeorge, Swiss Finance Institute Research Fellow and professor of Finance at the University of Lugano.
