Career prospects: What to do after your Master's or Doctorate at FGV

Completing a master's or doctorate is an important milestone, but it also brings with it an inevitable question: what are the next steps? To answer this question, Mário Dota, former student of the academic doctorate in economics at the São Paulo School of Economics (FGV EESP) and professor of economics at the São Paulo School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP), and José Carlos Nogueira, former student of the Professional Master's in Economics and Finance at FGV EESP.

They shared their experiences and perspectives on careers, academic life and the challenges after graduating.

Check out the full interview below:

What are the career prospects when you finish a master's degree?

José - The career prospects are that you have a natural progression, given the technical qualifications you now have, and that you can also enjoy an academic career since there is the possibility of studying for a doctorate after finishing your master's degree.

Mário - When you finish a doctorate, your career prospects are similar to those when you finish a master's degree, except that with a doctorate you've delved a little deeper into research issues, so this enables you to work either in the market or in academic life at universities or research institutes with theoretical applied research according to the demands of the area you've specialized in.

After your master's degree, is it worth doing a doctorate?

José - I think that if I want to continue in academic life and do a doctorate, I'll go much deeper into the quantitative part, right, the quantitative analysis of what you've been researching. The next step for my career after my master's would be to go deeper and make this part of quantitative analysis even stronger.

What's teaching life like?

Mário - I think teaching is a life full of challenges. The part of teaching is transmitting knowledge, right, one of the roles of the academy is to preserve and transmit knowledge, and the other part is to generate new knowledge, which you do through research. So the teaching life has these two spheres that are always in contact with each other

José - It's a life in which you, as a student, have to have a very strong discipline in order to be able to take all three of these sides of your professional, academic and personal life as naturally as possible, so you always have to control the activities of your day very well and never let anything that might happen during your day pass you by.

What are the career leaps?

Mário - Specialized manpower in a country like Brazil is still quite rare, so a differentiation such as a master's degree or a doctorate can make a lot of difference and can help your career progress quickly.

José - I was able to make a leap forward at the end of my master's degree, I was able to change jobs and practically double my salary. It was something very significant and relevant to my career, both professionally and academically.

See the full interview below:

This article is part of the series Beyond Academia, see the other contents of the Series below:  

• Scholarships: Find out more about the models available for Masters and Doctorates
• Master's degree: See how it's possible to combine work and study during the course
• Master's and Doctorate: How the choice of research lines and electives impacts an academic career
• Internationalization: The impact of master's and doctoral degrees on professional careers