Why I chose Doctoral studies
Mo Zheng is a doctoral student at the Department of Real Estate and Construction Management. Her research is within the field of Building and Real Estate Economics.
Why did you apply for doctoral studies?
I decided to be a doctoral student in a foreign country in order to acquire a higher-level international profile. I have been working in the real estate industry for several years and during that time, I realized that there were so many interesting topics that I wanted to investigate deeper. Being a doctoral student and doing research became the best and the most suitable option. Additionally, obtaining a PhD degree is considered the standard career path in my family.
What did you do before?
I enrolled in the master's programme of Real Estate and Construction Management in KTH 2009. I found an internship as a Luxury Properties Market Executive in the largest developer in Singapore in the Spring 2011 and suspended my studies. After my internship, I was recommended by the Vice Director of FEO to Citibank Singapore as a Home Financial Services Analyst doing individual mortgage risk control, then worked for United Bank Overseas Ltd. as a Business Financial Manager. In 2014, I had collected all the necessary data for my Master thesis, and during the thesis writing process, I found my true passion of doing research and applied for doctoral studies.
What do you want to do after having completed your doctoral degree?
I hope to continue doing my research and work as a researcher in KTH or another Swedish university. But practising what I have learnt during the past few years in the Swedish real estate industry is also an ideal direction.
What do you do on a regular day at KTH?
As a doctoral student in real estate economics, I need to take 90 credits - around 12 courses. In the first two years, I had many courses and spent most of the time doing the course assignments until mid-May. June and July are generally the academic conference season when you have the opportunity to bring your paper to conference and get feedback from top researchers and professors. Starting from the third year, I had been testing different software such as Stata, Matlab and R in my research. Every day I spend half of the time on the construction of econometrics models and testing the validity of the models. As a doctoral student, you do your own research and arrange your own schedule mostly, which requires discipline. And there are always rejections, failures and bugs in the research, so you really need to have the passion for doing it!
What is your project about?
My current paper is about applying both univariate and multivariate approaches to forecast the volatility, dynamic correlations and spillover effects of Swedish Real Estate Sector Index (OMX Stockholm Real Estate PI) from January 1st 2000 to January 1st 2018. For example, we have historical data, could we forecast the index for the next 30 days? There are ups and downs in the index, what caused the changes? If there are breath-taking news about the real estate industry in the US, how long does the news take to impact the Swedish market? Do the indexes of Scandinavian countries affect each other? If there is a big drop in the Swedish Index, does it have spillover effects of neighbour countries? Etc.
What do you think is the best thing about being a doctoral student?
I love playing with models and numbers, so I am extremely happy about what I am doing as a doctoral student every day. It feels like my career is merging with my hobby which is perfect. Moreover, I am working with smart people and the best researchers in my field. It is a super equal working environment and you don’t have to think about managers, hierarchies or gender.