Testmagicians, please evaluate my chances (Econ PhD)

[notacolour]

twity: Are you talking about UC schools, or what?

I wouldn't consider those to be particularly low scores, assuming quantitative is high.

[twity]

yale : 90 to 95 percentile ???

Uc???

Looking for innovation in marketing
but a very competitive dep...
[July02-May 04]
M. Tech. (Agricultural Systems and Management)
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, W.B., India.
CGPA : 8.94/10.0 (first rank in class)

[Aug 98-June02]
B. Tech. (Agricultural Engineering)
Punjab Agricultural Engineering, Ludhiana-141004
Project Work limited in this area





OCPA: 7.67 (second rank in class)

one year experience of working with a agroindustry giant's corporate social responsiblity project.

[Mex_Econ]

Originally Posted by Freethinker

Yes, those interests are logical taking into account your background. Good luck with the LACEA membership and with your apps!

About cutoffs, I'm sorry I couldn't find info for UC Berkeley, but UCLA's graduate econ site:

http://www.econ.ucla.edu/grad/

Look for the Admissions link. There you will see this:

"the Department considers only those with excellent academic records, GRE scores that average in the 80th percentile in verbal, 95 percentile in quantitative, and with a 5.0 in analytical, and those with outstanding letters of recommendation. TOEFL scores must be at least 260."

And I recall that I had read somewhere that the whole UC system had the 5.0 AWA cutoff, but don't take my word (I don't want to mislead you), contact the grad advisor!

Yesterday, I got my first response. A rejection letter form UC San Diego (by e-mail Feb 14th). Why on San Valentine's Day? (During my "romantic dinner" with my girlfriend I was trying to found out why I got this rejection and did not pay attention on our talk).

So, Freethinker I guess you are probably right about the cutoff in UC. Although I knew that before I submitted my application (http://ogsr.ucsd.edu/admissions/programs/program.asp?ID=13). May be they don't even review my whole application.

Min UCSD Me
Verbal 560 450
Quantitative 720 800
Analitical W 4.5 4.0

Well, I'll probably never know why this rejection and I prefer to think that I did not make the cutoff than I was rejected due to my entire application was not good enough (let's see my next responses).

Anyway, I applied to UCSD due the weather and because is near (about 40 min) to Tijuana (where I can buy plane tickets to home for just 100 USDs).

BTW, my research agenda didn't match theirs (Mine: Public Sector Economics, Theirs: Mainly Econometrics).

Now, I'm thinking that I have not a chance to get in a Univ ranked over UCSD (or even to go nowhere).

[no one knows]

Originally Posted by Mex_Econ

Now, I'm thinking that I have not a chance to get in a Univ ranked over UCSD (or even to go nowhere).

This is absolutely not true. Rankings are not a good predictor of where you can get admitted. Don't lose faith there is a lot of time and schools left!!

[Freethinker]

Mex_Econ, I agree with no_one_knows. It seems that the criteria for admission are rather quirky and you shouldn't lose heart since there is still a whole month of results.

In the case of the UC system, they seem to emphasize too much in the GRE test. Other univs are more likely to ignore the rest of the test if you have a sufficiently high GRE Quant score.

At that point, the rest of your profile should be much more important. In any case, I found it significant that you were aware that your research interests didn't match those of UCSD: If you saw this, the UCSD Adcoms surely saw it too.

BTW, sending on Feb 14th: cruel!

[klop]

Originally Posted by Mex_Econ

Anyway, I applied to UCSD due the weather and because is near (about 40 min) to Tijuana (where I can buy plane tickets to home for just 100 USDs).

BTW, my research agenda didn't match theirs (Mine: Public Sector Economics, Theirs: Mainly Econometrics).

Now, I'm thinking that I have not a chance to get in a Univ ranked over UCSD (or even to go nowhere).

I don't think you got axed simply because you stated that you're interested in public sector economics and not econometrics. UCSD is NOT just an econometrics department. They seem to be a fairly large department with a decent choice of concentrations available. According to US News and various other rankings, UCSD is a solidly a top 20 US economics department overall. They're very strong in econometrics but they're also considered a top 20 department by reputation and number of publications for many other fields, including but not limited to International Economics, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, etc. Getting into any top-20 economics program is extremely hard and the selection process seems fairly random to the outsider. Adding to this that this year US News ranked UCSD as a borderline top-10 economics department and the fact that San Diego is possibly the coolest college town in the US, I can imagine that their applicant pool was specially strong this year.