Fun with Econ: Would Steven Levitt get into MIT today?

[elhuevon]

Levitt replied:
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/200...-program-today

Nice work guys!

Now the real question: do we all (Levitt included) systematically underestimate how much luck was involved in our success and overestimate skill?

[Antichron]

That's awesome. Levitt posted a link to this thread on his blog:

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/

[econ_hopeful]

I wrote to Prof. Levitt through his Freakonomics e-mail to tell him about his thread here at TestMagic.

He also sent me a reply with additional details about his pre-graduate school profile:



For what it is worth, if you want to add it to the discussion:
I did work as a management consultant for two years before going back to get a Ph.D.

My only college math course was calculus 1a, the very first intro calculus course.

I got 800s on math and logic section of GRE.

My letter writers were Alberto Alesina, Philippe Weil (my thesis advisor), and one of my bosses at the consulting firm.

I got the NSF after my first year at MIT...I didn't know enough to apply to NSF when applying to grad schools.

I am told by the admissions people at University of Chicago that if I had applied there (I didn't), they would have thrown my application out before a faculty member ever saw it because I had too little math.

[snappythecrab]

hahaha, that's awesome

[andyecon]

That is so freakin' cool. TM rules the universe!

[no one knows]

Wow it is amazing how this thread turned up on that blog! What a small world!
*furiously checks all previous posts to find if he made a carrer ending faux pas in one of the threads*

Originally Posted by PseudoRandomThoughts

This is a 'counterfactual conditional', an 'unsolved' problem in philosophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolve..._in_philosophy

I was a philosophy major. Let me assure you that the whole discipline is an unsolved problem!

[OneMoreEcon]

Damn... I should have started this thread a few weeks ago so that we could all try to use our new Steven Levitt connection to network our way into the schools of our choice (or at least those schools he could help with).

Regarding crslr's post, I think Levitt has published more than that ranking makes it appear, probably in part due to the "top 30" journals it includes. There are rankings from RePec (http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html) that make Levitt look more prolific (probably due to his publishing in Poli Sci journals, and maybe some law journals). He ranks 86 overall and 162 for number of pages published (but I think this is based on entire career - at least the part available at RePec - so many ahead of Levitt have a few decades of publishing that he has to catch up to).

But it's also interesting to see that Daron Acemoglu ranks 11 for number of pages published, and he's been out of grad school for roughly the same time as Levitt. Not that our two most recent Bates Clark Medal winners are comparable in many ways.

[olhado]

i think its definitely the case that the amt of math needed for a first year econ grad sequence is totally overrated. while applying i had the **** scared out of me by professors and graduate students that an econ phd was just “math math math” all the time, but I haven’t really used anything but multivariable calc, linear algebra (all in greene appendix), and some rudimentary real analysis.

whether “math math math” is the way to get IN, well, i now think this might be overrated too (its definitely department specific). on the one hand, I know for a fact that I was rejected from one department specifically because of (lack of) math background. On the other, as a 1st year student in a top-10 program (not MIT), I’m underwhelmed by the mathematical sophistication of my classmates - of course, the top few are trained to the hilt, but that leaves another 20 or so that are all over the map. i’d say in almost everyone’s case, a good relationship with a letter writer seems to have been one, if not the, decisive factor.

(note to applicants – a nice letter from a prof who taught you is not immensely helpful. a summer research project with a – preferably tenured – faculty member who will write you a glowing rec at the end, now that’s where the big money is. and if you're like steve and can win a prize for your undergraduate thesis... well, then you're probably not in the position of having to strategize to get in anyway).