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Preparatory Masters in Economics (Pure & Applied) for Economics PhD


fylgja

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Hello, everyone! I am one of those numerous students who did poorly as an undergraduate, but remain interested in pursuing an economics PhD.

 

(1) I would like to try my hand at economics once more by completing a relevant Masters to improve my profile. My position is that my bachelor's results were an aberration due to external factors, and is supported by a much better performance in a one-year (taught and qualitative, unfortunately) Masters program in political economy. How would Masters adcoms assess this argument?

 

(2) From browsing this forum, I am aware that Masters from the Canadian Big 4 (UBC, Toronto, Queens, UWO) and Oxbridge, LSE and UCL in the UK all have good PhD placement records. Are there any such preparatory Masters in the US, excepting one I already know of at Duke? What about on the European continent?

 

(3) I would also be happy to do a similar program in an applied field, like the Master of Environmental Science in Economics at Yale. Again, what other programs would offer good preparation for an economics PhD? Apart from resource and environmental economics, I have research interests in behavioral, economics of education, political economy, and interdisciplinary work.

 

Finally, I am open to any suggestions of related fields whose doctoral programs might be more forgiving of a weak quantitative transcript. For example, the PhDs in political economy at HKS and Stanford are on my radar, as well as that in social science at Caltech discussed in another recent thread.

 

Thank you all for your time in advance!

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Modern economics is quantitative, and behavioral/political economy are in fact even more technically oriented than most other fields in economics once you take out experimental studies. Performance in qualitative courses will do absolutely nothing to help your admissions, and will likely be an additional negative signal within economics admissions, both at the doctoral level and master's level.

 

Some of your targets are misinformed; the PhD programs in PEG at Harvard, Political Economics at Stanford GSB and Social Science at Caltech are some of the most theoretically (read: mathematically) oriented economics programs in the US. The first is essentially equivalent with the PhD in Economics at Harvard in terms of coursework requirements; the latter two specialize in pure microeconomic theory applied to (American) political science and they will almost certainly only admit people with an exceptional background in pure mathematics and graduate level economic theory. Those programs are on the opposite end of what you should aim at.

 

You should instead target public policy PhDs if you are interested in using empirical quantitative methods (possibly with a combination of other methods) to study applied economic topics. A master's in public policy is a feasible (though not optimal, but you don't have a lot of choices) route to such programs. It will also give you outside options in case you realize academia or quantitative work isn't your goal.

Edited by chateauheart
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Don't let someone on here talk you out of economics if that's what you want to do, though I agree that policy programs might be a good fit. Send a round of apps to masters programs and see if you get in. While you wait for decisions improve your profile by taking math. Then you can decide if you want to try again once results are in. There are lots of masters programs in the us, but they are discounted on here because they aew more expensive than euro and Canadian ones and don't routinely send graduates to top programs. But if you believe in yourself you could check out your instate schools. If you get a 4.0 load up on maths and produce great research who knows where you could end up. At the very least it will improve your profile for policy programs.
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I have the same profile:

Not good grades in B.Sc. -> MBA (Qualitative) -> 3 Advanced econ B.A. courses as an independant srudent (U Concordia, Montreal) -> M.Sc. Econ (U Montreal) -> Ph.D. Toronto.

So there is hope.

Note that to get in Toronto I got A+ in every courses in Montreal.

 

The Masters adcom rejected me in the canadian big 4. U Montreal asked me to redo the bachelor Micro 2, Macro 2 and Metrics. They waved this requirement when they saw that I got A+ in Micro 3 / Macro 3 / Metrics as an independant student in Concordia.

So if you want to get in a Masters, my advice for you is to do Advanced Undergrad Micro/Macro/Metrics/Math courses as an independant student.

If you get A's everywhere, there is no reason that an Adcom would reject you for a Master.

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Don't let someone on here talk you out of economics if that's what you want to do, though I agree that policy programs might be a good fit. Send a round of apps to masters programs and see if you get in. While you wait for decisions improve your profile by taking math. Then you can decide if you want to try again once results are in. There are lots of masters programs in the us, but they are discounted on here because they aew more expensive than euro and Canadian ones and don't routinely send graduates to top programs. But if you believe in yourself you could check out your instate schools. If you get a 4.0 load up on maths and produce great research who knows where you could end up. At the very least it will improve your profile for policy programs.

 

You're very fortunate that there is a zero lower bound on your Rep Power.

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OP, you should post a full profile so that we can better advise you. If your goal is an economics PhD then you'll need to math up above all else. Furthermore, chateauheart is correct in saying that the political economy programs you're targeting are probably more quantitative (more pure math, less stats) than the vast majority of economics PhDs. Qualitative political economy has practically disappeared from most (if not all) reputable [economics/political science] academic departments in the US. Even serious sociologists at top ranked schools laugh at that type of stuff.
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I have the same profile:

Not good grades in B.Sc. -> MBA (Qualitative) -> 3 Advanced econ B.A. courses as an independant srudent (U Concordia, Montreal) -> M.Sc. Econ (U Montreal) -> Ph.D. Toronto.

So there is hope.

Note that to get in Toronto I got A+ in every courses in Montreal.

 

The Masters adcom rejected me in the canadian big 4. U Montreal asked me to redo the bachelor Micro 2, Macro 2 and Metrics. They waved this requirement when they saw that I got A+ in Micro 3 / Macro 3 / Metrics as an independant student in Concordia.

So if you want to get in a Masters, my advice for you is to do Advanced Undergrad Micro/Macro/Metrics/Math courses as an independant student.

If you get A's everywhere, there is no reason that an Adcom would reject you for a Master.

 

That's a very long route to try, and an MBA still looks better than OP's master's in marxian/austrian political economy. In general I advise against people investing in plans that have long deferred payoffs and require drastic change in direction from what have been trying - you might not know what you're getting into. RemiDev's advice is good: take a few math or economics courses as an independent student (and explore other things), see how well you do, then decide where you want to go next.

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You're very fortunate that there is a zero lower bound on your Rep Power.

 

Yeah, a certain poster has done a really good job of hitting every post I've ever made with a negative mark.

 

That doesn't mean I'm not right. It seems like there are two kinds of advice given out by certain people on here. People with 3.75+ GPAS and all the right courses get a pat on the back and a range of schools to apply to. People who fail to conform to the accepted formula, as well backed by data as it may be, get told "you will never get into a program, give up now." What ends up happening is people who don't need any help get helped and people who may be able to benefit from constructive advice get dismissed. I can't believe that admissions committees, in today's academic climate that values diversity, would be so diametrically opposed to anyone who is an unconventional applicant. It seems like a very conformist and elitist attitude that astute people would not adopt. I know that even from the small sample of applicants on this site there is someone who was accepted into a top-50 school coming out of an American public ma program. So there may be some merit to my advice. If OPs goal is to get into a top 50 Econ program, and they can't get into a "good" international ma, they may be able to make a public ma in their state work for them, provided they take the year between application and start to get the quantitative background they need to hit the ground running with research. Or as the poster after me shared from their personal experience, there are ways to supplement a profile to get on the "accepted" ma track even if you are rejected the first time.

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Yeah, a certain poster has done a really good job of hitting every post I've ever made with a negative mark.

 

That doesn't mean I'm not right. It seems like there are two kinds of advice given out by certain people on here. People with 3.75+ GPAS and all the right courses get a pat on the back and a range of schools to apply to. People who fail to conform to the accepted formula, as well backed by data as it may be, get told "you will never get into a program, give up now." What ends up happening is people who don't need any help get helped and people who may be able to benefit from constructive advice get dismissed. I can't believe that admissions committees, in today's academic climate that values diversity, would be so diametrically opposed to anyone who is an unconventional applicant. It seems like a very conformist and elitist attitude that astute people would not adopt. I know that even from the small sample of applicants on this site there is someone who was accepted into a top-50 school coming out of an American public ma program. So there may be some merit to my advice. If OPs goal is to get into a top 50 Econ program, and they can't get into a "good" international ma, they may be able to make a public ma in their state work for them, provided they take the year between application and start to get the quantitative background they need to hit the ground running with research. Or as the poster after me shared from their personal experience, there are ways to supplement a profile to get on the "accepted" ma track even if you are rejected the first time.

Like it or not, conventional ways of signaling academic ability are still the best approach to getting into a PhD program, and it does not serve applicants to tell them it doesn't matter. You in particular may be motivated to believe that "unconventional" credentials are still helpful because that's all you have. You may view it as sticking up for the little guy to exaggerate the probability of getting into strong PhD programs from unconventional backgrounds, but it is not helpful to applicants who are making serious and potentially costly decisions about building their profile and applying. Sometimes it is kinder to be honest.

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In this case, the person is looking for ways to build a profile with an unconventional background. No one is going to hurt their employabiliy by taking math and economics courses and it could help the poster and others like them achieve a stated goal. I don't think its our responsibility to evaluate the costs of a decision for someone. We should attempt to provide them with the best path towards the stated goal, and then they can decide.
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I don't think its our responsibility to evaluate the costs of a decision for someone. We should attempt to provide them with the best path towards the stated goal, and then they can decide.

 

I have to disagree. One of the useful functions of this forum is precisely that it can provide applicants with an idea of the potential costs of applying. For instance, for someone who is contemplating leaving a job to pursue a PhD, it could matter quite a lot whether the realistic PhD option is a T10 program, a T30 program or a T70 program. There is no reason why this forum should specialize in providing one kind of information (i.e. what actions to take to maximize chances of getting into a PhD program) without providing the other kind of information applicants want (i.e. what their distribution of expected outcomes looks like).

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I guess what I'm saying is we shouldn't use our own calculations as a pretext for withholding helpful information from someone. Its ok to introduce these considerations, but not to discourage someone from their stated goal because you don't think they can afford it.

 

That's nonsensical. You don't let someone drive off a cliff just because they think they will live.

 

Users on this forum routinely tell individuals to seek the advice of a professor, and if you are at a Ph.D granting institution, they probably advise much better. This forum is here, in a rather primary sense, for those individuals that can't or for those individuals whom have professors that can't give good advice. We have routinely seen individuals whom have an adviser that is very old and has not been on an admission committee for a very long time and advised students to apply to programs with either very little math, or apply to a very wrong range of schools. In a less primary sense, the forum serves as a forum to ask broad questions that may be more difficult for professors to answer (such as the question regarding what Fed is best for RA for placement).

 

We're not force-feeding anyone, and there have been several diatribe's on taking advice with a grain of salt. As Chateu or Yankee recently pointed out, Rep power is supposed to be some indication of the strength of the poster, and therefore the post. New users may not always know this, but anyone that gets on here, asks a question, and follows it blindly without doing any additional research or without talking to any additional professors has some real life-obstacles to overcome.

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Its true financial advice is valuable, and its ok to strongly caution people. However in the case of this poster who had a strong foundation albeit in qualitative methods and appeared relatively young (young enough to be able to invest a few years in prep) I thought some were too quick to discourage them rather than tell them what they need to do.
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Its true financial advice is valuable, and its ok to strongly caution people. However in the case of this poster who had a strong foundation albeit in qualitative methods and appeared relatively young (young enough to be able to invest a few years in prep) I thought some were too quick to discourage them rather than tell them what they need to do.

 

What you "think" is irrelevant. You're transparently clueless about this profession, have utterly no background or depth from which to give important career advice to newcomers in this profession, and should cease feigning authority to do so; and you have been recommended to do so numerous times by a wide range of people with absolutely no effect. You seem to have no self-awareness of how much of a nuisance you are on this forum. What you are engaging in is a deeply annoying spree of self-indulgent attention whoring in other applicants' threads, the main theme of which always goes back to your own righteousness, supreme maturity or capability. When rightfully told to shut the f*ck up, your choice is to hijack the thread with even more narcissistic, defensive and pointless screeds about *what you really think* about the situation, that *you concede certain points*, how *you were actually right*.

 

You seem to have a complete inability to function in a community in which you aren't (and don't deserve to be) the center of attention all the time. Please find a way to soothe your psychological insecurities and boredom in a less public manner. Go get a girlfriend.

Edited by chateauheart
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Its true financial advice is valuable, and its ok to strongly caution people. However in the case of this poster who had a strong foundation albeit in qualitative methods and appeared relatively young (young enough to be able to invest a few years in prep) I thought some were too quick to discourage them rather than tell them what they need to do.

 

Because of the utterly undeserved goods that this post received, I'm going to repeat what I said again in stronger terms. (1) Having a qualitative methods background will do absolutely nothing to help you in economics admissions. It is at best a neutral signal. People who suggest otherwise are ignorant, or deluded. (2) That he can afford to invest a few years of his life in preparation for this specialized career doesn't mean he should, because it's a huge cost in something with no guaranteed payoffs. Economics PhD is a very narrow, specialized profession. The vast majority of people that think they're interested in economics research decide that it's a very different thing from what they're interested in after 3-6 months. This will almost certainly apply to both you and OP.

 

These are both obvious points. It's pretty easy to trace the apparent lack of obviousness of these points to you to the fact that you just happen to be an old out-of-school student who have yet to take calc I and econ 101 that most applicants here have done by the time they're 17. What we are discussing here - going beyond advanced math and econ and doing economics at a doctoral level - is something completely beyond your familiarity at this moment. You can surely catch up; yet by all accounts you seem more interested in attention whoring on the Internet than academics. That you've convinced yourself about your own suitability for the economics profession somehow despite all caution to the contrary from people who are actually in this profession doesn't entitle you to go around other threads preaching your belief. I'm not sure when it will take for you to have some introspection and self-awareness of how far apart you are from having a clue about what we do, and that chances are you're wrong about the things you think are right. You don't know what economics research is about. Your actual understanding of it is for all intents and purposes at the level of a 16 year old teen.

 

Part of the job of this forum is to tell newcomers whether this profession is the right fit for them. If they seem unfamiliar with this profession, which is absolutely the case for OP (there are red flags in the first post), then the right advice involves a higher mix of caution and explaining what we actually do and some other directions they might consider going. For people who don't have deep-seated insecurities about their background, there is nothing discouraging about such advice. We're not raising kids, we're trying to provide professional guidance to adults. It's no different from showing somebody in a new town his way to his destination if he just happens to be going in another way. People also tried to point you to the right direction; you chose to respond by sticking around at the tourist booth and acting puerile and thick-skinned and being a public nuisance because you couldn't admit you misread the map, and now you're going around correcting other tourists about which way you actually think that monument is. Not only do you refuse to improve your understanding through learning from graduate students and faculty in this profession, you go around consciously preaching exactly the same beliefs that others far beyond you in this profession have pointed out are fallacious and naive. That's what makes you a gaping a*shole, buddy.

Edited by chateauheart
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I saw a message lit up outside a church yesterday that might be relevent for you. "Tact is making your point without using to stab the other person." You have absolutely no clue what steps I'm taking to further my research interests, and your willingness to discount any academic preparation besides conventional economics is truly elitist and conformist, to make a point I've made before. If you walked a day in my life and saw what the educational level of the average person in society is I think you would realize how out of touch you are to equate the educational level of someone with a BA and almost complete MA in a field heavily influencd by economics with that of a 16 year old.
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...discount any academic preparation besides conventional economics is truly elitist and conformist...

 

This is the crux of the matter: How you view Chatue's comments, as in this quote, do not matter. What matter's is reality. You can think his advice is elitist all you like, but that doesn't mean that it is incorrect. Adcoms read certain aspects of an application as signals of whether an individual can compete - not just in completing the coursework, but the intellectual competitiveness that is the doctoral profession of economics. People don't get admitted to a T10 instead of a T5 because they are incompetent, it's because they have less or worse signaling. Perhaps in grades, math background, grad courses, references, or research experience. When the adcoms make a wrong decision, it's bad for them and it's bad for the student. The student either fails out or leaves because it's not a right fit.

 

It's bad business to bet on the long guy, even if it works out once in awhile. There's very little reason to bet on a long shot when you can, by all accounts, bet on a sure thing. What is a sure thing? As close as you can get to 4.0, grad econ, as much math as possible, letters indicating immense economic intuition with math and research capabilities, and everything else that we prescribe poster's to ascribe to. .

 

Go back through the profile and results threads-please-and find me all these unconventional individuals that got admitted because adcoms like to bank on the long-shot.

 

I have never before met someone on a forum that did not post spam that I have wanted gagged as much as you. Your problem isn't unique to my own disliking, but the fact that you end up poisoning the waterhole. -By all account, out of ignorance and either a total lack of care or complete obliviousness to reality.

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The level of insulation from reality is mind-boggling. You two are really disconcertingly uncomfortable with anything that challenges your way of thinking. I would really challenge you to be a lot less confrontational with people you don't know. Am I prepared to do an econ phd right now? Obviously not. Does that mean I couldn't prepare myself or should be prevented from learning about it? No, and I really think the preparation process doesn't have to be as intense as you believe. A field that values conformity above all else is a field in decline, and I'm sure that the powers that be who control these things are aware of that. I understand that a lot of you have been insulated from failure for your entire lives and have very little life experience outside of academic institutions. But seriously get a grip.
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The level of insulation from reality is mind-boggling. You two are really disconcertingly uncomfortable with anything that challenges your way of thinking. I would really challenge you to be a lot less confrontational with people you don't know. Am I prepared to do an econ phd right now? Obviously not. Does that mean I couldn't prepare myself or should be prevented from learning about it? No, and I really think the preparation process doesn't have to be as intense as you believe. A field that values conformity above all else is a field in decline, and I'm sure that the powers that be who control these things are aware of that. I understand that a lot of you have been insulated from failure for your entire lives and have very little life experience outside of academic institutions. But seriously get a grip.

 

Economists are more of a group of people who share the same methodology than a group of people who study the same object.

So the conformity exists and are valued very highly for a long time, and it is not declining as you might think.

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The level of insulation from reality is mind-boggling. You two are really disconcertingly uncomfortable with anything that challenges your way of thinking. I would really challenge you to be a lot less confrontational with people you don't know. Am I prepared to do an econ phd right now? Obviously not. Does that mean I couldn't prepare myself or should be prevented from learning about it? No, and I really think the preparation process doesn't have to be as intense as you believe. A field that values conformity above all else is a field in decline, and I'm sure that the powers that be who control these things are aware of that. I understand that a lot of you have been insulated from failure for your entire lives and have very little life experience outside of academic institutions. But seriously get a grip.

 

Your level of narcissim is rather appaling. In several threads advice (including this one) you've taken advice that was explicitly directed at someone else and reinterpreted it to be some sort of attack on your "unconventional" background.

 

The advice we dispense here is by no means authoritative or binding; you [hopefully] reside in a free country and can make decisions contrary to what is recommended here. If being an economist is so important to you then you are free to quit your day job and go back to school and start taking classes from calc 1 and ECO 101. Hopefully along the way you'll learn enough about opportunity costs, expected value, and functional distributions to realize that based on your position on the distribution of people applying to graduate schools, the expected value of your outcome doesn't justify the opportunity costs of your now forgone income and experience. Unfortunately, by time you come to that realization you'll wish that you had taken our advice and insulated yourself from failure when you're staring at a wave of rejections from graduate programs and have lost precious years of work experience that could have translated to promotions/higher salary. You should also bear in mind that along the way you'll learn that academic economic research is very different from qualitative political economy, public affairs, or whatever crap field you're coming from.

 

flygja, I'm very sorry that you had to see this and hopefully this skirmish hasn't discouraged you from further posting here. publicaffairsny has been a rather problematic poster in recent weeks if you haven't picked up on that already.

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OP, I think the advice given if interpreted correctly is that you should work on developing your interests. Read a lot and talk to professors. It may very well be that econ is what you want. If that's the case, you have to work on getting more math classes and maybe more econ, but it's possible, some people have done that, but it takes time.

 

 

However, it may very well be that a public policy program is right in your alley. And in that case, prep work would take shorter and your masters degree will earn some points at many policy schools, probably not Kennedy or Harris but many other.

 

 

To publicaffairsny, I think you may feel that the tone of advice given is harsh, but after a while you would see that it isn't. The qualitative masters sends 0 signal in econ. There was no way to have told OP that in a nice way. He was never told to quit the dream, he was just strongly advised to consider his options because he was considering Harvard PEG and Cal Tech which are uber mathematical programs with admission rates similar to the top 10 econ departments.

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