Questions to ask current Graduate Students at Prospective Schools

[Corneconomics]

What is your usual schedule? How many hours a day do you spend at school? Weekends? How social is the department? Do people hang out together outside of school?

Where do first year students study? Do they have offices? What are the first year classes like? Are they well taught? Do they turn out to be useful?

My girlfriend and I are in different programs, and the two biggest difference in our chances to succeed are our will to put in the work for Quals, and our wanting to spend four to six years with the people around us and in our departments' offices. In the top schools, getting professors you can work with or whatever is important, but outside of the stratosphere, the department environment is so extremely important.

I'd ask how much the first years go out together (it should be fairly common), how many people drop out on their own, how smoothly the printers, copiers, and computers in the graduate student/department lounge run, etc.

One way, I think, to gauge how close the department is, is to ask which bars are popular amongst the graduate students (it should be easy to name a couple, and there should be more than one).

[Econ07]

I am not sure if someone has mentioned something alike, but I would like to ask:

-Which courses are well prepared and have good lectures and which aren't? (Before someone mentions that you should be mature enough to make the most of even a course that doesn't have such a good lecturer, Mankiw made that point in his blog. I agree with him that presentation is important).
-Which advisors have a good placement history?

[asquare]

bumped for bird0004

[butler blue]

Bump.

[treasuries]

Are there some more graduate students out there who can enlighten us on the questions posted here? It would be great to hear from you.

[ukecon]

Stanford (regular) let's you flounder, and I'm told that Harvard can be very bad, since they're all trying to publish like crazy there.

Is this really the case with Stanford? On their website they claim that people complete their PhD in 4 years...does anyone have any info to enlighten this claim?

[Antichron]

Victor Chernozhukov finished his PhD from Stanford econ. in 3 years. (Though his advisor told him that he could go on the job market in his second year if he wanted to.) I was under the impression that the average time to degree at Stanford is between five and six years like most other departments, though.

[ukecon]

Victor Chernozhukov finished his PhD from Stanford econ. in 3 years. (Though his advisor told him that he could go on the job market in his second year if he wanted to.) I was under the impression that the average time to degree at Stanford is between five and six years like most other departments, though.

I guess it should also depend on whether one wants to use the PhD on the academic job market, or to get a place in an international organisation (the latter requiring, I would imagine, less time to complete).

On a totally unrelated question: If funding claims $X for the first 2 years, subsequent TA/RA positions, does this mean that for a given amount of TA/RA work, we still get the same X funding?

[Antichron]

I guess it should also depend on whether one wants to use the PhD on the academic job market, or to get a place in an international organisation (the latter requiring, I would imagine, less time to complete).

On a totally unrelated question: If funding claims $X for the first 2 years, subsequent TA/RA positions, does this mean that for a given amount of TA/RA work, we still get the same X funding?

Victor Chernozhukov is an MIT professor now. I think he was just awesome in graduate school.

Regarding the funding issue, the amount of funding in later years usually goes down significantly. You should ask the departments what funding is like in the third year and beyond.

[ukecon]

Regarding the funding issue, the amount of funding in later years usually goes down significantly. You should ask the departments what funding is like in the third year and beyond.

Thanks a lot for the info - it's really helpful.

Could you give me any indication (maybe from your MIT experience) as to the income/funding in later years as supposed to the first two years?