What are the least useful courses for the phd admission?

[tangsiuje]

Oh, and Tangsuije, likely the TAs you will find in Toronto will speak Cantonese, so it may not help you after all.

However, off topic this is, my very unscientific study of the name list of Toronto PhD students revealed the following distribution of Chinese names: 15 unambiguously Mandarin, 2 unambiguously Cantonese, 1 unambiguously Hokkien, 1 which is is either Hokkien or Cantonese, and 1 I couldn't place. So whilst Cantonese speakers may dominate Toronto on the whole, they certainly don't dominate the economics department.

[israelecon]

i agree that most field courses are not worth much for the adcoms. but i would go even further and say that macro undergraduate courses are not very good signals either because they are usually taught on a very low level (at least from a technical aspect, i.e. it is taught by moving curves up and down and pretty imprecisely). i am not saying that it is totally useless, but if you had to choose whether to ace a micro exam or a macro exam, i think the micro exam is much more important. this is of course not true for graduate macro where the models are already well defined (more or less).

[Mr.Keen]

I agree that most field undergrad courses are not very useful, unless they are quite technical. In my case, some of my field courses were just as crucial as the theory ones because they built on what we had covered in the "core". Example: my trade theory undegrad course was filled with formal proofs of theorems such as Stolper-Samuelson, Rybczynski, factor price equalization, etc. That might be the case in some top undergrad international institutions, but I doubt you will see something like that in most US schools.

Even then, my macro undergrad was really useless and was more or less as israelecon has described it. However, most schools would like you to have exposure to both intermediate micro and macro.

[TruDog]

Originally Posted by Mr.Keen

Example: my trade theory undegrad course was filled with formal proofs of theorems such as Stolper-Samuelson, Rybczynski, factor price equalization, etc.

If you can take a class that covers GE topics like this, it's quite helpful. (I'm reviewing this material for prelims right now.) Generally, micro electives tend to be more useful than macro electives. Mr. Keen is spot on.

[italos]

My undergraduate degree is from Italy and is called ''Economics and Commerce''.I had to choose some paths among other in economics,in business,etc in which you get a specialization.There are the core -compulsory modules commune for all and the path modules.Personally since I selected economics path I had to take among others 3 compulsory courses of Law (Constitutional Law, Private Law and Commercial Law) and 3 compulsory business courses (2 courses of Accounting and 1 of business administration).I have also one course in a foreign language and one in fundamental informatics.I still try to understand why was useful to take the last two!
Anyway, I agree that if you have taken courses not directly related to econ PhD it is not a signal in doing well in an econ PhD.But if you did well if these courses and you general profile is good it might be a signal in a sense that you are a multi talent person, or as it can be seen often in a LOR ''a take-charge individual who is able to develop and implement innovative plans and can produce impressive results in a wide variety of areas not only in the field of economics''.

[israelecon]

i would think field courses like game theory or mathematical economics are pretty useful. basically as was said before, the importance is probably in how technical the course is and less on how "basic" the course is in terms of economics education.

[wcd123]

This question should be broken down a bit more.

If you have an opportunity to take a field course from someone who is actively publishing in top journals in that field, then taking that course can be incredibly useful for a number of reasons. First, it may lead to an RA position or a letter of recommendation from that professor. Second, it will introduce you to the frontier of research in that field, which may help you gauge your future interest in studying in that area. Third, if you are interested in specializing in the field, then learning how the productive researcher approaches important questions and critiques journal articles can really improve your ability to do research and understand what important issues a good paper must address. All of these are factors that you may not get from the marginal math class (beyond what is really required).

If you do not have access to field courses from an active publisher, the payoff associated with each of the incentives listed above is greatly diminished. In that case, expanding your math background is always the best option.

[buckykatt]

I dunno. If I were on an adcom, I'd be impressed by a student who'd taken several semesters of a challenging language like Chinese instead of an easy elective. Even more so if that student had an interest in development or history and was taking an appropriate language to further their future research.

[reactor]

Originally Posted by econphilomath

You will obviously need to ace the course to become the TA [...]

There are many kinds of TAs. "Lecturing-fullcourse TAs" and "grading/officehours TAs". The former requires more advanced skills than the latter does. (Most probably) Being a "grading/officehours TA" won't produce a very usefull letter.