veroniquaz

you will have to study a bit harder for the macro prelim

it is pretty much certain you will get a TA-ship. Your relative performance in class determines whether they give you a fellowship to cover the non-resident tuition (if you are not a California resident). At least this is what they told me two years ago. Try to look up old posts by TheBrothersKaramazov and jhai. TBK is a current student and some time ago she described her (very positive) impressions. Jhai was admitted but went to Georgetown eventually. She visited the department and posted some helpful stuff afterwards.

I never said it was impossible, it is just not obvious and the 34% drop out rate pretty much confirms that.

I will repeat myself. Given the state of the economy it is pretty likely BU will end up with a large class this year and that will make second year funding highly competitive. I would suggest everyone who is about to start a PhD program this year to not take second year funding for granted at any department and to think carefully if and for how long they are able to finance themselves.

Also remember that getting funding at BU after the first unfunded year is a STRONG assumption. I know someone who left, because he did not get funded after the first year even though he had funding in the first year. If you get unlucky with the class size you might end up going through an extremely competitive first year and no guarantee you will make it into the second, let alone you will get funded. In this respect the Master in Stat is not such a bad option and a good reality check at the same time. If you do excel over there you might get funded at BU or somewhere else in 2 years. If you are not among the best in the Stats MA, it is very unlikely you would have made into the second year with funding at BU either. But this way you will still end up with a marketable degree and no debt as a bonus. The Bank is not only hiring researchers, so with the MA you still will have a shot.

tell them you really like them and ask where you are on the waitlist. I was waitlisted two years ago and they told me exactly where I stood. In a normal year the people from the very high waitlist make it all in. I was on the other waitlist and did not make it eventually.

which university are you at? Is it any of these? Lausanne, Zurich, Geneva or St. Gallen? if yes you should be fine. Just make your LOR writers stress how rigorous the MA program is.

we have a micro development guy who exclusively uses R so I guess it can also handle large datasets. He also forced Masters students to use it for their homeworks in the metrics class.

I did not include any US programs because they are generally not considered a good preparation for PhD that you stated as your eventual target. I also dont think you really need a Master to get into a good PhD program, but now that you missed most of the deadlines, it is not such a bad idea and I would suggest you pick your program based on the brand name. By the time you will apply the adcoms will not have your grades anyway but reading your application they will be left with that nice feeling that you are at a good place. In my personal opinion go for one of the most rigorous Masters at LSE. You will get a good preparation for the PhD and it will look nice on your application. The only problem with LSE is that funding is rather unlikely. At the non-UK programs I listed you should also have a pretty good chance to get funding.

not sure what their deadlines are, but programs that are worth looking at in Europe: LSE, UCL, UPF, Toulouse, Tinbergen in Canada: UBC, Toronto, UWO, Queens I am sure I have forgotten some, but these are all very good and I am sure most of them will happily accept you.

double post

funny, I never noticed those superscripts were there, but they really are :blush:

I believe A,B, C refer to the part of the chapter the problem is related to, not the difficulty.

After all the horror stories I heard about the book, I expected something unreadable and incredibly hard to understand. Not true, I actually ended up liking the book, even though I am not even a micro person. With your math background and assuming you also took some intermediate micro, you should be fine reading that book.

Tillburg I heard is a boring village. At Tinbergen I believe you will be based in Amsterdam for at least the first two years, though you will be taking some classes in Rotterdam too. Amsterdam is a fun European city. For me it would be a reason enough to choose Tinbergen over Tillburg. Know nothing about Toulouse, but in general I would avoid French speaking cities if you do not know any French and quality of life outside the university matters for you.

I got into UCSC with 440. Another girl I remember from here got into UCSD with a similarly spectacular score.

why do you want to go into Econ? if you know that the SOP should be an easy task. If you do not know yourself convincing the adcoms will be tough. To not discourage you, your profile looks good, but having more econ classes on the transcript would be nice. With that and a convincing reason why you want to switch, I believe you could shoot even higher than those schools that you mentioned. For now maybe you could add Georgetown. Going through the CVs of their students I remember lots of engineers and other technical non-econ backgrounds, so they might like you.

any introductory text will tell you that. Google should have some answers too.

they have King and Baxter, but they are not exactly new keynesian. Minnesota is also not the best pick if you want to do new keynesian. Actually right now I can only think of people in Europe who do that sort of stuff (Gali, Canova, Corsetti, Tille). Maybe Ghironi at BC?

if you do not insist on going to the US, I think looking into Europe is good advice. Zurich is a fine place for example. They have Ernst Fehr and pay a sweet assistant salary (like all schools in Switzerland).

BU, Northwestern

I had a course with F. Canova following this book and while he was an amazing lecturer I found the book a very tough read. It assumes quite some knowledge of both economic theory and econometrics and I do not recall any matlab codes in it. Before he published the book it was available on his website, so if you try, I am pretty sure you will be able to get an electronic copy.

forget about it

You can apply and they will not care but you will have to learn something when you are here. You have to pass their stupid French test, otherwise you do not get the degree. But it is more or less a joke. They will read you an article in French twice and you can summarize it in English. I definitely would not see it as too much of an obstacle. The more annoying part is to be constantly bombarded with emails from the administration in French. I normally ignore them and they did not kick me out yet, so they are probably not that important.

YE: OP is not American which makes a hell of a difference. I for one would not be able to go without funding either. Even if I would be willing to take a loan, there is noone to borrow me such an amount. And even if I managed to get a loan the risk of dropping out after the first year is not insignificant in the US. Failing means leaving the US and repaying the debt from the salary I can earn where I am from could be a lifelong nightmare.