TruDog

Randy Wright is coming to Wisconsin. Confirmed.

Randy Wright will have a joint appointment in economics and finance, and I'm pretty sure that the business school is footing the majority of the bill.

Yeah, I'm leaving the econ department with a master's (after coming fairly close to passing the micro prelim) and going into the education policy PhD program. One of my econ classmates also transferred to the finance PhD program upon passing the micro prelim, which is required for the finance PhD.

The real reason why the quality of this year's applicants is higher than in the past...I applied two years ago. :)

My suggestion is to convert the graphic to .pdf and then use the \includepdf command in conjunction with the pdfpages package.

Wow, that's a smidge over the top. :)

Hi everyone, As many of you know, I'm leaving the economics PhD program at Wisconsin with a terminal master's degree after not being able to pass the micro prelim in two attempts. I'm not too upset with failing out, although I sure worked my tail off to stay in the program. My next step in life will be the education policy PhD program here at Wisconsin, one of the best in the world. It allows me to do some solid applied research that has the potential to do good. To those of you who have offers from Wisconsin--or are considering applying to Wisconsin in the future--I definitely will say not to let the attrition rate (which seems to be settling in around 25-30% after being high for a few years) rule out the school. The economics department is very good, especially in applied micro and econometrics. And it looks like the macro side is definitely trying to hire some good people. The resources available in other departments such as ag econ, finance, public policy, demography, and education are all top-notch. To those of you who are entering graduate school in economics, I recommend a large dose of humility right away. You almost surely won't be the smartest person in the room, and a lot of your peers are amazing. Learn as much as you can from them and about them. Make contact with faculty members right away so you have advocates if you need some. Explore the offerings in other departments, as some faculty in other departments have great datasets and piles of money available for grad students. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't thank some of the great forum members that have helped me get through the past three years. asquare, Bayern, buckykatt, econphilomath, italos, jeeves, polkaparty...the list goes on and on. It's great to have a place where people sharing common problems can get together and help each other through a lot of nerdy times. I'll still be on the forum occasionally through the rest of the admissions season, and then it'll be lights out for me. If you have any questions regarding Wisconsin or grad school in general, feel free to PM me, but do expect a slower response after April 15. Best of luck everyone! :grad:

Clearly, there is a formula for calculating the top N schools: N=N+K+J, where N is the number of schools one is asked to rank, K is a preference parameter (substantially larger than zero for most people and negative for a few outliers), and J is a dummy variable equal to 1 if one's school of choice is not always considered in the top N already.

Yes, especially regarding policy evaluation.

Development at Wisconsin is almost exclusively in the agricultural and applied econ program. After your first year, you're free to take courses in that department.

The state of Michigan provides a very small percentage of total resources to the University of Michigan, so the OP's concerns there are completely unfounded. And it's very strange that the OP's first post is trashing Michigan...unless he or she is an Ohio State fan.

That's normal here at Wisconsin. You study a lot and learn even more, or you fail out of the program. (Perhaps I should make that an and/or proposition. :) )

Congratulations! I think that you'll really enjoy St. Louis...it's a pretty neat place. Make sure to check out the Zoo, Forest Park, and Busch Stadium quite a bit while you're there.

First of all, welcome to Madison. I think that you'll really like it here. All students are guaranteed funding through years 2-4 conditional on making satisfactory academic progress. To be guaranteed second-year funding, you need a 3.33 GPA in the department (which is higher than the median GPA of about 3.2) and to have passed at least one prelim over the summer. To this date, I don't know anyone who didn't get funded for the first semester of their second year at Wisconsin. To get second semester funding, passing both prelims is essential. The university just unveiled a program to raise undergraduate tuition and to have part of the proceeds go toward making more courses available in high-demand fields like economics. The undergraduate econ program here has grown like crazy over the past decade and there are long waiting lists to get into courses like intermediate macro. The university is committing funds to hire more faculty (and TAs) to teach these courses if this initiative goes through. In that case, Wisconsin will have more TA positions available for students, a big plus right now.

And the poster has been banned, although he/she may very well come back in a few months under a different username. Let's just let this thread die off.