Karina 07

There was also an MIT Sloan that I know about.

I would struggle to think of many people who can do both micro theory and applied micro well. It's not impossible, but econ is about division of labour and people only care about your best paper. All else equal a micro theorist will write a better micro theory paper and an applied micro person will write a better applied micro paper.

I forget if someone mentioned this, but the visit days are April 6-7. It sounds like all admits have gone out. Congrats to all!! :)

I don't know why the Wisc numbers look like that. Maybe they are only counting U.S. female applicants in that total. When institutions report how many (racial) minorities they have, only U.S. citizens count, so maybe this is the same thing except for women. Just a best guess, because otherwise those numbers are tremendously off. But even that seems weird, so I don't know. Edit: I would trust the actual numbers from the department rather than numbers reported for some institutional requirement by the overall graduate division any day!

Congrats!! As another Berkeley student, I'd also be happy to answer questions. :)

My impression is that about a third of applicants to Berkeley are female. I don't have perfect information, but that impression is not based on nothing either.

I thought I'd balance the score here: 1, on a quarter system. I did do a master's, though.

Um, you realize these are all exactly the same, right? And the top list only "breaks ties" alphabetically? So actually, all the ties remain tied? U.S. News only updates every once in a few years and hasn't for a while, so these are literally the same one from a while back just re-printed in different years' editions.

As someone who routinely took too many classes (even in grad school this is my first term taking less than 20 units...), I'd tell you to stop taking so many and focus on getting good grades in fewer -- if you can. Some people who take a lot of courses seem to not be able to make the switch to taking fewer courses and end up getting just the same grades as they would have with more courses, except in fewer. It will depend on you. Incidentally, word on the street is not to take too many in grad school or it will look like you're unfocused and prefer learning to research. Now that I've actually tried taking fewer courses, this makes sense -- I *do* have more time for research now (albeit not right now at the end of the term...). Very glad I switched.

Hooray! Glad y'all are coming here! :) See you in the fall!

It seems to me that growth has gone micro, by and large, and will continue to. (Just as macro has ;).) There was a thread on this board before, which you may want to look up, in which this was the prevailing view.

Heh, it's a little scary how well everyone knows me. :) Lombardo's currently in the Econ MPhil there. Both of us have posted in the past about the differences between the US and UK system and also about their grading/continuing on to the DPhil. I'm a little hesitant to post more because I'm trying to stay out of the spotlight, but search around some more for the Oxford MPhil/DPhil and if you don't find the discussions or if you have more questions feel free to PM! :)

By the time you're out of the program, you're going to be sick of being a student and taking classes. Or, at least, by the time you're out of the program and halfway through your Ph.D. 2 years is a lot of time to suck out of your life. Oxford is *lovely* and amazing and great and all that, but... 2 years is still a lot of time. If I could do it all over again, I would have figured out that econ was what I wanted to do while I was in undergrad and then go straight from undergrad to a Ph.D. program without doing a master's in between (though supposedly there are benefits to maturity...). I would recommend going to Oxford *if* you either have a particular reason to avoid Wisc or just want some more time before a Ph.D. program to get to enjoy Oxford and figure out what you want better. But honestly I'd take Wisc and run if I were you. It's hard to distinguish yourself at Oxford because 1/3rd or so of your class will have won some big scholarship and the rest will have still cleared out a lot of awards from their respective undergraduate universities.... God, Oxford's beautiful, though. I feel kind of bad giving this advice because if you actually went there you'd love it. I don't know what weight you'd assign to a great and memorable two years.

Why do you say this? Actually, if I recall correctly, Todd and Wolpin model how many children people choose to have and how they choose to educate them in an AER article.

I've posted about this before. Essentially, rumours of Berkeley's imminent demise appear to have been circulating for a couple of decades and it hasn't happened yet. Anyone who was potentially leaving has already left by now or declined their offers (you don't hear very much about declined offers, but they're there. Sorry MIT and Harvard, Card prefers to stay at Berkeley permanently...). P.S. I'm not sure where there's this idea that Haas doesn't have economists is coming from. I don't think it's as good as Stanford's GSB, but it *does* in fact have some good people working in economics, political economy etc. There's also the ARE department which has a few good trade and development people.

But we strive for better models all the time. And I don't think we're losing much parsimony by extending our model of Econ Ph.D. students from all heterosexual men. Edit: See the trend of extending models (e.g. trade theory) from homogeneous to heterogeneous goods/firms/etc. :P (Plus, because it reinforces the trend, but that one's not as funny.)

Can we please, as a group, stop assuming that Econ Ph.D. students are men -- heterosexual men? It's been like half a dozen really damn infuriating posts on this thread so far (and it was cleaned of the troll before I got here).

Congrats, all! :) Great news and I hope to see you next year :). Sometimes additional funding info comes later because after they make their own decisions they send around the applications to other parts of campus to see if some other part of the university wants to give more money. So even when you get the funding details, bear in mind they might be updated over the next few weeks. If anyone has any questions, feel free to PM :).

Sample size is too small. If 3 old-timers had gotten into one of those programs, I don't think you'd make this argument. Of course, from my old fogey perspective, there exist only about half a dozen regularly posting old-timers applying this year :P. Also, if memory serves, I think there are usually some posters who over the course of admissions time become like old-timers, so that by the end of admissions (which have only started) they'd be considered new old-timers (and people who sweep with good admissions are more likely to stay in the memory like that) (who remembers that girl who started a blog detailing her impressions of fly-outs, only to thankfully promptly remove it because of the flak she was likely to receive from it?). I might be able to believe that the admissions of TM posters *and* readers would gradually go down over time as the readership expands, but I think it would be hard to tell a story in which the admits of the posters get worse than the admits of the readers. An easier story to tell is that admits are 20% down this year and when there are only a few old-timers who do really well normally... you can't really draw inferences. Maybe at least wait until the season gets going, and the next two years -- -- this is assuming that your hypothesis is that high posts is becoming more negatively correlated with high admits over time. It's not entirely clear what your hypothesis because originally you just said high posts are negatively correlated with high admits but now you're saying but previously it wasn't like that.... Or is your hypothesis that this year only (and not in future years), high posts are negatively correlated with high admits? The last one is uninteresting because you probably can't make a causal argument to underlie it aside from the admits being 20% down and chance variation in a small sample. Anyway, I'll stop wasting time on this. Something tells me that the argument will keep shifting (if one admits that yes, my previous examples weren't good because there was selection bias, but I'm still going to find something to support my original hypothesis with, except my original hypothesis isn't quite my refined hypothesis right now... it kind of reminds me of data mining, actually).

You get these because there is a very, very, very large group of people who never post or almost never post, both among people who apply and among people who were relatively recently accepted (paying attention to this board goes down over time as you progress in years in your program). The ones you see posting are very much the tip of the iceberg. Those who lurk or quasi-lurk but get in somewhere good will post to share the good news. Those who lurk or quasi-lurk but get no good news won't exactly want to register or post to say "HEY GUYS, LOOK AT ME, I DIDN'T GET INTO YALE!!!" See? Selection bias.

Congrats!! [clap]

It was posted today, which would imply that it was still open. Perhaps the position was previously filled but the original successful candidate had a change of mind or some such.

Not necessarily. The typical pattern seems to be: - Newcomer rubs people the wrong way. - Forumites express their frustration. - Newcomer EITHER slowly learns to tone it down (in whichever way -- I'm thinking of the annual bunch of people who think they're misunderstood geniuses) and eventually gets assimilated or comes back in a new form and makes something up to piss people off. We haven't yet seen which way it'll be. I'm actually a little sympathetic to OP because it's hard to deal with everyone being against you. I'd suggest taking the high road, though when the other way is chosen the comedy is pretty gold.

People are usually pretty good at making complex calculations about who they can trust, without thinking. Thus, those who stick around long enough can judge what is credible information and what is not pretty easily. Not by how many posts someone has, but largely by the content of their previous posts. I think this is your problem right now. People will give you flak because they've put you into a category where they don't expect anything good in your posts. It might be good for you to settle down for a while because I would imagine you'd keep getting flak and other people would keep getting pissed off. It's a bit of a vicious cycle at the moment. Sources are usually implied, but when people trust each other, they're not always necessary. If there's some source you want to know about, it might be best to inquire on that thread, because if done politely I'm sure people would be glad to share as much as they reasonably can. Of course, as others have pointed out, anyone can make up a source, so it will not stop misleading rumours, and we also all know that even when someone comes in with credible information and does cite their source (Nalfien citing the grad secretary) it doesn't seem to matter to some people. I'd rather this board go the way of trust rather than anonymous citing of hazy, general sources, because the latter (and the aggressiveness of some recent posts) reminds me of econjobrumors. Imho, one is more apt to get better info here and I'd attribute that to the trust that comes with being fairly recognizable, if only by a username handle.

No. Apparently, messages have to be at least 5 characters long. :rolleyes: So, no, again.