Thesus

Hey guys. I'm actually in co-charge of organizing the flyout this year, so I'll see you in April. I'll talk to Arianna tomorrow and see if we can fire off a schedule in the near future. Spring break (for undergrads) starts here this weekend and I'm unsure whether that includes non-academic staff. EDIT: Update, no schedule as of yet. Feel free to shoot her an email if you have specific concerns, though.

Thanks for the feedback, people. Keep it coming. The one thing that has surprised me is the demand to sit in on a class, I'm not sure how interesting that would be to suddenly have to sit through and hour and twenty of unfamiliar material.

Hey guys. Not sure if anyone remembers me. Anyway. Just got tabbed by a professor to organize the visiting day for prospective students the first week in April. I realize not many people are contemplating flyouts just yet, but I figured I'd throw this out there. When you visit a school, what do you want to do? Besides consume pizza and beer on the department dime.

Reporting in; passed both quals first shot here. Lot of nostalgia here.

Many graduate students decide not to get cable.

Fellowships are taxable the same as wage income in the US. I do no TA/RA work, I am still liable for taxes. Just like (well, sort of) you owe taxes on lottery income in the US.

I'm not sure there's a blanket answer for this. I guess it's very culture and location specific. I think being professional is much more important than any gift, which is why I'm not entirely sold on alcohol. Also, try to avoid writing articles in the national press criticizing your undergrad the minute you leave, it doesn't make for warm relations.

I don't think that's fair. Clearly, we're all working off speculation and hearsay. The guy is married and has a family. I don't even know if Stanford has made an offer. Maybe you're right, but I don't want to judge with such an incomplete information set.

Kenneth Arrow failed his actuarial exams, therefore he became an economist. At least that's the story I've heard.

Unless your news is less than a couple days old, all that can be said is that the two are thinking about it. He's turned down other offers before.

I'm not sure you need to put too much into it, they're not uncommon. If you tell them where you plan to go or not, it shouldn't make a difference. Just be polite.

I think our placements are pretty good. We have pretty small class sizes so they're noisy from year to year. I'm not up on the comparisons, but I think we do well, especially if you want an academic placement. Ryan Michaels is coming from Michigan, can't say more than that. I think the atmosphere is decent, but I don't want to say anything too strong because I haven't been a student anywhere else. I've played soccer and basketball with the profs, I know what television shows Bils and Chang like, and a lot of office doors are open. The student social life is very heterogeneous and I attribute that to preferences - many people here are perfectly happy working eighty hours a week and not much else, but I personally have to go get somewhat more than tipsy every so often with people from the department. What discontent I hear stems from the weather and the city, not the department. Rochester is not a cultural mecca, unless you really, really like classical music and jazz.

With respect to the waitlist, there will certainly be some action there, but I wouldn't expect a ton. I don't know the exact probability, of course. I would definitely characterize the faculty as young, and we've got one confirmed new AP this year and offers out on a second and quite possibly a third. I also agree that the instruction is very technical across the board, especially in game theory and macro. However, I would characterize the strengths as macro and labor/applied micro, unless you like what William Thomson does. Econometrics is definitely not a strength, very few students here do econometrics. Micro theory is okay - Thomson as mentioned, and a few young game theorists. The macro activities - student lunch, seminars - definitely get the most traffic, both from students and faculty.

I was admitted off the short one two years ago, April 14, circa 6pm EST. If I remember correctly, someone else had a letter with less enthusiastic wording but was admitted the day before me. They ended up going to Chicago, though, so that may not be typical.

I was going to post that the Rochester admits were going out a few hours before they actually did, and then I couldn't. :( Erin, we really appreciate all this work you do for us. Take it as easy as possible.

Twenty.

Conditional on getting to the job market, the prevailing wisdom is that your grad school grades matter very little.

Already did. Since real analysis is always related, I should mention that the only reason I started playing poker is because the son of the prof who taught me three courses worth of analysis shipped 1.67 million at a Bellagio tourney last summer.

I only lay claim to variance. Going to be a rough downswing in micro, but I'm grinding well in macro/metrics. I can't be too results-oriented. Marks don't come out until this evening.

Yeah, for sure. I wrote

Bring it. Some of us went to an undergrad dubbed Canada's best party school. So dubbed by a beer company. They used it in an ad campaign.

Those transcripts won't be looked at by anyone, they just get sent straight to the graduate studies administration to satisfy university regulations.

18/18. I guess I have learned something this year. :P

Oh, wait. I thought you we were talking CGS, the 35,000 one. Then I googled. My bad.

Canuck: I couldn't even swing a SSHRC last year. Grats.