savingtheplanet

At Berkeley, the development group makes essentially no distinction between Econ and ARE students. ARE students take the same development courses, and have equal access to the same professors. If anything, they have more mentoring from the the ARE professors than we econ students do. For development, I suspect that Berkeley ARE > NYU and UPenn. In addition, its a happy department in which people seem to get along, and the Bay Area is a very very nice place to live. But for every other field other than development and environmental economics, I would recommend NYU over Berkeley ARE.

I'm not really sure what the deal is with Berkeley and the number of JD students. The department has had a pretty good experience with the law students it has admitted, so that surely makes them more open to other such students. But I don't know if they particularly target JD students -- in the end, it's still an econ department, so it does place less weight on intellectual diversity than, say, a policy school would.

Here at Berkeley, we have at least 3 present PhD students who have JD's. One of them had never taken an econ class before he got here -- although he did have an undergraduate degree in engineering. Another is graduating this year, and going to Berkeley Law school as an assistant prof. I believe he also had offers from other top law schools and econ departments. He, too, does not have a background in econ - or even math. Here's his c.v.: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/econ/grad/d.cvs/krishnamurthy.pdf The third student already had serious background in econ: http://works.bepress.com/andrew_hayashi/cv.pdf

I'm not going to write *my* impressions here, since I'm a current student. Just creating a thread to act as a catalyst. Good feedback for us, and useful information for people considering the program.

20-25 prospective students will be attending visit day this year. Another 5-6 prospectives are visiting on other dates. See you then!

It's pretty easy. Two people even worked as RA's for behavioral people in the first year!

Boy, that's a really hard choice. The Michigan development group is very good, and very supportive of it's students. They've had some good development placements, too -- e.g. Taryn Dinkelman at Princeton recently, and I would bet on another couple of great development placements in the next 2-3 years. Dean Yang is fantastic, as is Rebecca Thornton. They are both people who are moving development in exciting new directions at present. Knowing all of these people personally, I would highly recommend Michigan as a place to do development. And clearly you will also get a very strong applied micro training. I don't know the UCSD group as well, at least personally. Muralidharan is superb -- and a really nice guy to boot. McIntosh is also top-notch, and Bhardwaj seems quite promising. PM me in a couple of weeks, and I will have additional private information about UCSD development which I would be happy to share. In the end, I suspect you will do fine at both places. They really are very close in quality.

Knowing certain students and faculty members at Chicago fairly well personally: if you are going to be the weakest person at Chicago, do not go there. You will be unhappy. You have to compete pretty hard for faculty attention at Chicago. That's their model. Of course, this is not from personal experience -- so if the forum has active members from Chicago at present, please do correct me if I'm wrong.

Speaking for the atmosphere here at Berkeley: Nobody places much weight on grades in the first year classes anyway -- at least, not for the purpose of determining where you "stand" in the class. We all know that what matters is how good your research will be, and it is pretty hard to predict that using grades in classes. So I really don't have a sense at all that anyone in our year is looked at as being "weak" or even as being in the bottom half of class. And frankly, everyone who gets into Berkeley is pretty smart, and is treated as such by others -- including by faculty. Things might be a bit different in places which have comprehensive exams at the end of the first year. I recall that when I was taking classes at Michigan, people seemed a lot more stressed out because there were fears (mostly unfounded, it turns out) about failing out of the program after the first year. But even so, given your excellent admits, I doubt you will have much trouble at any place.

glad to have helped. :-)

Not sure I understand your question, given the quote you chose. If you're asking what fraction of admission offers have been sent out yet, the answer is ~ 10%. The actual admissions decisions from the department will come out next week.

Actually, in my class of 23, I know of at least 5 people who didn't have analysis. I suspect there were more, I didn't ask everyone. Analysis is a useful signalling device -- e.g. I used it as such since I didn't have many basic math courses -- but it is certainly not necessary.

Yes, the standard funding deal pays all fees (including all tuition) plus health insurance, plus a fairly generous stipend ~ 23-25K. You can make another 5-6K over the summer as RA money if you want it. Yes, a few. In my year, only one of the students who finally joined was unfunded, and s/he found an external fellowship before joining. Last year, I think 2-3 first years were partially unfunded, I think.

Pretty much everyone. TO be precise, the university doesn't waive your tuition, but the standard funding deal that the dept provides pays it for you. And the university waives it after you take your orals in the third year, I think.

Let me spare many of you much sorrow by confirming that the vast majority of Berkeley offers have not yet been made. What usually happens is that a few people (about 5 usually) who have been selected for various university fellowships are informed a few days early. The offers from the department itself will go out next week.