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.

Harvard admits are probably for real, unfortunately. At least, I know three people who got it. They heard on Feb 25.

Congratulations to all Berkeley admits (and everyone else too, really)! It's a pretty fantastic place to be. I'm a second year there, and am happy to answer questions about the department.

As I've said before numerous times here, Michigan is very very strong for development right now. It's a very stimulating and nurturing environment for development there at present. They already placed Taryn Dinkelman at Princeton, and watch out for a few likely stars in development a couple years from now. There have been some rumors flying around this forum about Dean Yang leaving for Maryland. I have no first-hand info about this, but it would be surprising to see him leave such a strong set of colleagues for a weaker department. Even if he leaves, though, it will still be strong with Thornton, Arunachalam, Levinsohn and Lam to talk to.

This is out of line, and a really stupid thing to say. You seem to be under the impression that having an Ethiopian friend gives you some sort of "tolerance" credentials, and allows you to say insulting things without hurting anyone's feelings. Grow up, or shut up.

Romer, Shapiro and Farrell shouldn't be on that list, since they are only gone for about 2 years. That does hurt about 2 cohorts of students, including mine. But it won't impact rankings in any meaningful way. However, you do need to include Hsieh, who we lost last year to Chicago GSB. He was one of the few people in the world doing cool macro development work, so his loss stings. On the other hand, he was a famously difficult adviser, so I haven't noticed too many tears being shed by grad students...

I'm sorry, but this is just untrue. There is huge consensus between economists under the age of 50 on the value of randomization in field experiments. There are very few skeptics (Heckman and Deaton are prominent amongst them), and many of their criticisms apply only to the very early work in field experiments, when people were still figuring this stuff out. Carefully designed field experiments are powerful tools to distinguish between models, and need not be atheoretical. c.f. some of List's stuff, or recent Duflo stuff on hyperbolic discounting, or Mullainathan's ongoing work on wage incentives and commitment devices.

FYI. A PhD from Berkeley practically guarantees you a job at the World Bank if you want one.

:tup:

They do not. They have their own sequence, which is intermediate in level between the undergrad and phd courses. When I was around, however, a number of the masters classes were taught at almost the same level as the phd classes, and sometimes by the same professors.

I have a couple of friends who went through the MAE program. My understanding is that funding for masters students is rare. Its a big phd program ~ 30 incoming students, so i dont think they have too much of a shortage of ta's. you could try applying for ta'ships in other departments, or to look for ra's, but i dont think you should count on getting them. departments tend to prefer their own students for such work, and it always felt like Umich didnt consider the masters student "its students". asquare may be able to give you more insight on this, and might disagree with me.