octavio

Miami University (Ohio).

There are IO professors in Berkeley ARE. Look at the faculty list on their website. Perloff co-wrote an IO textbook and is an active researcher in the area. Villas-Boas does IO almost exclusively. Also, look at the people who recently obtained the best placements from Berkeley ARE. Many did dissertations in IO. You can find their references/committee on their CVs if you care to search around a bit.

I think this is right. A friend applied to Oregon last year and received an admissions offer quickly followed by a TA offer a while later. Not sure when the TA offer arrived though, probably sometime in March.

Miami doesn't have a PhD program, which probably explains their absence from the econphd list. It might also explain why their MA program is very good.

No... no European degrees, in fact.

One way to answer this would be to check ARE departments' websites and look at student CVs to see where they got their degrees. The entering class at Berkeley ARE this year had 7 people with MA/MS degrees: one in international/development econ, one in environmental sciences, one in ag econ, and four in economics.

Your chances are fine. Here's an anecdote: a guy I know who had lower qualifications than you in all areas was offered admission (Fall 2007). I think their main concern was getting him to write them the tuition check. Aid was nonexistent, for him at least. He ended up going elsewhere.

jlist

Maybe the entire narrative was a hypothetical situation? I started wondering what was going on when s/he said that Davis doesn't really do development. Davis has a lot of development work going on in their ag econ department. So I'm inclined to think the poster doesn't go to Davis currently...?

This is just a guess, but are you viewing the outreg2 results in Excel (or other spreadsheet software)? Outreg2 does put parentheses around the standard error, which Excel interprets as meaning a negative number. You can correct this by selecting the cells, right clicking, going to Format Cells, and picking Number and then selecting parentheses as the option for negative numbers. It will display correctly, but Excel still "thinks" the numbers are negative. Alternatively, add the "excel" option when you run outreg2 and it will make a nice .xml file that Excel reads nicely. This is what I do if I need to drop the results into Excel. If this isn't the problem in your case, I have no idea. And I haven't found a way to move the asterisks either -- although if you check out the outreg2.ado file, it would probably only take a little bit of work to sift through and customize it to your liking. The author commented his code well and I think it would probably only require you to change two lines of code. Good luck!

Course dummies.

The paper makes a solid effort (golfer-specific dummies, analysis of potential selection bias, control for purse amount, etc.) to deal with these objections. It's an interesting exercise in applied econometrics, even if it is too disturbingly unimportant to read through.

This is a good point. If you look through the ARE students' websites, you'll see that maybe half focus on agriculture/resource/environment topics and the rest do all kinds of applied micro fields: development, trade, IO, health, labor, etc. There is a lot going on in that department. Jen Brown got interviews at U of Toronto and UBC this year, so the paper must have interested at least a few professors. I've known quite a few professors that played golf, so this could be the kind of thing that catches their attention. As another example, when a job candidate gave a talk at my school about the determinants of divorce, she had a lot of professors on the edge of their seats and commenting like crazy! I don't know if she got the job though...

I've also heard good things about some neighborhoods in South Berkeley -- Rockridge, parts of Piedmont, etc. I'll be interested to check it out and see what's what.

No, Berkeley only allows you to apply to one department. I imagine that this lowers ARE's applicant count a fair amount and results in a higher proportion of applications from people who are interested specifically in their program. Oh, and about housing, my wife and I haven't figured anything out yet, but I don't think it's as bad as it used to be to get a place there. I talked to a current grad student there and he said it's doable to get housing with just a few days of looking. I'm not excited about paying the rent there, though. At my undergraduate I paid $400/month for an apartment, so $1200+ is a new concept for me...

I will. See you all in a few months! Also, nice picture, 486hunter :tup:

Required Textbook: White, H., Asymptotic Theory for Econometricians, Academic Press, 2001, Second Edition. Other Books: Davidson, J.E., Stochastic Limit Theory, Oxford University Press, 1994 Davidson, R. and J.G. MacKinnon, Estimation and Inference in Econometrics, Oxford University Press, 1993

So I know a bit about the UW's courses and felt like pointing out that Advanced Multivariable Calculus I isn't really advanced. This is students' first exposure to things like Lagrange multipliers, multivariate integration, and the chain rule in a multivariable context. I would consider this to be basic and pretty important stuff -- it was covered in my standard calculus sequence at another university. What do you all think?

I see from your signature that you do have a tuition waiver for Duke, which significantly lowers the difference between the first year costs at UVA and Duke. It sounds like you want to attend Duke and that you have looked into the differences between the two programs carefully. Maybe you can think of it in this way since you'll be funded in years 2-5: instead of getting $0 in the first year, would you pick Duke if you had a stipend for years 1-5 that was worth $4250 less than usual? Assuming that you can borrow at low rates and the uncertainty of passing prelims at Duke is not a factor, the problems are roughly equivalent. Good luck!

From their website: How many students are admitted to the program? We plan on an enrollment of 25-30 incoming students each fall and up to 5 each spring, and anticipate that about 50% of those admitted will accept our offer of admission. Given a pool of 150 to 200 applicants, so about 1 in every 3 applicants can expect to be admitted. If you imagine the quality of their average applicant compared to that of students applying to top PhD programs, I think it is safe to say that admission is not extremely competitive. The fun part comes after admission when you get to cut them a check for $35,000 :yuck:

I'm all for ag econ programs (and will be attending one in the fall) but I don't know that they're right for the OP's interests. Macro is typically not prevalent in these departments, though not nonexistent. In any case, you typically don't take the full macro core and the development field is geared toward micro-level development. I think "Brown-type" programs are probably the better fit... although I'm curious about what others think.

Type of Undergrad: Large US state university, econ program ranked very low Undergrad GPA: 4.0 Type of Grad: Currently enrolled in econ masters at a US public university Grad GPA: 4.0 through first semester GRE: 800Q, 690V, 6.0 AW Math Courses: Undergrad: Calc 1-4, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Real Analysis; Grad: Topology, Optimization (IP) Econ Courses: Undergrad: All the standard intro/intermediate, econometrics, electives; Grad: Micro, Macro, Econometrics Letters of Recommendation: All three were from economists and should be very positive. Nobody famous, that I know of... but I get the impression that they were very specific. Research Experience: Summer RA for econometrics professor, currently an RA for a couple of professors working in applied micro Teaching Experience: None, except some grading Research Interests: Development, trade, applied micro SOP: It was very conservative, about a page long, talking about what I had done as a research assistant, what my general research interests were, and my desire to work in academia after graduation. For the AREC programs, I added a short paragraph about my experiences studying abroad in a developing country and my eagerness to do field work (without sounding naive). RESULTS: Acceptances: Berkeley ARE ($, will be attending), UCSD ($), Maryland ($), Michigan (no $), Wisconsin AAE ($), Michigan State ($), UC Davis ($) Waitlists: Brown Rejections: Stanford, Yale What would you have done differently? Things worked out well given that my pedigree was so poor. I got into Berkeley ARE, which is a perfect match for my interests, so I can't think of much to do differently. Probably shouldn't have applied to Stanford and chosen a different reach instead, not that I would have gotten in.

I worked in an international student services office for a while during my undergrad, and my best advice for you is to: 1) Talk to the international office at your school about the situation with your F-1 and your prospects for reentry, during which time they'll probably tell you to... 2) ...chat with an immigration lawyer to get quality advice on the immigration situation you'll face if you go home. It's worth it to inform yourself fully. Good luck.

Good luck to everyone waiting! I hope today will bring good news for some TMians.

Quick update: Just got the financial information email from UCSD. Hopefully the rest of admitted students will soon.