jbs02002

You will be fine. I went to a top 10 LAC as well (Pomona College), took only calc, lin alg, and diff eq for math, and got into Minnesota. With all your extra math, you will almost surely get into at least one top 7-8. On the off chance you go to Pomona as well you can PM me if you want.

I think the biggest reason to worry about grades is that some forms of funding, especially dissertation fellowships offered by the university (not the department itself, mind you), are competitive and grades are one of the factors in determining who gets the money.

I wouldn't worry too much. Economists are usually pretty rational people and bigotry towards gays is completely irrational. I'd have a hard time believing that economists are less gay-friendly than the average profession.

Sorry, PHP is so common in web design these days that I figured if you knew some Flash you were probably familiar with it. Depending on how you're storing the data (not in a database, so text files?) you could certainly still use the combination I suggested. There's nothing that would require you to use SQL instead of simply reading the data in from text.

You might try using a combination of PHP and the JPGraph library. If you are at all familiar with PHP, it's pretty painless to get it to work, and the graphs are all generated server-side so there's nothing to slow the client computer down.

Heh, you're doing my job for me.

I think we need to organize a drinking competition at next year's AEA meeting to determine the true, objective ranking of graduate programs. Minnesota will take everyone down for sure.

As a first-year, student pages seem to be most useful for 1. Posting homework, solutions, etc. for undergrad classes for which one TAs. 2. Hosting class notes, prelim solutions, etc.

I'm the guy at UMN who is from LA originally. I went to the UCLA flyout last year and I really was not impressed. No one seemed enthusiastic about the program at all. Did you attend either flyout? I really would not let the rumored mathematical rigor of UMN's program worry you too much. I had never seen any concepts from real analysis before I came here, and between math camp and the analysis class I'm taking now, I have had no trouble at all with the math. The weather should also not be a big concern for you. For one, you will be inside most of the time anyway studying. If anything, the cold weather disincentivizes leaving the office which makes you work more. Second, our weather is exaggerated just like the mathematical difficulty of our program. I was among a pretty big group of people who rode their bikes to school every day, even when it was -15 F. It's really not a big deal when you get used to it.

I see an ERS Group placement in 2004-2005, Microstrategy, Inc. and Brattle Group in 1999-2000, Brattle and CNA Corp. in 1998-1999, Price Waterhouse and Oppenheimer Funds in 1997-1998, and a few more further back. I think UMN may place few people in the private sector because most of us focus on macro-related stuff and do very little metrics (especially a while ago). This doesn't mesh with private sector work, which tends to be micro and/or metrics related. Econ consulting firms for example generally only hire finance/IO/applied micro/metrics guys.

As far as I know, Minnesota's complete placement record is publicly available. The website is here: University of Minnesota Department of Economics Obviously they are not as good as Yale's but the public record goes back more than 10 years.

Come on junior, you gotta show up for happy hour on Friday at least. To the original poster, if you have nothing else to do that weekend you should come. It will be a lot of fun and the department will pay for it.

Also at Minnesota... we spent about 5 minutes on the basic RBC model in our first quarter of macro.

I don't think professors at LACs have to do all of their own grading. When I was at a LAC for undergrad, I did a lot of grading for my professors. Maybe for upper-level courses professors have to do their own grading, but for lower-level classes having student graders is very common. I graded for upper-level classes like econometrics as well, but that may be more rare.

Minnesota takes flyout partying pretty seriously. The department pays for a fairly raucous happy hour on Friday and also buys the booze for a party at one of the first or second-year's houses. The only other flyout I went to was UCLA. They didn't put nearly the same emphasis on having fun as the Minnesotans did.