eqtisadi

If you need to get into some program in order to feel smart enough, or if the reason you do something is to signal others that you're very smart, than... this, my friend, ain't very smart. But that's just me.

If you're complaining to get respect from other people, don't waste your time. Indeed, many walks of life demand a lot - maybe too much - from people that chose them. Workaholics will work too much no matter what they choose to do. True, in some cases the institutions are such that you must work around the clock. And you only need the (credible) threat of attrition, even if it's just 1%, and a really hard exam, to make your life hard. Of course, if it's only 30% pass rate than things are more stressful, but the attrition rate isn't the only thing that can drive you nuts while studying.

The number itself - GPA that is - doesn't matter too much. The question is whether people from your university usually go into good PhD programs. If not - then even with a perfect score and with amazing skills it's going to be very hard to get in. If there are people, you should compare your GPA to theirs. Not to people from other universities. Let alone from other countries.

No worries. Not even about how "high" the program is ranked. Even if you have guys with very extensive math background around you, it's not a prerequisite and therefore the department will do its best to make it possible for you to study what you need.

School: Stanford Required prelims (we call it comprehensive exams): Micro, Macro, Econometrics When taken: First attempt: end-of-May til early June. A comp for every Friday. Six hours each. 100% fun guaranteed. Retakes: Everyone gets a second attempt at the end of September (before the 2nd year starts); up to about four or five years ago you could take as many metrics comps as you want (need), then they made it four attempts overall, our year is the first one when we'll have two attempts in metrics. Micro and Macro were always two attempts. Score required to pass: I think for Macro and Micro it's about two thirds of the points. For metrics one third (and it's the one with the largest number of fails). It's not quite clear what makes the cut - whether it's absolute or relative. Most of the class ends up with very close scores, even though some above the threshold and some below. More: Comprehensive Exam Archive | E c o n o m i c s

Just don't ask him if the Taylor expansion is also named after him. That can be awkward... Seriously now, I think there was this thread last year, by asquare mainly, with good questions to ask. I figure that if Taylor called you, then you probably wrote Macro as one of your fields of interest in your SOP. You can ask him (or others that will call) about the programs, placements, etc. Oh, and on the light side again, you can ask him questions about the movie based on a true story: global financial warrior - Google Video

Just to make things clear, I'm not trying to compare Stanford vs. Columbia (as the title of this thread might say), but rather to compare Stanford before and after the change. Maybe Columbia has the same structure. I was just saying that previous performance by Stanford, especially in Macro is not a good predictor for future performance. I think you can find more info on the structure of the program under "Current Graduate Students" and find the handbook there. I'm pretty much into passing the comps right now so I can't tell you. Oh, and in second year, most of us must RA, and they make sure that we get matched to professors. I think it's really good because it's right between doing problem sets (first year) and independent research (third year and on). You get to know professors better and start thinking also about your research. As to the curriculum, I don't know where you got Stanford's curriculum. You can find it in the Handbook somewhere. It took me some time to find it. Anyway, I think in second year you get what the professors that teach are interested in, so you can simply read about their research interests on their websites. While the core courses in first year are relatively stable (and very much alike across departments), second year can change a lot and it depends on supply and demand of subjects. Bottom line, if you have two departments with enough breadth in the fields you are interested in, I don't think there's a clear cut criterion that can tell you that one is better than the other. In any of them there's a chance you'll end up with a really good adviser with whom you have great chemistry, or you can end up not matched as well as you wished for. Ex ante, you can't really tell.

Email them, or call them, whatever you feel like.

Well, although this year gives me a lot of pain, especially in Macro (I'm not a Macro type really), let me clarify some things about Stanford, Macro and placements. Stanford had a rough time about four or five years ago. I was talking to some fifth year students here and they say that things were pretty bad back then. One of my former professor also mentioned that too. Especially in Macro, things were so bad that they didn't have the whole first-year sequence in Macro - there weren't enough professors to teach. This year, however, we have three quarters with six professors teaching (each for half a quarter) and this is not the complete list of Macro people here. Many of them are researchers at the prime period of their academic career, which is exactly what a grad student is looking for. Even though I don't really like the field, it's pretty clear that the Macro professors are trying - more than any other field - to bring people to do Macro and support them. Take a look at Tertilt's website, for example, and you'll see that she's really into training young economists. In addition, I think I said that before in this forum. This year we started a new structure for the PhD program which is more tight and makes you work harder in second and third year so that you won't get lost in the way. If you'll ask people who are in fourth or fifth year, many of them will tell you they don't really remember what they did with their third year. For many people it's very hard to go from well-defined problem sets with (hopefully) a solution somewhere to problems that you need to define without knowing if there is a solution to them. I really think the new structure is better. Unless someone will make me present something with a fixed deadline, I can wander on and on looking for better and better ideas wasting time instead of working. In terms of placements, you need to take this reform into account. Predicting future placements according to past placements will not take into account the structural change. This reform was imported along the lines of Northwestern's program. If you saw Northwestern's placements in recent years, I sure hope ours will start to look like them too in the near future. I can't say anything about future placements, but at least for the present time, you can definitely notice the change in the program, so it's not just cheap talk. Come to the flyout, talk to the Macro people. All of them are nice and helpful. P.S If you're into finance and Macro, I think some of the recent recruits are actually in the intersection of these fields. Check out Schneider and Piazzesi in the faculty list. Schneider taught us this quarter (great guy, good sense of humor and accurate honest answers to any question I had) and Piazzesi next quarter.

oh, sorry for the late response. I didn't get any notice on Bored's question. Grades are relative in that you need to get B or above to pass, and even though there is no official exact percentile above which you get a B, it's around the 30th to 40th percentile. In metrics, the most intimidating comp of the three, for example, you need to get slightly more than 100 out of 300. Everyone gets two chances to pass, but the second chance exams are two-days apart, so failing two comps in the first time isn't pleasant. On the other hand, I didn't really hear about anyone who was forced to leave because he failed the comps. In the last two years I think there was maybe a couple of students who chose to leave for their own reasons. The most important thing to remember is that the general atmosphere is not that their out to get you, or have a quota to fail, but rather that they really want everyone to pass eventually. In other words, getting kicked out generally off the equilibrium path, thanks to the fact that it sure is a credible threat.

I was just forwarding the message! And I wanted to come but couldn't at the last minute (Yeah, I know I'm lame). Are you saying that my case is different? Man, I'm so roasted. Anyway, I agree with everything JohnStreetEcon said. Especially how the class has really nice people. Students in Berkeley told me that the atmosphere in Stanford is very competitive and "star"-system. It's funny but even though grades are relative, people share notes, resources, knowledge, spouses (well, maybe not spouses). But people are very nice and very supportive. Still 97 days to the last comp. Damn.

The ***** up there is an automatic-mouth-shutter/politically-correctness-autocop that replaced my original word which started with b, had four more letters, and rhymes with rich.

I had a similar dilemma last year. Berkeley doesn't have comps (they have a different second year drag) and Stanford does. I knew that it's a pain, but I thought that maybe the fact that you have those comps make you study harder. Especially for fields that you find less interest in, by the way. Academically, though, it was a tie for me. So we ended up going further in the lexicographical order deciding for reasons which are not academic. In hindsight, I can't compare it to other programs, but I learned a LOT. Every time I ***** about how I hate this year, I know at the same time that I learned so much. Even in fields that I thought I was pretty strong at, I realized that I knew nothing (unfortunately, I still know nothing, which makes me a bit anxious about the comps, but that's a different story). Anyway, a good way to compare how good the programs are is to look at the placement record. The problem is that you can't identify how much credit the program should get. To the best of my knowledge Stanford hasn't been as good as other top-5 departments when it comes to placements. But this year the department revised the program (now it's Stanford 2.0) - especially the second and third year - so we hope for better results in two-to-three years. 97 days left to the last comp.

Congrats to all admits! Sorry for all rejects. If anyone has any questions about the department feel free to PM me. Especially if you want to know how painful is first year, but also about how nice is the weather, how many free lunches you can get on an average week. If I don't reply quickly it's because of how painful, indeed, this year is. 97 days to the last comp.

Just a reminder - last year there were a couple of people (me included) that didn't get an answer even after most people got either admits or rejects. It turned out that they had another round a week later or something like that (after which I was rejected).

Lower expectations but don't lose hope. I got waitlisted twice last year. I think Harvard didn't admit any of last year's waitlist eventually. But they said that they did admit one or two people from the waitlist in previous years.

I agree with YoungEconomist, but nevertheless there is one case in my class (transferred from a relatively lower ranked school). My friend asked me jokingly if he's applying to MIT this year ;)

I really liked asquare's post, but I disagree with the last part - if you got into more than one school, I think you should take into account pretty seriously how constraining are the prelims/comps. If one school has a quota to fail (or a reputation for consistently failing, even if an official quota is nonexistent), and the other is pretty much safe to stay with, then it is definitely one (of many others) reason to go to the safer school. You guys don't have prelims/comps in econometrics? Just micro and macro? I heard this is how it used to be here too. Nowadays I think metrics is the hardest comp. Oh, and it's six hours, not four. One would have thought that it's good because time pressure is lower, but then remember that the number of questions is endogenous, so having more time doesn't necessarily mean having less pressure.

I heard from a friend who has heard from another friend that a professor that is involved in the admissions decisions told him that decisions have been made. I guess that next week will be really busy around here. Good luck to all people waiting to get in. I can't wait for you guys to arrive - because then this group of really desperate people that can't understand why they did it to themselves (aka first year econ students) won't be me :)

This is very true - solving problem sets of well defined problems and solving problems that you need to find and define are two different things, and it is clear that the latter is more important, but as it turns out (and I'm not sure this is right), part of being an economist is having enough competency in some main themes of economics. I don't think that making people leave after a year or two they invested is a good way to implement this - especially when it's part of the deal: throw x% out. I think there are other better ways to ensure some minimal capacity in economics fields that are unrelated to yours.

As far as I know (and I'm not a big gossip hub), nobody got kicked out. Yes, some people failed a comp of two, some of them failed metrics the second time (although up until our year they're supposed to have four chances in metrics and not just two as in macro and micro - we have two attempts in each). But nobody was asked to leave. I heard that there is one or two students that people don't see too much since the end of last year, but they believe it was the students' choice and not the department. So I don't know how credible is the threat of making you leave if you fail the comp, but it still is a constant shadow on the entire year.

I thought that people in European departments (or that wish to go there) might be interested in this: Do elite economics departments produce the best papers? | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

Damn those prelims! I think we should strike...

I think I heard the 20% number in Stanford too. But it was earlier this year, long before the deadline. Maybe they were comparing early admissions to early admissions.

Promise her commission from your fellowship. You can also bring a gun to school. Both will work as an incentive. The former sounds less criminal, but still... never mind. stupid joke.