desimba

The one answer that will never lead you to have a problem is that it depends. Well but then what does it depend on? It certainly depends on the school (to a large extent) and the discipline (to some extent). Chicago GSB and Stanford GSB, unarguably two of the best B-schools are believed to prefer younger students coming straight from undergrad/ grad-school, at least for their Economics/ Economic Analysis & Policy program. On the other hand, there are other schools which look favorably on 2-3 years of work experience. For one, age does tend to raise maturity levels and causes people to be sure why they are there in a PhD program. Speaking for myself, I have had a total of 4 years work experience and am currently in the 1st year of a top 10 B-school and I feel that my work exp. just convinces me that I don't want to get into industry and get a "real job". Even that thought doesn't come to my mind and I know that I want to be in academia when I am done. Often folks who come in without that background of having worked, aren't quite as sure and they may take the attitude of "We will see when we get to it." And B-schools typically don't want their graduates taking up positions in industry- at least that's what I understand at present.

http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-business/88460-phd-finance-vs-economics-vs-business-economics.html#post575707 This is an old response from me to a similar question. Maybe some of you will find it useful.

Since you seem to disagree with me on so many fronts, it would be nice if you dropped me a note after all the dust settles in and you have all the results with you. I have strong convinctions that I am correct in what I said but who knows, I could be wrong as well. Would be interesting therefore to hear from you at psmoon@hotmail.com once you are all done. (If all this sounds a bit cocky pardon me for the same but having applied during two application cycles- the first during 2006 to 10 schools and then in 2008 to 17 schools gives me some confidence that I understand how the process works :) However I will admit that my field wasn't finance but business economics)

What counts more is not your overall GPA but your Math GPA. If you had an A or a higher grade in the math courses that you mentioned and a B- on your Heat Transfer or Thermodynamics course then that is acceptable. Of course it would have been good to have an A in everything but then life is not like that.

Couple of thoughts: 1) 760 is probably too low for finance at top schools. 2) If you end up not getting in anywhere then spending 1 more year in industry will not add much value to your package. On the other hand if you are willing to spend 1 year at a university working with a prof on an active research area, then that will add considerable weight to your application. 3) Making your SOP very specific is probably a bad idea because you risk the fact that schools will reject your application if they feel you are too rigid in your choice and will not fit well into the program. 4) Last, in terms of direct advice as to what is to be done, I would suggest that you may apply to 3-4 more schools which are ranked lower than the 6 schools you have already applied to. Based on that, you will be able to get a sense of the right range of schools to apply to. If you get rejected by all 10 schools, then that will be a wake up call for you and you know that you will need to do things differently the next time around. If you end up getting accepted by some of these places, you can decide whether you want to join those universities or end up waiting for one more year and improve your profile in the meanwhile.

To the best of my understanding verbal section scores don't really matter. My GRE scores were 800 Q & 580 V and I did have an admit (without schol) from Wisconsin at Madison and full scholarship from University of Iowa's economics department. And I am pretty sure that last year I had seen posts on this board from people who had a very low verbal score (

I would tend to agree with that conjecture. At any of the top schools, it would probably be a deal breaker. Places like Wharton/ HBS/ Kellogg are used to seeing near-perfect transcripts and Cs in a very important course would almost certainly rule you out of running. My 2 cents :)

Vague impressions from having looked at their website and their placement stats: They have a good PhD program esp. when compared against the rankings of their MBA programs. For most schools, whether it is Wharton or Stanford or Michigan, their MBA rankings and PhD programs have a pretty tight relationship. Not so for Rochester whose PhD program is certainly thought of as being much better than their masters' programs. I had thought of applying to that place myself at one point of time in their strategy department but then the small size of the place was one of my concerns esp. as I wasn't sure how my interests would evolve once I joined the program. In fact I checked again and they had only 2 full time faculty devoted to that area. You should really think hard about applying to a place which has that few faculty members on its rolls.

University of Iowa does that as well. Here is the link: http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/phd/Fall07AdmResults.html The 2008 link on their site does not seem to have been updated.

Looks solid to me. The leadership stuff does not count for much really. However the rest of the stuff appears to be there by and large though I might mention that I don't see real analysis, which is something most successful applicants to top Econ programs have had. Other than that I think it is solid. Strong recommendations from your recommenders will put you over the hill and should help you get into places within the top 20. The top 10 is always touch and go.

The credentials look good and you should be able to get into the kinds of places you are thinking of. If you are only interested in the Mid-Atlantic region, you can consider U Penn as well and if you are ready to consider parts of the Mid-west, schools like Purdue and OSU are also good options. Having said that, you may have seen some discussion on these boards of IS being a discipline in decline. There is probably some truth to that. I have joined a school in the MW and in the Business Information Technology area, there was just 1 incoming student in the first year class whereas in every single other discipline there were at least 2 students if not more. So you may want to re-evaluate the idea of just sticking to IS and consider strategy/ management/ OB programs as well.

Look at the profiles of people who are in the role of a financial advisor to the deptt. of finance and see if any of them has a PT degree or not. As best as I recall, advisors/ politicians in the finance ministry tend to come from the very top-tier schools. Look at India which is where I come from. The present Prime Minister has an Economics PhD from Oxford and the Finance Minister has a Law degree from Harvard Law. Also look at folks in places like Thailand, S Korea and Mexico and you will see the truth of what I am saying. A PT degree as I said is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Berkeley could probably fall in the ultra elite but not Yale or Duke. Yale's PhD program is in fact almost an afterthought and in some ways, they are milking the reputation of the larger university. One evidence of the fact that they do not focus on their PhD program is that they don't even have a PhD program for all of the management disciplines such as operations or organization behavior or policy, etc. Yale should be less competitive than the other ones.

You have not specified which discipline you are talking of. Assuming that it is finance, I would guess you have a decent chance at the ultra elites and a very high chance at the other top tiers.

Hal Varian is considered a guru. And he is at Berkeley.

My vote goes for Real Analysis. In fact I am struggling with trying to get my head wrapped around open ball, neighborhoods and converging sequences and am taking a break to check out these boards. The other stuff comes a lot readily and in some cases is less useful as well, but RA is tough and something that is hard to avoid if your research has anything to do with economics.

Second oldprogrammer's note. Cannot think of a single PT program whose degree is worth the paper that it is printed on.

You should have provided the percentile scores for ppl. to respond well to your query. If you haven't got your percentiles already, you should have them soon. However having taken both the tests and having a rough sense of what percentiles these might correspond to, I would guess your GMAT score will look more impressive than your GRE score. So therefore for schools which will accept the GMAT, that might be the better one and for those who don't accept anything other than the GRE, you really don't have a choice.

That is precisely the reason I did not offer this advice even though I followed it myself during my application process. Now the reason I had personally gone for e-mailing 2-3 of the profs is that it seemed very unlikely to me that if one were to contact 1/2 professors, they would keep a note of your name and come application time, they would tell themselves that "Hey, no matter what, I don't care how good this guy's application package is, I am going to reject him in February '09 because he had written me two e-mails to me in September '08." I mean to me it personally seemed ridiculous that such a thing would ever happen. More realistically the profs to which you are writing will give the mail a casual read and hit the delete button rather than respond back. However there were exceptions to that as well as I can attest from my personal experience. I was interested in applying to Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) (they do work in the areas of labor economics and transitional economies, etc.) but I was undecided whether I should apply to them instead of another school that also looked appealing. I then wrote to two profs at ILR whose work most closely matched my interests and they both responded back almost immediately with very positive responses and that clinched the deal as far as applying to the school was concerned. Later on, I indeed did get an admit from that school. However at the same time, there were profs who did not respond to my e-mails but to me, that was fine. Eventually my acceptances and rejects had little correlation with whether I had shot an email to 2 profs in those departments or not. However it did help me in finetuning my list of schools that I applied to.

I second all of what you have said- seems reasonable to me. The only other add I have for the person posting originally is that if your recommender is encouraging you to apply to all the top schools, then that's a good sign- s/he likely has a good impression about you and will support you by giving a strong recommendation. I would also venture to guess that in such a case, he wouldn't mind writing a few more recommendations for you. Now if this same/ similar level of enthusiasm is shown by the other profs, then you are in an enviable spot.

As I said, I wasn't sure of the econ departments myself, but as far as B-schools go, you can look at the list of the schools attending one of these fairs to be held in NY in September' 08: hardly what one might imagine given your previous comment. Columbia Business School Harvard Business School MIT Sloan School of Management Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Stanford Graduate School of Business University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business (Link: Events)

The book that was used in my MBA classes 2 years back at a top-25 school in the Mid-west: Principles of Corporate Finance by Brearley & Myers- Amazon.com: Principles of Corporate Finance (The Mcgraw-Hill/Irwin Series in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate): Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers: Books Pretty safe book which covers the basics quite well I think. I am just starting off a PhD program in Business Economics at the University of Michigan and in our department, PhD students are appointed as RAs in all but the 3rd year of the program when we have to teach a course. Business Economics Group: PhD Program Overview I understand that how much work one does as an RA depends on how hard the prof is willing to push and which stage of the program a student is in. In the early stages, it is likely to involve more of the low-hanging fruit such as lit searches or cleaning up some data sets, etc. It is actually pretty useful in some of these settings to have good programming skills. I know of someone who was able to get RA positions consistently during his PhD program because of his superior programming skills.

As you said yourself, researching the deptt. very well and getting that reflected in your SOP is a good idea. While writing my SOPs for instance, I remember having spent quite a bit of time looking at the websites of the schools pretty closely and trying to get a "feel" of what characterized their environments and what made them unique relative to other schools in that same tier. I also remember having read 2-3 of the papers most relevant to my area of interest that were authored by professors in that particular deptt. and then referencing 1-2 of these papers in my SOP. To the extent that the SOP is not made much attention, this may largely have been a waste of time. Another way (which I am purely speculating on) could be to show up at PhD fairs that are generally held during the Fall across some of the major cities in the U.S. From what I hear, usually academics don't come to these fairs and instead send Admin folks in which case networking with them might not be all that helpful. Nevertheless if you are able to speak with folks there and like what you see, it can't hurt to mention that in your SOP. Now while I know they are usually attended by the business schools (e.g. PhD Program: Stanford GSB), I am not sure whether pure Econ departments also participate in anything that is similar to this.

Amazon.com: One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth: Dani Rodrik: Books While I am not familiar with the book itself, I have read a number of his papers and found them to be very interesting. I would dare say that the book also is good. It also gets a 5-star rating on Amazon.

Not all that familiar with OB so take my advice with a pinch of salt. I would say that: a) Your chances at a top 10 school seem low to me. People admitted to top 10 programs, more often than not, have graduate degrees and tend to have higher GPAs during their undergrads. b) Given that it may not be a bad idea to spread out your schools a bit more. If you had to go with no more than 8 schools, I might consider choosing 2-3 schools from the top 10 and the remaining 5-6 schools from the next set of schools. Choose wisely such that they are roughly equispaced from each other by way of the ranking. So, say, 1-2 from schools ranked between 15-25; 1-2 schools ranked between 25-40 & 1-2 schools ranked between 40-60. c) Which specific schools you go with should be based on looking at the websites of the schools pretty thoroughly and seeing which ones best match with your own research interests and your past experience (assuming that your past experience is in something in which you would be interested in the future.)