Mr.Keen

I have a rather economics-intensive background, rather than a mathematics one, and right now I'm wishing my first micro course here at Chicago had a little bit more math and less intuition, :S. I find the economics part much more difficult than the math. Paraphrasing Tom Sargent: "once you know how to set up your economic model, the rest is just math".

You should definitely consider Chicago among your reaches. Your Verbal score might hurt you at Yale and, well, pretty much at every top school. But I got into Chicago fully funded even though I had a mere 3.5 AWA. Other than that I think your record is pretty solid to aim at the top. Just my 2 cents.

You may not need to take the TOEFL since you will be getting a degree from an institution in an English-speaking country. With few exceptions (Duke comes to mind) you will find that most schools will give you a TOEFL waiver. That way, even if your English is poor, at least you won't have a bad TOEFL score to reveal such deficiency.

Because Olm would be on the OP's case like white on rice. He used to get annoyed by people with perfect profiles asking to evaluate their chances since it looked more like showing off than anything else. Can't really blame him, if you ask me.

Don't sell yourself short. In my opinion you do have a chance at those places, your profile seems to be on the strong side.

IMHO, ODE is stuff you can learn on your own. Take topology. If it is offered before real analysis then I assume that you will get a nice background in the topology of R that will be very useful for analysis. And an A in topology looks far more impressive than an A in ODE, so it will help you a lot more with the adcoms.

I heard ASU's stipend is in the 24k neighborhood, and so is University of New Mexico's. So it's not only about the rankings, it seems you got the greatest lower bound of the stipend set... tough break.

I agree with Jeeves, don't ask your recommender to write about his qualifications. That could even hurt you because adcoms might think your recommender doesn't even understand the process.

But THERE IS a paper ranking departments published at the AER. Look it up.

Apply to all top 10. You should definitely include Chicago in your list.

The MA way is definitely the best for you. Just use all your electives to take advanced math and stats, write a decent thesis and do well in all coursework and you'll be in good shape.

It looks reasonable to me too, although I would put NWU over MIT and Harvard out of that list. (Just my personal opinon)

I know you were meaning deadline, I just couldn't resist... :)

I agree that most field undergrad courses are not very useful, unless they are quite technical. In my case, some of my field courses were just as crucial as the theory ones because they built on what we had covered in the "core". Example: my trade theory undegrad course was filled with formal proofs of theorems such as Stolper-Samuelson, Rybczynski, factor price equalization, etc. That might be the case in some top undergrad international institutions, but I doubt you will see something like that in most US schools. Even then, my macro undergrad was really useless and was more or less as israelecon has described it. However, most schools would like you to have exposure to both intermediate micro and macro.

Wow, I did not know that the European schools had their own phone dating services. Those guys are really ahead of us, ;)