Chicunomics

Fancy seeing you here hotfuss!! Well the OP had a contradiction in that first post. First, "Firstly, a straight honours degree in economics is not going to be adequate preparation for a North American PhD program, as you will be deficient in maths. You will need to take some additional courses from the maths department." and second, "My advice: if you have a strong first class honours, just bite the bullet and go straight for the PhD, recognising that you might have to work a bit harder than your peers with a masters." Maybe you meant to imply in that second statement that you will have also taken some additional math courses after the honours degree, THEN bitten the bullet. Anyway, yes, you need more math than an Australian program is going to give you, not only to be 'well prepared', but also to be admitted. Admissions committees know this, and it's not arbitrary that you'll have a hard time being admitted without enough math. It's simply because without it, you'll find it hard to survive first year.

Haile and Tamer, "Inference with an Incomplete Model of English Auctions." And not just to rep NU...

This, 110%. Do not confuse correlation with causation. Obviously the best of the best go to top 5, on average. But they are there because they are the best of the best, and if they'd gone to...say Penn or NU, they'd still be top 5 faculty now. But in any case, if you're feeling unhappy with the place you're thinking of attending now, odds are you're always going to have that gnawing feeling, and whether justified or not, if it's there, you may as well do what you can to get rid of it -- either by realizing that you should be happy with the place you have, or alternatively by waiting it out another year.

I don't know what issues you got, but son, you got issues.

With regard to empirical IO, the best minds seem to suggest: find the data first. It's nice to have grand ideas about hypotheses you want to test, but they're near-worthless without data, and good IO data is very hard to come by. Also, there's a difference between data mining and asking "what questions can I answer with this data?". Truth is it takes long enough to come up and estimate IO models that very few people would have the patience to do anything close to resembling 'data mining'. In fields where you can get Stata to run 100 regressions for you in a couple of minutes, data mining is more of a problem, but if you're good about things, the "what questions can I answer with this data?" approach is still fine far as I'm concerned.

I'm really curious what university you are from now. Some of the things you are saying do not seem right. And if you are going to do courses outside the norm, why wouldn't you go to the professors first to verify that you can take their subject without the prerequisites?? Anyway: see signature.

I don't want to speak more generally, but I know that (the relevant) Northwestern faculty do seem to honestly believe they provide the best IO and especially micro theory training of anywhere in the world. Whether that is true or not, I would like to think it manifests itself in the way they approach classes, advising, etc. so that they at least make that a goal to strive towards.

Let Igal know about your preferences and other offers ASAP. I cannot see that it would hurt, and it much more likely to speed up the likelihood of funding in your particular case (that being that you have very credible: "I will not go here if you do not fund me" arguments).

You'll want to be clear with them about what 'unfunded' means. For me it was made clear I was going to have to fund myself for 2 years, not 1. Whether that might have changed once I was actually in the program, who knows, but that's what I was told...

I was on this once upon a time. It never moved for me (as you might infer ;) ). I didn't find out until April 10th, despite them saying quite a few times it would be earlier (i.e., couple of weeks, then by the end of march, then first week of April, etc...). I don't blame them though, that's just how it went, and I suppose they were trying to be positive for me by giving the earliest feasible dates each time I checked up on that. The funding was going to be only for years 3-5. This implied a 150K debt, give or take, for the first two years. Unless your family is very well off...no one recommended it, not MIT, not anyone else. Which is to say: MIT said I shouldn't come if they couldn't fund me (given my other offers, which weren't even as good as yours) -- it's not worth it. Apparently my year there were only 9 funded offers. I cannot verify this, but the source is relatively trustworthy. So the competition for those is going to be fierce, and the reason that MIT sometimes overturns admissions decisions for NSF winners -- they really try to get as many as they can externally funded. I was ranked, within my field. I was the '2nd in line' for microeconomics funding. At April 10 I was told that #1 in line MIGHT get funding, so, I should act as if I wasn't going to. I know that people who visited and were on the waitlist also didn't get off (very good applicants at that). I didn't visit. I don't really regret it, though I guess it can't hurt to get face time. No idea whether getting people to write on your behalf etc. will help. Odds are everyone does that and at a certain point they just have to start ignoring it. It was a pretty heartbreaking experience. But the faculty and students there were great throughout the whole experience (though I was always so nervous talking to Glenn Ellison...). I have nothing but good things to say about them, and I hope they don't mind me divulging this information. If so...too late ;)

Yes, and elly the year before him. No urban legends here. People who have gotten the NSF and been previously rejected have also stayed rejected. It is not an automatic ticket in, but it helps!

Haha thanks, I'm a second year now, life has become slightly easier ;) time flies...

I did a lot of this. The list below is not completely mine: I got a lot of them from a thread here which I am too lazy to search for right now. I had personalized lists for professors at different schools, but I've tried to condense them. How do students at [your school] find advisors/at what stage? What is the general approach to advising, and how closely do students work with advisors? When do most students start working on their own research? What opportunities are available to students who want to get an early start? Is there time for such a thing? What is the policy on auditing classes, and is there the potential to take extra classes? Is doing this advisable in any case? Compare other universities being applied to (i.e. if this is university A, ask to compare universities B, C, and D). If there is a business school/other department you’re interested in: what is the level of integration with [department/business school]? Class and seminar-wise? Talking to faculty about research? What do students usually do over their summers? Attrition rates? If high, what is the rationale behind this? What is the attitude/preference towards RA vs TA responsibilities in the department? In 2nd year onwards, is there much possibility for RA work? [if school has a full year math sequence/compulsory history sequence]: I see that [school] has a full year [maths/history] sequence which is quite unusual amongst top schools. What is the reasoning for this, and what do you think [school] offers in this respect that other schools are lacking? If good placement record: why is that and what are you doing right that other schools are not. If bad placement record: what are you doing to change that? What do you see as a weakness of the department? Strengths?

It depends on whether it's the admissions chair or not. I spent up to an hour on the phone with professors before making a decision, but then I wasn't going to visit. Especially if they are not the chair: they probably don't specifically care about feeling you out or working you for figuring how much they can screw you out of funding. Even if they are the chair, it's usually the case that they want to find funding for you -- though of course having competing funded offers and a credible thread of not coming unless you're funded is going to be useful. I'm going to post a list of questions in that other thread that you might find useful.

Leaf.

Not in a 'to another department sense', but at 70 years of age, one can fairly speculate he's not going to be around the department that much longer.

Well obviously I think they're great ;) It's hard to say what more you can do with those rankings though, givne that the information is imperfect, and given there's even less reliable information regarding who was ultimately offered what. You could always go to departments to seek out placement reports, but that's so much work it'll almost constitute a paper -- lord knows it has before.

We actualyl did a little bit of search in information economics with Wolinski in the second year course I'm currently procrastinating on studying for. And Mortensen's 2nd year course is all search, so if you're lucky he'll still be around for that when you're in second year ;). If not, no idea if whoever replaces him will do search. We had an assistant prof doing search here who taught our third quarter, first year macro course which was all search, basically, but she got denied tenure. Shame, she was a really nice person.

He's still here, he had 2 students on the market this year, but it's not clear for how much longer...! So take that as a 'maybe'.

The truth is applied micro is a relatively weak area of northwestern, but education is the big exception to that. We have a weekly seminar on the economics of education, and we recently got Figlio who while not in the economics department, is an economist. You should basically look through here: IPR People: Faculty Fellows and see what people are working on. There is also actually this fellowship: which comes out to 30K/year stipend for your 3rd - 5th years that two people in my year levle got, that is tailored for people wanting to do research on the economics of education. So you get more money than everyone else, with less responsibility if you get that. And I dare say those two people were the only two that applied -- I don't think it's that competitive. So with that comes some obligation to take a few courses from the education department, but if that's waht you want to do research on, that shouldn't be too much of a burden! For labor itself -- that is a bit weak for us. We have a few people doing applied micro work that borders on labor: urzua directly, beaman, and just hired someone from MIT this year -- cynthia kinnan. Since Urzua works with heckman a lot, one of the guys in the year above me who's doing work in labor is working with Urzua here, and Heckman in chicago also. So of course, there's always the option to take classes in Chicago -- someone in my year took classes from both LEvitt and Heckmann this past quarter. It's not a perfect solution for you, but it's at least definitely an option. There are a couple of other offers out and pending for labor/development people I believe. But the Labor field took a hit when Chris Taber left us for Wisconsin. And the truth is Columbia is going to be better than us for applied micro (other than IO, if you want to include that as applied micro). So, I guess you should see and decide...

There is a course in theoretical behavioral being offered in the spring by Jeff Ely under the guise of 'economic theory and methods' -- but it's a pure behavioral course. One of my friends this winter quarter also took a 1 on 1 course with Jeff Ely on behavioral because he had an interest in specific stuff that I guess wasn't going to be covered in the spring quarter's subject -- he just basically approached Ely about it, and Ely said yes. So that was pretty cool for him. If you consider decision theory behavioral econ (which many people do) then there are plenty of options in that respect. If you want more experimental type behavioral, you're going to have to catch the train down to chicago for classes (like one of my other friends is doing!).

I wouldn't worry about the B average. You have to be doing something very wrong not to be able to get a B average. Any course that you take that's on your transcript counts, but anything less than a B effectively counts as a 'fail' - professors know about the B average thing, and they grade accordingly, so that a B- or especially a C is basically a signal that 'you did not do well enough'. C is the worst grade I've heard of people getting, and that really is like a fail. If you're working hard and have at least some understanding of the material, you should clear a 3.0 GPA pretty easily. In any case, there's never any attrition because of that. Moreover, I think Kellogg take some pride in not having anyone fail out or anything, and you will avoid the one thing that is usually the reason people have to retake exams -- macro!

There isn't really much difference. Econ people are free to take whatever courses from Kellogg they like (indeed, any courses offered by the graduate school), and vice-versa. Most of my classes (since I take Kellogg-related stuff like IO and Micro) are about 50% Kellogg students. The only material differences are that econ people have to take macro (so do finance...but not the MECS people) and that as an econ PhD you have to have an econ professor as the chair of your dissertation committee (no restriction on the other members though). Kellogg PhD students also have some other requirements dependent on the field...but anyway, you can find that out by looking at the program webpages. In general, I don't really think of Kellogg courses and faculty as being any different to econ in the sense that -- if there's someone I wanted to talk to or a course I want to take, I'll take it -- the fact that it's not formally part of the economics department is not really relevant.

I think Golden Rule is being very measured in his responses. I'm going to be less measured. I think while you accuse Italos of being patronizing, which may or may not have been the case (not intentionally anyway, I'm sure), you should realize that you are also being patronizing to everyone out there that is not at a 'top 7' school. Let me tell you, there are WAAYYYY more applicants every year who think they should be at, and will get into, a top 7 school, than ends up being the case. You cannot underestimate just how strong both the faculty and the students will be at a place like Columbia. Yes, Columbia is not, at this point in time, going to claim to be on an equal footing with MIT. But I have this feeling that you would get to Columbia and realize that your peers are much stronger than you would have guessed. Moreover, I am sure the average student in the Columbia PhD class will be stronger than the average student at LSE EME (no offense intended to those there right now). Only very few LSE EME students make it to top 15 places, and at least a couple of years ago, I know that out of the entire EME class there were 4 admits to top 10 universities. I got this information from someone who might see this and can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it. Exactly as divikid points out -- there's nothing in the structure of the EME that in any way guarantees success just by attendance. This is not to say that it might not increase your chances of success. But it might be a very expensive lesson in being humble as well. And the bottom line is, as divikid points out, if I am wrong and you are actually far superior to your Columbia classmates, you can do what someone I know did 2 years ago, and reapply (he did his first year at UCLA, comparable ranking-wise to Columbia, then got into Stanford the year after). But I wouldn't bank on it working out that way -- I would be pretty happy getting admission to Columbia in the first place.

Luke.