rob59404

There is a lot of good advice on this forum. I certainly benefited from it when applying to programs. I learned a ton about first year comps, grad stipends, admission qualifications, and field classes from reading these posts. However, the posters are usually undergraduates or first or second year graduate students who are experts on these topics, but have not experienced things that come at the end of the graduate program like writing a job market paper, presenting at conferences, and navigating through the job market. As a former grad student (graduated in May) and a current AP, I can offer an additional perspective on these topics. This is a list of issues I wish I would have considered when I was comparing programs during my senior year of UG. Hopefully it will be helpful for those of you who are comparing grad departments this spring. 1) Faculty availability – After you complete field courses most of your work is directed towards research. Having an adviser who is available and willing to work with you on a regular basis is essential. So there are two points to consider here. First, figure out which faculty members advise PhDs and also find out how many advisees are typically on their plate. Having a world renowned adviser is great, but if he is splitting his time between six other PhD students and two editorships, it is going to be difficult to fit into his schedule. More generally, try to assess the involvement of faculty members who are not your adviser. Can you still frequently interact with them? Is there a formal seminar or brownbag where you can present your ideas or finished papers in front of faculty? Eliciting feedback from your teachers in these low stakes settings is very valuable when preparing for the real ones down the road. 2) Research support – Some research projects require additional funding. This is especially true in experimental. If there is any chance your research goals might need additional funds, figure out if they are offered through the department or the university. If the university wants you to apply for external grants, what support system is in place to help you procure the grants? Support for conference travel varies widely. I went to over a half dozen conferences in graduate school and they were always internally funded so I paid nothing out of pocket. I found that other students had to pay half their way or more. That adds up, so figure out what is offered for travel. 3) Preparing for the job market – The end goal of entering the PhD is to graduate and get a job. You want to make sure faculty members are enthusiastic about helping you get the job you want. Do faculty members participate in mock interviews? Do alumni students and faculty members provide lists of practice questions that you are likely to encounter in interviews? Is it common for advisers to personally reach out to search committee chairs to speak on your behalf? This last item is important since search committees see >500 applications, so having a special tip on a particular application boosts your chances at a first round interview. Finally, will the faculty’s support be unconditional on type of job you want. Some departments want their students to exclusively place in research universities. Anyone who does not have the desire or ability to work at such an institution is brushed aside. If you do not anticipate being an economic all-star, it is important to have faculty members who want to place you somewhere that fits your ability and preferences. My goal was to work at an LAC and my adviser and committee members were supportive of that. My preferences would have been met with a lack of enthusiasm or outright disdain in some departments. On each of these points talk to faculty members and grad students during the visitation day or even outside of it. The job market stuff might seem far away, but your performance on the market will largely determine if you view the graduate school as a success or failure and is therefore of paramount importance. I hope this has been helpful. I don’t check this site a lot, but if you have any questions feel free to PM me and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Best of luck on the upcoming admissions cycle.

I agree with #1 conditional on having full funding from the T10 school. If your first year is not funded, it's a bit of a gamble. You might not pass comps, you might decide econ is not for you, etc. Some programs give an MA as a consolation prize, but that is still a lot to fork over if you are not completely sure you are sticking around for the whole five years. I completely disagree with #2. Everyone faculty member who isn't Emeritus is producing research. There is also no room to falsely "advertise" the quality of research. Go to their websites, look at CVs, and observe the quality of publications. If you are unfamiliar with the quality of journals, check out the Ideas journal rankings https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.all.html. Hope this helps.

Things have been modified since my first year, but the amount of work is about the same. Back in my day, we had something called grading pool. Once or twice a week, all the students in my cohort would meet up and grade problem sets or tests from various professors. So everyone was a TA for everyone. Now things are more specialized.

It was great meeting all the students who attended visitation day. I'm happy to take any questions from prospective students.

Hi all, It's been five years since I applied to graduate school and now that I'm graduating next semester, I figured that posting some information about my graduate experience might be helpful. If not, there is free disposal. In this post, I will keep things mainly confined to information about the program at Notre Dame. We are always looking to attract more applicants and I encourage you all to apply. In a future post (hopefully after I have a job), I'll talk about some advice about graduate school more generally. Notre Dame is a small program with fewer graduate students than faculty members. One benefit of this is that each student gets a lot of individual attention starting in the second year and continuing to the fifth. One aspect that may work out to be a benefit or a cost is how each cohort works together. There are six people in my cohort and we all worked in a big group my first year. The faculty is clear that the optimal number of students continuing to the second year is exactly the number of students who want to put in the time and effort to succeed in first year classes. The extent of competition, therefore, was limited to personal pride. The small cohort size, however, can backfire a little if the students don't work well together. That has happened to a couple cohorts. Speaking of first year, like most programs it's comprised of two semesters of micro, macro, and econometrics and students must take comps in micro and macro. Students have two opportunities to pass comps. In the second and third years, students take two classes plus a research seminar each semester. During the spring semester of your second year you start an independent research project and work on it over the summer. Students present these "second year papers" at the beginning of the third year. In hindsight, getting this early exposure to research was immensely helpful in writing my dissertation. You don't want your first paper to be your job market paper. In terms of dollars and cents, our graduate stipends are quite competitive. Incoming graduate students get around $19,000 for nine months and summer funding is available. There is also funding available through a couple institutes on campus and other funding through the Graduate School. One of my favorite things about Notre Dame is their support for conference travel and research. I have attended around ten conferences and have received financial support from Notre Dame for all of them. Talking to students from other departments, I know this level of support is exceptional. What can you do with your money? Turns out to be a lot in South Bend. Rent and entertainment, to the extent it exists, is cheap. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, South Bend is nowhere close to a booming metropolis and the winters can be brutal and this is coming from someone who grew up in Montana. However, South Bend is relatively safe, commuting is easy, and did I mention it's cheap? Plus, Chicago is only 90 miles away if you need a big city fix. People will differ on the "biggest strength" and "biggest weakness" of the department, but for my two cents, the faculty is the biggest strength and the diversity of course selection is the biggest weakness. Due to the number of students, we can offer only three field courses a semester. However, since students take classes in their second and third years, this is not as big of a problem as it seems. The department typically offers six fields a year so it ends up taking two years to complete a field. This brings me to the faculty. The support we get here is phenomenal. Notre Dame is a relatively new department and all senior faculty was recruited from other schools. All of them came here because they thought the graduate program could succeed and they have been working to make that goal a reality. I don't know if this level of buy in from senior faculty is common at other universities. From the first year, to the job market, you will have the support and guidance you need to succeed as an academic economist. Please ask questions on this forum if you have them. PM me if you feel more comfortable, but if you have a question, other people probably do too. I hope this was helpful. Good luck in the application process and I hope you all get good news this spring!

If you have already taken some sort of proofs related class, or will have a chance to in coming semesters, I would take diff eqs. That class will almost certainly be more applicable to the material you see in grad school. Even if it is geared towards physics, the techniques are the same. If you get to use computers that's also a plus. The main draw of calc 4 is more experience with proofs. If you are taking other higher level math courses then there is nothing to worry about by missing calc 4.

I'd recommend George McCandless' "ABCs of RBCs" book for macro. "Dynamic General Equilibrium Modelling" by Heer is also good for macro and any other field that uses dynamic programming. Gibbon's "Game Theory for Applied Economists" is an awesome for game theory.

Haha, I should have known that one was coming. Listen, I'm not saying that ultra heterodox methods will be greeted with a lot of hospitality, but at the same time I think most economists would be willing to at least listen to your reasoning about why you find the heterodox method convincing. I'm still new to the profession, but it seems to me that the curiosity of the typical economist dominates whatever methodological agenda he/she has.

I think almost all PhD programs, high ranked or not, welcome students wanting to "change economics from the inside". Usually that means making a research contribution to a well established literature. If it's a worthy contribution, you might incrementally change the way the profession thinks about a particular question. On the other hand, the sympathy and/or support you'll receive from adopting a "heterodox approach" will be contingent on what you can deliver with it. If you can convince people that the traditional methods of solving problem X are inadequate and solving problem X requires a big departure from orthodoxy and you can show how problem X can be solved with some "heterodox" approach, then you will win people over. I think this is a results orientated business. Sure, people that purpose some radical departure in methodology will receive extra scrutiny, but if you show why it's superior, you'll gain followers.

Carl Walsh's book is a good mix of monetary theory and policy.

I don't know much about finance, but if you plan on doing computationally related topics, numerical analysis might be helpful. I'm not saying this just to play devil's advocate :).

While both purely theoretical and purely applied work are useful, there is not as stark of a dichotomy as one might believe. The entire notion of structural estimation starts with a theory, derives predictions from the theory and then estimates the underlying parameters governing the behavior. There is a long, somewhat contentious debate in the profession spanning at least from the 1970s on the appropriateness of structural versus reduced form modeling. I won't get into it here (partly because my own knowledge is pretty limited), but the JEP had a symposiosium AEAweb: AEAweb Journal Articles Display that discussed some of these issues. The point is that there is ample room for pure empiricists, pure theorists, and people who blend the two.

I think 50-60 hours a week is sufficient, but it varies by person. Also, there is something to be said about the quality of the study hours. If you're truly locked in during that 50 hours, i.e. not going on facebook, ESPN, etc. you get a lot more done. Of course, this same principle applies in UG. The other aspect that I had a little difficulty with, at least initially, is finding a way to best allocate my time between reading, problem sets, doing extra problems, and reviewing for comps. In a UG math class, solving the time allocation problem was a little easier since I would spend 2-3 hours a day doing every problem in the book there was an answer for. But through experimentation and consulting with fellow students, I found a routine that worked.

Hi all, I'm happy to hear that those of you who came to our visitation day enjoyed themselves and learned a lot about our program, students, and professors. I realize one concern is the high attrition rate, especially in the most recent year. In prior years, attrition has not been nearly as high. For instance, in my year all six of us passed the comps and the year before that five out of six passed. Although last year's results were surprising, I think they show that there is not a student quota in either direction. That is, the department neither has a minimum of students they will pass, nor a maximum. The expectation is that all students admitted to the program are capable of passing the comps and eventually becoming competent economists. I know you all have a big decision to make in the next couple weeks, so please let me know if you have any questions about Notre Dame. If I don't know the answer, I'll get a hold of the person who does.

Humanomics, seriously good post. I'd like to echo that libertarians believe in free markets even when they are not convenient to country-club aristocrats. Indeed, they often admonish policy makers on the dangers of a "What's good for GM is good for America" philosophy. I'd say some of the best academic work, that's accessible to a general audience, is Rajan and Zingales' book, "Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists." I just love that title. I'd say the biggest problem for self identified free market/libertarian economists is the labeling. Often they don't insist on the philosophy being distinct from the economics. I would much prefer Professor X identifying himself as an economist and a libertarian, not a libertarian economist. This problem is probably felt most acutely with the Austrians, since conditional on identifying oneself as an Austrian economist, the probability of being a libertarian is about 0.97 (I'll omit standard errors).

double post

First of all, it sounds like this is a good problem t have. Second of all, I would say UPenn has a good macro theory group and, judging by their job market candidates, top faculty members are involved in advising students.

Here is one for labor search specifically http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/4129380

Maryland: They lost Mendoza last year and that hurt, but Drazen and Haltiwanger still advise. Toronto: I think they specialize more in growth with people like Restuccia, although I'm not as sure. As far as back end programs on your list go, I think BC is good in international and monetary. Some people on the forum go to BC, they could probably tell you more

I agree with the above posters. While I don't know if the adcom's default is to impute a C in the place of pass/fail, it doesn't look great especially for a math class that they want to see. One way to help your credibility if you do take a class pass/fail is to take a more advanced class later on and crush it. Given that you're a senior however, that option is off the table.

I don't think it hurts to apply to both, thereby keeping your options open. The advice I have received in the past is that if you get a PhD from an econ department you can teach in an econ department, teach in a public policy school, or go to the public sector, but a PhD in public policy or political economy only places people in the latter two types of jobs.

I'd echo the sentiments above. I think the gold standard for an elite macro group in a not necessarily elite (top 10) department is Minnesota. Plus, a lot of their students get a chance to intern at the Minneapolis Fed. I'd also check out UCLA, since they have some strong macro faculty.

Last year we hired two junior micro people, one senior macro person (Tim Fuerst), and a junior macro person. In terms of macro, we are pretty eclectic. Both Tim and Eric Sims, an AP, specialize in monetary. Joe Kaboski does macro development and he just won the Frisch Medal. We also have several senior people, like Nelson Mark and Bob Flood, who work on international topics. All their personal websites are linked on the department's website if you want more info. Also, as I said above, we are still in expansion mode, and will be flying a lot of job candidates out in the spring.

To shamelessly self promote a little, I would also consider Notre Dame. We hired a senior macro guy last year (Tim Fuerst) and will continue to expand this year. Let me know if you have any questions.

Not to be a shameless self promoter, but we just had a professor win the Frisch Medal for a development paper he coauthored. Plus, we have some young hires working in micro and macro development and IO. I would second Brown and also add UCLA to the list.