SubEffect

To clarify on this (as a someone who was on the Yale waitlist and got off of it), this is not related to your rank on the waitlist, but a change in their policy over time. In the past, they would tell you your rank, but my understanding is that they have decided to stop doing that regardless of where you rank. Good luck!

Wait until you hit grad macro. A truly kafkaesque experience.

Another 2 cents on Yale from another student there (I'm a 3rd year here). I like it here a lot, and originally wanted to do behavioral (and development) coming in; however, we don't have much behavioral and I ended up not doing much with it. However I didn't really try that hard to stay with behavioral since there were other things I ended up liking a lot. If you're seriously considering Yale, you should check out the faculty at the school of management and see if any of them do anything you like, since there is a decent behavioral presence there. They all are excited and available to work with econ phds, and you can take any of the phd classes there. You might want to also think about what style of behavioral you are interested in, i.e. the more empirical or more theoretical? And within the theoretical, are you more into the Gul/Pesendorfer style decision theory? Because what they do is different from a lot of other behavioral people (including Rabin to some extent). But if you do like their stuff, Princeton seems a perfect fit.

Hi Venture, Your situation sounds very similar to mine when I was applying, so definitely PM me if you want to talk more (I was on 5 waitlists, including the one at Yale, and now am a 3rd year at Yale). As FromtheHip* said, in our year, people were told their ranking on the waitlist after asking, and I know at least one person on the wait list last year who was told. It could be that they only tell people towards the top of the list: I was 1st on the list, and someone I talked with about the wait list last year was 11th or 12th. However I have also heard from others on the waitlist this year that they were not told their rank, so I suspect that it is just a change in policy this year. On multiple wait lists, I think it's important to tell your top choice that you will attend if admitted, and then be in contact with them throughout the process (e.g. if you get an NSF). Some of my recs contacted the school, but in retrospect I don't think that had any effect. I told the schools that I was admitted at that I couldn't let them know until I heard back from Yale, and that seemed to be fine: once they make you an offer, I don't think they can take it away. Another thing is that some schools may get back to you earlier: Berkeley let me off around April 5th or 6th, and Yale on April 13th, but others waited until the very end. So I guess just give them up to date skype/phone information, and be ready if you haven't heard back that night (with phone in case the internet breaks, they can call you). It is definitely not ideal, but if you know in advance what your ranking of schools is/write out your plans for each contingency, then that makes it much easier. Good luck, and hope to see you next year! *we are in the same class, and it's nice to know I'm not the only one procrastinating here!

Congrats! Definitely email any school you were rejected or waitlisted at and ask if they would be willing to reconsider your application in light of the NSF. There is basically zero cost to doing so and potentially a huge benefit. In particular, Berkeley is known for letting in previously rejected applicants once they get an NSF (I’ve heard about multiple cases of this); I suspect other publicly funded schools may work similarly. I was waitlisted there when I applied 2 cycles ago, and once I told them I got NSF, the admit was basically automatic. Of course things may have changed, but best of luck!

Congrats! Letter writers is maybe fine, but you probably should contact them yourself unless your letter writers are really going to push for you. From what I hear, many schools will not reconsider, but Berkeley for one definitely will (you could start by emailing the grad secretary, who would know who to contact; if they don't get back to you, then maybe try the admission committee head). In recent years, I know of people who had their rejection reversed there after getting NSF. You might want to message Jeeves, since he actually has done this...

If you are an undergrad at MIT, then you can definitely do a JPAL summer internship through the UROP program; I also know of some Harvard undergrads who have worked for JPAL before graduating. But otherwise I think it is not possible unless you have some outside connections with the professors, sorry...

I just sent you a message with a more detailed response, but coming from a similar LAC background, I would agree with Walras that right now you are probably looking at the 40-60 range. That being said, you can definitely move higher with either a masters in economics or a RA position, but right now it might be hard to get an RA position given lack of econ research background.

You should check with the department as the flyout date draws closer, since I think nothing has been finalized, but word on the street is that we've made offers to two senior macro people from top 5 departments and they are seriously considering them. So that would also strengthen our macro. Hope to see you next year as well, and happy to answer any questions you have, either through PM or on the forums!

Congrats on all of your great options! I have a pretty similar set of interests to you, though only recently became more interested in political economy, and was picking between Berkeley and Yale last year (now am a first year at Yale). Berkeley is definitely stronger in political economy than Yale (e.g. Finan doing political economy and development), but Yale is stronger at development generally, or at least has more professors working in the field. Stanford is generally pretty weak in development (other than their recent hire of Dupas), but strong in political economy with the GSB. If you are very interested in political economy, you might also want to look at the political science departments of the schools, as sometimes there are people there. But probably what will be most helpful is going to the flyout days and talking to professors: you have a bunch of great options, I would politely disagree with kipfilet's post about job market outcomes: I just looked at this data more in depth in another thread, and if you look at mean flyouts per student, Yale seems to beat the other two, including in terms of quality of flyouts. Berkeley has a larger cohort size than either Yale or Stanford, so I'm looking at means to control for that. Looking at offers data is more difficult since not all offers get posted online, though you should probably also look at outcomes data from the schools. Also, one piece of advice: I was also on the Yale waiting list last year, and if you email Truman Bewley, then he will tell you your exact position on the list. Knowing that might be helpful in thinking about schools.

Glad to hear that you're leaning towards Yale! I'm another Yale first year, and definitely agree with FromtheHip that you could get a couple of departments to split the cost of flying you out. Even if you have to borrow a little money, you will probably be able to make it up in stipend next year. However, I didn't go to any flyouts last year because of the cost of flights, so understand where you are coming from. Something that you might want to check out is how people in your fields have done on the job market at each of the respective schools. I am pretty sure this will favor Yale, so maybe this is just my bias towards Yale speaking, but I think that is probably a more valuable measure of how the program will help you succeed than professors. Our metrics people do very well (last year, had metrics placements at Princeton and Northwestern), and this year I think the macro candidates from Yale (Vavra, Berger) were basically doing applied macro like you're describing. Vavra got an offer from MIT/Booth/Northwestern/Chicago, and Berger has one from Northwestern (and others, I have heard), so that is hard to beat. I don't know other schools as well, but it might be good to go through their offers and see.

Congrats to everyone admitted and waitlisted at Yale! I’m a first year there, and would be happy to procrastinate on doing problem sets by answering questions, though my perspective may be limited. I suspect that FromtheHip may be willing to join in, and there are probably a few others lurking here as well. I should start by saying that I really like it here, so you should take into account that my perspective will be biased. Some quick points for/against Yale. - Lifestyle in your first two years: Life is pretty good here. Everyone passes classes, and in the last three years, I think that only one or two total have failed comps, which is extremely low. As a result of that (or perhaps because everyone in my cohort is awesome), people aren’t competitive at all, and everyone is willing to help one another. I don’t think I realized how important this is coming in, but I can’t imagine how much more stressful first year would have been if I couldn’t rely on my classmates or was super stressed about comps. As a classmate put it recently: “wow, you guys have really ruined my opinion of what econ grad students are like” (i.e. she used to think of econ grad students as ruthlessly competitive). General advice to people looking at any schools: ask grad students about the atmosphere during flyouts. Even if you’re a superstar guaranteed to pass comps, it is way more fun to work with classmates than compete with them (for me at least, I guess there may be heterogeneity in preferences). - Placements. This was definitely one of our better years, but we had more and better flyouts than every school other than MIT (and maybe Stanford GSB, proportionally). I don’t know about offers yet, but from what I have heard, we’ve done well. Actually I just looked at the data compiled by @untitled and other than a down year in 2008, in terms of mean flyouts per student/mean top flyouts (need to correct for that since our classes are smaller), we consistently place better than even Harvard on average. Can someone please check my numbers? I am very skeptical of how that could be true*… Anyway, yes, we’re ranked lower in the US News department rankings, but those are based solely on professor output. So perhaps the really smart profs here are slightly less awe-inspiring than the really smart profs at other top schools, but at the end of the day, I care more about my future job prospects than how many Nobel prize winners are in the department. - $$$. Even leading a reasonably nice life, you can still save like fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year. Pretty cool, and if anyone is thinking of bringing a partner/family, the extra money apparently helps. I’ve heard that Yale is good about sponsoring visas for spouses where your spouse can work, but would have to check on that. -New Haven: I had heard bad things before coming, but it is actually pretty nice. There is a good mix of restaurants/theatre/bars/other activities, pretty much anything I would have done in a larger city. So far we’ve gone to the theatre pretty regularly as well as some other events like opera. Yes, there are parts of the city that have a lot of crime, but the areas around Yale are pretty safe if you take reasonable precautions. -I can’t comment very well on access to professors because I am a first year. But both times I have wanted to talk to profs about research ideas, they offered to meet with me almost immediately and were quite helpful/encouraging. - There are definitely some fields where the department is weak, such as macro, so if those are fields that you want to do then perhaps Yale is not the best fit. That being said, the two biggest stars on the macro job market this year were from Yale (one got an offer from MIT, the other from Northwestern and a few others), so I guess it can’t be that bad. -Harvard beats us at football every @#$#@ing year apparently. -It is not California (weather wise). Wow, this turned out vastly longer than I expected, I guess I must really like the program. Probably should get back to work, but feel free to PM or post messages if you have questions. For every other top program other than MIT/Harvard, I know multiple people in my class who picked Yale over it (and one who picked Yale over an unfunded MIT admit); as far as I know, everyone is pretty happy about it. *This is entirely based on me using the Windows four function calculator with Untitled - Flyout ranking!. I’m looking at mean flyouts per student, which seems a more reasonable metric because of differences in cohort sizes. I omit smaller programs like Tilburg, because though they are obviously great, I suspect that the few students on the wiki are less representative of the program as a whole. Also I’m just looking at flyouts because it seem like the offers data isn’t as good (e.g. 18 offers for 55 Princeton students? From this the ten best schools are Stanford GSB, MIT, Northwestern, LSE, Yale, UCLA, Princeton, Brown, Wharton, UPenn (sort by mean flyouts on the top of the wiki to see this). MIT and Stanford GSB are by far the best from a flyout perspective with over 4 flyouts per student. These flyouts are also heavily concentrated in the top 35. Northwestern has 3.534 flyouts per student and 1.67 top 35 flyouts, but that is almost entirely coming from an outstanding year in 2008. LSE’s flyouts appear to be concentrated among lower ranked schools, with almost only 0.8 top 35 flyouts per student and 1.89 top 100 flyouts per student, so should be adjusted downwards. Yale has 3.36 flyouts per student and 1.85 top 35 flyouts per student, mostly smooth from year to year. I’m tired of the four function calculator, but by eye, this ranking appears to hold for top 35 flyouts going further down. I don’t know how it is possible that Harvard has a low mean of only 2.714 flyouts per student and 1.46 top 35 flyouts per student? Perhaps they have more stars (at least in terms of ReStud participants), but the non-star students in the program don’t do as well? I’m just speculating here, count me as confused. But from this, one could argue that Yale is only behind MIT and Stanford GSB in flyouts for the average student in the average year. I’m trying not to be biased, so please check my math and correct me if I am making errors.

Yale has a class of 19 coming in, with 5 US and 14 international, and 6 of 19 are women. Also, three people did their undergrads at Yale, so don't know if that is evidence of preference for their own undergrads, random noise, or if once you've been in New Haven for a bit, you realize that all the negative hype is wrong and it is nice (really hoping for the last one!).

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad: Top 5 US liberal arts college. Undergrad GPA: overall 3.89, with about the same in econ/math and a strong upwards trend since freshman year Type of Grad: NA Grad GPA: NA GRE: 800 Q 720V 5.5 AWA Math Courses: Modeling (A), Math Stats I (A), Math Stats II (A), Differential Equations (A), Data Analysis (A), Real Analysis (B+), Topics in Analysis: Dynamical Systems (A+), Senior Research Project (A) [freshman year: Honors Linear Algebra (P), Honors Multivariable Calc (B)] Econ Courses (PhD-level): NA Econ Courses (undergrad-level): Intermediate Micro (A), Advanced Micro (A/A-), Intermediate Econometrics (B+), Adv Econometrics (A), Polit Econ of Africa (A), Economic Development (A+/A), Public Policy Evaluation (A), Experimental Economics (A+), Behavioral Economics (A), Senior Research Project (A+), [freshman year: Int. Macro (A-), International Polit Econ. (A-)] Other Courses: Nothing too useful, except for Comp Sci (A+). Letters of Recommendation: 1) prof with MIT PhD, took two high level classes with and talked a lot about research ideas; 2) assistant prof with Berkeley PhD, did independent research and took three classes with; 3) prof at top policy school who I worked for. From my NSF feedback, it sounds like they were all good, though the ones from my undergrad profs were probably stronger. Research Experience: JPAL field RA for a year; RA for a prof at a top 5 econ for a summer; did independent research project with a prof at my school; thesis for my math major, which won best paper award in department; separate thesis-like econ paper, which won best paper award in my department Teaching Experience: TA for Intermediate Micro, Intermediate Econometrics Research Interests: Development, Behavioral, Auctions, tons of different applied micro topics Statement of purpose: Probably fine. Other: Can't think of anything RESULTS: Attending: Yale Acceptances: NSF, Yale ($$, off waitlist), Berkeley ($, off waitlist), Cornell ($), Brown ($) Waitlists: MIT, Chicago Booth, Columbia Rejections: Harvard, Princeton, NYU What would you have done differently? I spent a long time thinking about this, especially the painful stretch between the first wait list and getting the NSF. My school has had really good placement in the past, and my profs had been pretty excited about my chances at top 5 schools, so letting them down was a bit of a bummer. With another year at JPAL, especially at the Cambridge office, or taking real analysis 2 to get the A , maybe I could have been a contender at M/H? Still, I'm pretty eager to start working on my own research, so wouldn't have wanted to take more time off beforehand; this also lets me be near my girlfriend, which is a high priority. The one thing I would change is to apply to more business PhD programs, but Yale was my third choice behind the Cambridge schools, so I am very happy to be going there. Since they do a lot of behavioral/dev combined, it might even be a better fit for my interests than the others. A couple of people have asked for advice on the NSF. It didn't end up helping me too much with admission (since Yale would have worked out anyway), so I feel kind of bad getting it when it might have helped someone else, but it did get me into Berkeley. Jeeves and others have a lot of good things to say, so I'll just focus on three things. First, working at JPAL/doing a proposal on development topics is clearly a huge advantage. JPAL produced at least 20% of the NSF's this year, which is just absurd. All three my reviewers mentioned it, and two included it in their comments on both intellectual merit and broader impacts. Second, don't be bashful about multiple applications. I put out feelers in a proposal last year, and the comments were extremely helpful in succeeding this time around. Even if you're rushing to finish it, you'll be able to get a sense of what they think of your idea. Third, just follow their criteria for broader impacts. In your personal statement, you can dedicate a paragraph to each one individually; make their lives easier in checking off excellent for each one. Non-econ related things, such as tutoring or mentoring other students is looked upon favorably, especially if you plan to continue doing so. Also, make sure to devote some substantial part of your research proposal to broader impacts, they look for that too: I had the final half page be just about ways that my proposal could be broadly applied. If you can tie in broader impacts in any way, do it.

Yale!

Institution: MIT Program: Ph.D. in Economics Decision: Rejected off of waitlist Funding: n/a Notification date: 04/15/2011 Notified through: E-mail Posted on GC: No Comments: Cool, now I can accept at Yale and not have to stay up too late.

I think TM plays a bigger role than we would see from just looking at the people posting: most of the people I know who use it are lurkers, and if you look at the number of people ever on a given thread, there are usually at least twice as many non-users as users. Thus I would up that estimate of the proportion of applicants who use it...

Institution: Yale Program: PhD Economics Decision: Accepted Funding: It's coming, but should be the full 37k a year Notification date: April 13 Notified through: E-mail, he would have called but knew I was asleep Posted on GC: No Comments: So, so, so happy, I definitely plan on attending.

As a former LACer (and from one of the higher ranked ones that supposedly has less grade inflation*), I'm going to have to agree with thewhiterabbit. The average is definitely significantly higher than that: getting a 3.0 would be below average, and compared to ones classmates, a 3.5 would probably be an issue in terms of PhD admissions. At my school, top 10% is somewhere above 3.8, and of the three or four of us in that category who applied this year, two of us only made the top ten off of wait lists, and another placed in top 10-20. I'd be applying more in the 15-30 range, but I've heard that Texas is willing to take chances on people with lower GPAs and other good qualifications, so that might be a good fit? *Someone posted this a while back, and while I have no idea how true it is anymore, you could look up your school to get a sense of the grade inflation relative to others. The top LACs apparently have less, but not to the degree TomRod was mentioning. http://web.archive.org/web/20000829094953/http://www.pcmagic.net/abe/gradeadj.htm

Oh, haha, I was being facetious: I'm sure they have lots of stuff in place to prevent that from happening, not that JPAL profs would do that anyway!

Hahaha, wow, 8/39 is just absurd, but I'm loving it. Was there some JPALer heading the awards committee or something?!

I would agree with pretty much everything thewhiterabbit says, though not sure I'm completely on the same page about the worth of a second year in the field for JPAL. For me, after a year, I felt like the returns were diminishing, but that may have been because I was fortunate to experience many phases of my project, whereas for a project that is longer and just starting up, there might be more to learn over the second year. Though if you have the opportunity to gain more responsbilitiy in the second year (e.g. the PIs give you a new project and much more leeway in design), that would be different. A second year in Cambridge, however, might be more helpful, as you'll be harnessing a completely different set of skills. But thewhiterabbit would know more about that. Definitely doing a second year would be helpful for letters of rec, and I am wondering if that would have been wise in my case, but at this point I want to be working on my own research, so whatever loss in prestige of the grad school I attend is worth it. But returning more directly to the point of the post, after time at JPAL, you will likely be in a pretty strong position to apply to PhD programs, especially considering your strong profile. Thus I'm not sure it would make sense to get a masters, as that is just more time until you can finish PhD. Something you could do is test the waters for a PhD next year by just applying to dream schools, in addition to applying to the LSE MSc: this would allow you to get feedback on an NSF application, which can be pretty helpful for getting it in the following year. The upsides are that you could be super happy if things work out the first time, and if not, you can do another year at JPAL or go to LSE. It just kind of seems to me like you'll probably be able to get into the MSc program next year with a stronger application, and you can tell the Fulbright/MArshall people that you got into LSE when applying next time. Then you don't have to put down the deposit, which I would be somewhat adverse to, though perhaps the state of your bank account is better than that of mine!

Aww, thanks for the congrats, Tuesday was a really, really good day.

Yeah, mine were super pithy as well. I'm guessing that they try to encourage people receiving honorable mentions to apply in the following year by providing a detailed commentary on how you can improve your proposal, but if you get it, then they probably feel like you don't need/care too much about the comments. Also, to those thinking about JPAL positions, I think that my and thewhiterabbit's experience indicate that they are extremely helpful for getting the NSF. Every single one of my reviewers mentioned it as a positive for broader impacts, and in addition to the two of us, I saw four other current or former JPAL/IPAers on the list of recipients. There might even be more whose names I didn't recognize, but 6/37 is a pretty absurd proportion, and I didn't even get a rec from one of the biggest guns (e.g. Esther, Abhijit). And re: Popolo2, I used word, though in retrospect, LaTeX would have been better...

Institution: UC Berkeley Program: Ph.D. in Economics Decision: Accepted, off of the waitlist Funding: NSF covers first three, Berkeley gives tuition + 16k in the fourth and TA/RA in the fifth. Notification date: 04/05 Notified through: E-mail Posted on GC: No Comments: Praise God. I'm pretty ecstatic, best of luck to those still waiting...