econornot

UMN is definitely a very good place and probably good enough for most conventional fields that you are interested in. So if you do get in eventually, it will be a hard opportunity to miss. I don't have much to add except that there is nothing unethical about having decided right from the on start to leave after the M2 and still taking the eiffel scholarship. Nobody will see any lower of you because there is simply nothing wrong with it. Also, I don't think there is a relationship between nationality and eventual placement of particular field. While there might be some politics going on in job market placement that has got to do with nationality, I don't think it's widespread and even if there is, it will be field and school (as in where you get your phd from) independent so you really shouldn't take that into account. Finally, if I haven't remembered wrongly, you are a Turkish. As far as I know, there are a number of people from your country in Toulouse now and I would guess you would at least know some of them (perhaps through your professors) and they will be best to tell you about the situation here. But my personal advice/warning is that if you want to go to a very high US program eventually, coming in top 5 in the toulouse M2 is a necessary (but not always sufficient) condition. I might be ignorant in saying that the Toulouse M2 is not a relatively easy program to ace but from personal experience, I have seen before (quite a number of) people with seemingly good preparation and coming in with high ambition to top the place and leave for a top US school after that, but ended up doing barely enough to even be accepted by the phd in Toulouse, so it's a risk that you need to take into account.

My point is, the program of most (if not all) European programs have their 1st year equivalent of coursework to the US program embedded in their own Master program, hence my point about attending UCL is already "equivalent" to attending a top 30 program (which seems to be the OP's aim). I am not implying that the quality of teaching is definitely better at UCL but I do personally believe that will be the case given my impression of the strength of the UCL dept and my lack of knowledge of SMU. The downside will definitely be that the UCL master will have a much larger cohort as compared to the 8 in SMU, but from my experience, one really doesn't need too much personal attention from the faculty during the coursework phase. If anything, I personally will prefer a slightly larger cohort so that I can have peers to form study group for the coursework. Most people will agree with me that during the coursework phase, we do learn a lot from our peers (and sometimes even more than from the professors). I'm not trying to create trouble or agony for the OP and if he has already made up his mind, then I wish him all the very best. But it's just that the OP mentioned entering a top 30 as an aim, and I firmly believe UCL is well within the top 30, and I'm pretty sure they value their own master program enough to accept students who have done reasonably well into their phd program. To me, that seems like a "not too difficult" route to a top 30 program, and do bear in mind that it's not just the faculty members that makes UCL good, UCL's placement is so amazing that it rivals even the top 10s so it is definitely running a very very good phd program there. Lastly, even if the OP doesn't do well enough in the master to gain admission to the UCL phd, the UCL master is definitely a value-add. I personally don't believe in "losing a year" to do a master. If one is really working and learning in that year, then it is time well-spent. Knowledge takes time to sink in and most people do not truly understand their first year coursework until much much later in their phd years, so there is absolutely no harm in "re-doing" it again and I'm absolutely sure that no 2 programs have the exact same first year coursework, so one will always be learning things.

But UCL itself is a top 30 school for sure! I'm pretty sure if you do reasonably well there, you can easily get admitted to their phd program and you are not losing any time as well since the Europe system has their master equivalent to the first year of US phd program. So essentially, if you go to UCL, you are already attending a top 30 phd program, no?

I'm from TSE and have been in Toulouse for some time now. Toulouse as a place to stay is amazing to me so I don't really understand why philecon's friend said she felt lonely there (I suspect it has a lot to do with her being in the M2 currently and the environment is class is kind of competitive in M2). It is definitely not the type of student town (like the well-known Oxford or Cambridge) where the place exists only because of the university so you get most of the things you tend to see in a city, but there are also a lot of students around so you get to meet a lot of young people. People here are generally nice (but it also depends on who you meet of course) and apart from the bureaucratic inefficiency and the occassional strikes that is rather common in Europe (but you will get used to it after a while), I have only good things to say about the city of Toulouse and I can safely say that it will be the case for all my friends here as well. Language wise, if you don't speak French, it's definitely going to be quite a problem. Nothing is written in English here and even the people in the banks or government agencies that you might have to deal with do not speak English so it might get rather problematic when you need to fulfill some administrative issues... but then, the language barrier should never be a binding constraint in your decision to come to TSE or not. I would say at least half of the entering class of M1 and M2 each year do not speak enough French to even make a basic conversation, and another 25% speaks probably just speak enough to get by (like buy food, ask for directions, etc), so you are definitely not alone when comes to having the language barrier problem. I was able to speak French (though not fluently at first) when I first came so I cannot say I understood how it felt not knowing French in France but I believe there will definitely be people in your class who are able and are willing to help you get by (at least initially). I have never heard of anybody running into serious problems because of the language issue (but there were of course quite a number of hilarious incidents!) but if you are staying for the Phd, you will have to learn to speak French eventually (though I know of someone in the jobmarket this year who still cannot speak proper French!). Most people do not worry about learning the language during the M1 and M2 phase because you would have no time for other things outside school but come after it, most who do not speak French enroll in some night courses in the Alliance Francaise here... and learning French in France itself is accelerated... most of the people are able to speak French rather fluently after just around 6 months. Without going further on some old granny stories, the bottom line is that coming to France without knowing French is definitely going to give you quite a bit of problem but it should not deter you from coming because you will definitely be able to get sufficient help to get by well, comfortably and happily.

I don't doubt that the OP is for real but I will like to hear the OP's views about how GRE is weighted during the admission process (as what asquare has asked as well).

@OP This is not an act of sympathy, but in my humble opinion, things are not as bad as what the others feel. For a start, it is not a very bad letter; it is just not a stellar one that you are looking for. The first reaction I got from reading it (if I'm part of the adcom) is that this is a good student who has unfortunately and unknowingly asked a rather irresponsible and lazy professor for a LOR. Every remark there was positive so the writer obviously thinks positively of the student, but the writer obviously can't be bothered to spend more time on elaborating more. If anything, the letter reflects badly on the writer, not the student. But the letter is clearly uninformative. I don't think the adcom will think any worse of you because of this letter; If the other 2 letters are stellar, you are not going to have marks deducted because of this letter but then, you have definitely wasted one opportunity to impress upon the adcom. But having said that, you will be amazed by the number of letters that look like this that ended up in the adcom's hand every year (at least this is based on what I have heard and seen). I personally believe that if a person is not from some top 20 schools whose faculty members are all very "well-informed" of the selection process because of the popularity of their programs, or if your LOR is not from someone who is recent (and hence know how competitive it is), or someone who has a track record of sending his/her students to the top program (and hence know what it takes), the LORs one ends up getting are mostly like yours (or even worse). This will be the case even if the recommender appears extremely enthusiastic and tells the student to just only apply to MIT and Harvard. We will never know, but my money will be on that half of those letters that posters here describing as "good" or "stellar" are no better than the letter that you have shown us. I mean, if you ask the professor who has written you this LOR how was it, I'm quite sure he/ she will tell you that he/she has written a good LOR for you (and maybe that's really what he/she thinks is a good enough LOR). I seriously think it's extremely rare that a person gets all 3 letters having those "XXX is the best of all my students in my 20 years..." or "Comparing XXX to YYY whom I have sent to ZZZ, XXX is better in ..." kind of remarks that the adcom really wants to see. I mean how is it possible that a student have close enough relationship with 3 different professors for them to credibly and even want to write such things, and we also have to bear in mind that for dept outside the top 40 or so (which I presume most applicants on this forum come from), the interaction between faculty members and undergraduate is usually rare to the point of non-existence. The bottom line is: Getting this LOR is definitely not good news but I believe a lot of your "competitors" for the top 20s are not necessarily in a better position than (they think or you think) they are, so do not lose hope. For what it's worth, this was just my opinion... but I concur with whatdoido, you have already submitted your application, so there's no point fretting about it. You did all you could in the hope of getting a good LOR so you should not be hard on yourself at all.

With no offense intended to the OP, I find this notion very ignorant. Doing a master can never be a waste of time in any way if it's done in a decent program (which a lot of Canadian programs clearly are), and I'm not referring to just improving your profile for your application but also that you take a intermediate step between undergrad and phd econ. It's been mentioned a zillion times before, graduate and undergrad are totally different things and I dare say a vast majority of the people do not take it well immediately. These things take time to sink in and there's really no substitution for the time it takes. It will be pretty obvious during the first year of phd that those who had done a master and have thus seen some of the stuff before are able to appreciate a lot of things a lot more while the rest are basically struggling to come to terms with having everything being rigorous. Hence, you really should not be thinking that way.

no, it's fine. If you read the eiffel webpage (although I believe most things are in French), it's not a finanicial need based scholarship. It's a scholarship that the french govt hopes to bring in people from (particular) developing countries and hopefully they will go back and be somebody in either the private or public sector in the future and they can then boast that the XXX (big shots) of XXX country were educated in France. Sort of like a way to foster ties with these countries.

Yes it is country specific and some countries stand a higher chance than others as well. But even if you from a developing country with a rather good track record of getting the Eiffel (for eg. China or India) but if you have studied in France before previously, it's unlikely you will get it.

You can apply and still get in. But the Eiffel is gone for you for sure this year and even for next year, I believe the Eiffel is only granted to people who had not studied in France before. Once you are already there, it's unlikely that they will give it toyou.

That really has nothing to do with it; if TSE supports you for Eiffel, they will ask you to re-write a statement to suit the Eiffel application. There's a very high chance that you do not qualify (as in nationality wise) or just happen to fall into the category of countries or background where there is a very low probability of you getting it (not because of your results), so they decide to nominate someone else with a higher chance instead (they can only nominate a limited number of people each year). However, TSE has some funding as well (although not as good as the Eiffel) and the decisions of these funding can be released for some as late as April or May, so keep your fingers crossed!

It's probably a little too late now (sorry for not seeing this earlier) since you must have submitted the statement by now. What I did that time was just to change the part of my SOP on the research and career goal in academic to research and work in public sector. It was probably a ten minutes affair and it worked out for me. But anyway, Aude will vet through all the statements first before sending them up, so if there's any problem she will definitely highlight to you. She has been doing this for years so you really don't need to worry about it at all.

I didn't come from M1 to M2, but I did not get the impression that it is very difficult to make that step up. I know there's a slightly more stringent criteria for Ecomath but still, I don't think it's particularly difficult. More importantly, I think if one has difficulty in qualifying for the M2 ecomath from the M1, it's very unlikely that he will survive well enough in the M2 to be accepted into the PhD at Toulouse eventually or use it as a stepping stone to the US schools, so you shouldn't be thinking so negatively about it this early. I don't know about the UPF program but there are a lot of people here in Toulouse from UPF and they all told me that they are rather brutal in their "attrition" rate. Only a very small handful of people made it from their master to their phd eventually, so do ask around about it too before making your decision.

I don't think there should be any issue with applying for Bourse d'etudes as well, but you might just want to check out with Aude before donig so. As I have mentioned before, based purely on people who attended Toulouse eventually, the success rate of Eiffel is 100% for people whom TSE nominated (at least for the past 3 years M2 cohort), so you really don't need to worry so much (although I know nothing will stop you from worrying until you officially received the scholarship). If it's worth anything, the tuition fees for Toulouse is dirt cheap and living cost is not very high as well. I don't know what your financial situation is, but self-funding at Toulouse for a year is a lot more do-able than many other places.

No worries, I am not offended by it and I understand your point. But I still consider it a form of unnecessary stereotyping remark or biasedness; It does not mean that if somebody claims that document forging is a widespread act in my country but if I know I am not part of it, I can and should just ignore the statement. (Don't worry, you are not talking about my country either.) I am very convinced you have got real personal experience in seeing these things and hence you made the claim, but then, there's no way we can ever have any proper conclusion on whether such act is more widespread at certain places based on just the limited sample of our own personal experiences. Even if a country is deem a more corrupted one, we still cannot extrapolate that to their students as equally lacking integrity. That's all I'm trying to point out. Many of us are going to be refereeing journal articles or be part of the adcom some 10 or 20 years down the road for sure. It's just not right even to have just that tiny little bit of stereotypical perception about an article possibly being a plagarized work or the documents might have been a forged one, just because it was submitted by a person from some partcular countries.