dsdoodle

Don't do it!

Not sure, perhaps someone here got one of those offers and they can make a comment about this? I'd say maybe a week, if I had to guess.

I'm pretty sure a bunch of offers got sent out today. A lot of the original offers expired at 12pm central today, so another batch went out. They probably will wait to hear from those before sending out more, if needed.

Every student at UMN is fully funded.. so I was funded just like everyone else!

Well, I wouldn't keep emailing the department back over and over again, but I was also told last year that I probably was not going to get an offer and still got it. And yes, after the 15th most schools frown upon you turning down their offer after you accepted it - but I talked with the DGS at the school I accepted an offer to and he gladly released me from my offer... it wasn't too hard or awkward. From what I have heard, there's usually about 100 people on the waitlist (at least in the year before mine), with 10 on the short one and 90 on the long one. The year before mine, they made offers to 22 people on the long waitlist (obviously a bunch of them turned it down). This is obviously not official information, but it's from various different sources.

I may be somewhat biased... but I think the choice is pretty obvious! :)

The long one... like 10 people from our class are from the long list.

I got my offer on April 19th last year, and most people heard around April 13th-15th. Hopefully in the next week or two!

Minnesota has an awesome environment of collaboration. We have a good micro group and a great macro group. If you want to do theory, you need to come to Minnesota.

Never heard about this, but I think that could be very good since you are learning top notch theory, it's hard though to be an "outsider" unless they give you office space and keys like all the other first years. Otherwise, you'll really have to try hard to work together with other students or your life will be very miserable. But thanks for quoting yourself, I had in fact miss your post!

Yep, correct. The fellowship money you get only if you are actually around over summer though (I think I mentioned this before).

Oh, no.. if you are a grader or a TA then it's $1300 for that plus a $2000 fellowship. If you are an instructor, you get paid a very little bit more. If you are an RA, your pay will vary. I think RA feds get paid a lot more than a TA does. There's a chance that enrollment over summer is not high and so you may end up not teaching or grading and still getting the $3300. At least that's from what I understood so far. You can choose to take the whole summer off and go somewhere to work on your own, in which case you will not get the $2000 fellowship since you are not in residence.

Yes, it's very sufficient. Rent is about 700-800 for a one bedroom, but I split rent with a classmate so I'm at about 500. Basically, one pay check is for rent.. the other one for whatever you need/want. I find that throughout the year this is very much enough, as I actually don't have much time to spend money. The summer funding isn't that bad either.. it's about 1000 per month which is enough to live off of. I think some people were not as well saved up the summer before school started, since you don't actually get paid until sometime in late September. I would probably recommend doing some saving up before school starts, no matter where you end up going.. since I think most schools don't start paying their students until the first pay period of the year.

I wouldn't wear a tie, but I would wear a dress shirt and jeans. You may look silly if your visit involves sitting in on classes, since other students will definitely not be in any sort of nice attire.

There is probably a difference between the curriculum at UMN and some other schools at this moment, although I can't say I know well what other schools are teaching, but I do believe that schools like MIT and even some traditionally salt water schools like U of Washington are teaching DSGE models instead of IS LM (or whatever "other stuff" is). I think most macro research right now are more closely related to DSGE than "other stuff". With that said, you can tell that I don't really know what "other stuff" is, so maybe that also answers your question :).

Well, a lot of people are indifferent (at least first years, it seems like), and some just don't like the people who are not in macro but keep making the whole saltwater/freshwater issue an issue. I think I said this in an earlier post, but at UMN there really isn't much talk about "us versus them" or "freshwater and saltwater"... in fact, I've only heard about these things through people talking about the criticism. In the end we all just want to find out what works best. It seems that DSGE failing in the crisis was a good wake up call. In one of my classes this semester, the professor brought it up as an introduction to the new models we are studying (adding heterogeneity into our models) and flat out said that the old models with productivity shocks cannot explain the recession and so we need to get new answers. I went to a job market talk with someone proposing new ways of modeling uncertainty (I think.. I actually don't remember) which was pretty interesting (although I didn't understand enough to actually know what exactly he was doing).

Funding over summer,assuming that the offers are the same as last year (and assuming you mean the summer after the first year), is something like $1300 for a grading/TA position (about 20-30 hours of work total) and a $2000 fellowship that you get if you are in residence (i.e. if you are around doing a TAship or grading, or an RAship, which is pretty rare for first years to get).

I'm not sure what you mean, do you mean if there is a place online where you can see previous prelim questions? Or are you saying how hard it is, or how many people pass it? Generally, most of the class pass the prelims in the first year, with most people passing after the 2nd try in August.

Despite the graduate program being very strong, our undergrad program is definitely not as solid since most of the classes will be taught by graduate students and not professors.

We have metrics! It was added a few years ago. It's a regular field and full year course (the first year is applied econometrics, which is still a lot of theory).

I replied to Ad hoc over private message since I saw that message first... if anyone else is wondering about the above I can always copy and paste it. But the summary is I don't really know too much about the current stance in micro theory, that it's definitely not as strong as our macro, but that it's still a very strong group with active researchers.

Yeah, it doesn't affect you getting in, just on the job market (is what I meant, in case there was confusion). The DGS will probably say the exact same thing as joefriday said if you choose to attend here. You do have five years to work on English if that's not up to par currently, but you need to make an effort to communicate more with natives. Your goal is basically to be able to "talk economics" without any language hindrance, which from going to job market talks is extremely important!

One of the reasons I've heard (not specifically for the Chinese though, but in general with international students) was that their English speaking skills were not good enough and we had a hard time placing them.

Warning you that my comment is obviously biased, and what I know of Wisconsin only comes from what I hear, Minnesota is a better choice. From the ultra friendly environment, to the extremely low attrition, to our recent placements, to the fact that we're not just good at macro, but at the forefront of modern macro research.... I would recommend UMN. I heard UW has a beautiful campus and an excellent math program though.

Grades do not matter, at all, at least in my program :).