scienceofsleep200

Great post.

1) My guess is that it's the same thing. 2) As far as I remember, all the attachments are at the end.

Of course it is enough! As people have said repeatedly, there is no minimum (aside from calc and linear algebra). There are many people doing great research who had a lot less math than that. All the OP (and a few others) wanted to say is that people with a strong math background seemed to have gotten more attention from the adcom at Princeton last year, than at similar universities.

I think that you should have a good shot at schools you listed. Funding should not be a problem, it always seems to work out at most of the schools you listed (I can't really comment on UCSB, did you mean UCSD?). I would listen to your advisor as he/she probably has some experience with sending students to US universities and would be able to judge the situation best. Your references look like they will come from people who should be able to compare you to PhD candidates at top schools and that's always useful for adcomms. In short, I don't think you are aiming too high, but if you definitely want to get in somewhere, I would add a few more safety schools (you can try Wisconsin Madison as they admit quite a lot of people). Good luck with it all anyway!

Usually the first semester of graduate real analysis is measure theory with an introduction to functional analysis. The second semester is all functional analysis. Measure theory is normally a pre-requisite for functional analysis, as some of the most important examples rely on it. As Galoisj said, take measure theory first.

Hi Restranga, 1) I think this refers to economic development. From memory these options are basically the courses which you can choose to take in second year. 2) The SOP and CV part comes at the end of the application. Good luck!

A rough guess is between a third and a half. A couple of the students have symbiotic relationships with their copies of Folland.

Measure theory is a must if you are doing any type of theory. Aside from its use in probability theory (and related areas), many papers from just about every (theoretical) literature employ the language of measure theory. Plus it's fun and it's not hard, so although you won't see it in a serious way in first year grad courses, taking measure theory is definitely worthwhile.

I tell them that money doesn't really exist.

I largely agree with popolo2's suggestions for specific courses. Take graduate math courses if possible. Take anything that is taught by a good (or famous) professor. Learn as much math as you can at this stage. Learning math is a young man's game (von Neumann apparently thought that math ability declined after the age of 26). My impression is that a course in functional analysis will be more beneficial than undergrad labor economics--both for admissions and your future research career.

My impression is that TAing falls into the latter category. IMO TAing is only useful if you have NOT done the course as a student. TAing a course you haven't done allows you to learn the material and says to the adcoms that you are certainly capable of getting an A in that subject. For me that was the case with Public Economics, Advanced Macro, Linear Algebra I and II, Calculus I and II. The fact that I TAed applied regression, econometrics and a few other courses I had gotten As in probably didn't do much for my admissions.

IMO Linear Algebra II.

Micro.

I was objecting to the implication that grad micro is taught at an easier level than MWG. From what I've seen, this is not the case (this may be a biased sample though). This is true of undergraduate courses as well. IMO there's a fairly good probability that a course using MWG will be more rigorous (and thus better preparation) than a course assigning JR or Varian as the primary text.

I don't mean to scare people, but I do want to share my experience since it's wildly different to the above. The first-year lecture notes that I've seen at the top schools (i.e. in the top 10) are MUCH harder than MWG. This is because the courses tend to be taught by theorists who specialize in these areas and they start including topics of current interest to researchers early. It actually seems that you would probably be going to MWG to try and understand their lecture notes (and not the other way around).