Team3

We shall officially retire the award. Jeeves, thanks for all your help over the years! Speaking from personal experience, so many of us are off to wonderful career starts because of the forum and its exceptionally helpful members. All the best, Team3

Long time no see! Perhaps seven years has been a good run. Although I'd defer to tm_member: the forum looks really slow; is it dying, or are the sticky threads doing their job (or both)?

I'm not sure that 3 votes is enough for a quorum. Would other people care to cast ballots?

Ladies and gentlemen, The time has come to cast your ballot for our peer-voted award for forum team player--the 8th Annual Jeeves Award! The criteria are the sort of things you'd expect and that we all enjoy about this forum: 1) helpful commentary and advice 2) overall team-oriented behavior 3) positive outlook and/or humor 4) don't take admissions results or profiles into account 5) non-moderator status (moderator breaks ties) Of course the criteria are fluid, so feel free to assign weights as you see fit. The award is about stepping outside of yourself to help people you probably don't even know, which improves the quality of the applicant pool in general. Here are the results from some of the older threads: 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 Vote by replying to the thread (rather than using the upvote button), and we'll tally when the thread dies out.

^ This is generally true. As to the Chicago-specific question, dissertation committees tend to have faculty from both the Econ Dept and the B-School. See Booth: Job Market Candidates | The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Econ Dept: https://economics.uchicago.edu/graduate/candidates.shtml . To summarize: there were 2 Booth students on the market this year, and one had an all-Booth committee, while the other had a mixed committee. In the Econ Dept, all 16 students on the market had mixed committees (Econ Dept faculty mixed with either Booth or non-Chicago faculty). As a second point, the program in Booth is generally smaller...although not as small as the number 2 indicates. There were 10 Booth PhDs on the market this year; some of them were accounting, finance, marketing, etc.

Word on the street is that the incoming cohort consists of 21 students from 15 different countries.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%% Concur (wow, unanimous)!...the 2016 Jeeves Award winner is chateauheart! Send a little reputation that way if you see fit (the star at the bottom of a post). In the spirit of jeeves, thanks for sharing what you've learned with the rest of us. It helps a bunch! Congrats! %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%

Obviousness: it's a function of your audience. Castlecoeur could be a new user, a light-hearted partial literal translation of chateauheart (which, to clear up all doubts, is my intuition), or a Pokemon. Here's a side note that doesn't have anything to do with your comment: words like "obviously" or "clearly" usually precede some of the most convoluted writing/thinking you'll ever encounter. Maybe some of you have noticed this, but when you grade a lot of proofs on exams, students use the word "obviously" to skip central steps they very likely don't know how to show. In my experience, it's rarely used to skip something simple. I'll take it a step further: it's periodically used in seminars to deter someone who asks a question by making them feel inadequate in having missed the "obvious" connection (which sometimes turns out to be flat-out incorrect). Of course, it's possible there is no misunderstanding, but the word has a charged connotation, and my sense is that it's helpful to be aware of it.

I'm taking this as an invitation to dust off my French (...so if there's really a user with this name, let me know!)

Ladies and gentlemen, The time has come to cast your ballot for our peer-voted award for forum team player--the 7th Annual Jeeves Award! The criteria are the sort of things you'd expect and that we all enjoy about this forum: 1) helpful commentary and advice 2) overall team-oriented behavior 3) positive outlook and/or humor 4) don't take admissions results or profiles into account 5) non-moderator status (moderator breaks ties) Of course the criteria are fluid, so feel free to assign weights as you see fit. The award is about stepping outside of yourself to help people you probably don't even know, which improves the quality of the applicant pool in general. Here are the results from some of the older threads: 2015 http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (Time to vote for the 2013 Jeeves Award) (2012 Jeeves Award)http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (2012 Jeeves Award) (Time to vote for the 2011 Jeeves Award)http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (Time to vote for the 2011 Jeeves Award) (Time to vote for the 2010 Jeeves Award)http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (Time to vote for the 2010 Jeeves Award) EDIT (tm_member): I tried to edit these hyperlinks to fix them, but I can't seem to get them to work. To get to them, click, then delete everything up to the second exclamation point in your browser, and hit enter. Vote by replying to the thread (rather than using the upvote button), and we'll tally when the thread dies out.

I'll add two things to this for posterity. 1) The law market is highly pedigree sensitive---I'd argue much more so than the econ job market---thus tacking on a PhD in econ from a less well known program is considerably less helpful on the margin than one from a well regarded program. For those starting from scratch, given chateau's advice, the idea is to focus efforts on the econ hurdle. 2) The ABA has a matriculation requirement. For students in joint programs, classes taken in the econ department that might normally count towards the law degree are generally ineligible unless taken after law school matriculation. "Matriculation" is often interpreted to mean actually beginning 1L classes rather than merely being admitted into the law program. This has major implications for sequencing and time spent in the programs.

What about the economists on the faculty at Minn?...the IFLE is there, right? Perhaps they'd have some insight as to whether other channels are available...

Also, part of the added Booth joint finance selectivity comes from the fact that not all applicants are similarly situated. It seems like every year a couple Chicago first year PhD students look ahead to second year field choice and apply for admission to the joint program. It helps to dampen performance variance for the joint program since they have the added data points of first year PhD work.

If you do delete the post, would you mind leaving the thread open as a sort of cautionary tale?

When I say extended, my feel is 5+ years post-college working outside academia. There's lots of room for debate on that, but most applicants haven't worked that long; so I'm talking about outliers here. And I also don't mean "people who've been out of undergrad 5 years" while doing masters degrees, fed research gigs, math research, or really anything academic

Maybe the general advice is stick to 3. But, it's interesting to look at the boundary cases. Here's my first draft at a rule. Assume some people that sit on admissions committees think you might have no clue if you include a letter from your non-PhD supervisor. We'll model this as constant in the duration of employment. Of course, there's a distribution of how the no clue camp would value the supervisor's letter: some will count it against you, but let's say E_{no clue camp}(Value of research PhD letter) > E_{no clue camp}(Value of non-PhD supervisor letter) > 0. In other words, most people in the camp think it's not worth much, but it might contain something that augments the application's information content on the margin. Likewise, assume some people that sit on admissions committees think the value of a letter from a non-PhD supervisor is increasing in the duration of employment. Maybe it's concave, but since age discrimination is illegal, I'll focus on the increasing part of the curve. This "maybe a clue" camp is not immune to the "no clue" argument: if they see a letter from a non-PhD that supervised a summer intern in a non-research capacity, say they'll count it against the applicant so that the time 0 intercept is E_{maybe a clue camp | t=0}(value of non-PhD supervisor letter) To handle the 3 vs 4 letters thing, we could draw two identical curves: E_{maybe a clue camp | t}(value of non-PhD supervisor letter | letter 3) and E_{maybe a clue camp | t}(value of non-PhD supervisor letter | letter 4). The former should be shifted down from the latter. (Another permutation is to suspect they cross and the intercept of the 4th letter from an intern looks even worse than the third letter from an intern. I'm not going to run this permutation). The question then is, does there exist t such that either E_{maybe a clue camp | t}(value of non-PhD supervisor letter | letter X) curve intersects the E_{no clue camp}(value of non-PhD supervisor letter). I'd argue it's not unreasonable to think they might intersect. If you've got a committee that assigns readers who later bring their stacks to the full committee (which isn't uncommon), it's wholly possible to get a reader in the maybe-a-clue camp to find value in the 4th letter. Advocacy from that reader in full committee may then make the difference. Idiosyncratic reader behavior is another reason to try to match at a larger number of programs. Aside: I'm wholly unconvinced a letter from a professor who taught a student for a single term is worth more than a non-PhD supervisor who worked with the applicant for 5+ years. When neither situation involves research, there is a point where a researcher attempting to infer research potential from timed test taking is less helpful than the sort of general character and work trait insight the supervisor might supply.

Here's a specific case in which it's useful to have a 4th letter: you've been in the labor force for an extended period of time and one of the letters is from your supervisor. By no means should anyone construe this as including internships, etc.

I know this is a myth, at least at Chicago.

You might check to see if there's an undergrad honors macro elective if you're looking for a taste of grad school. In any case, I'd suggest probability theory prior to undertaking grad macro or metrics.

Sounds like a good idea...as people are thinking about what might be helpful in a page like this, I've found Help Center - Stack Overflow treats the topic pretty well. At it's heart is: be nice (although they go into some detail as to what that means).

I agree with your assessment, but didn't you use Fourier analysis when you did time-series metrics?

^This. And to add to it, I'd say this perception would be more common at more well-regarded PhD departments than at departments that are less well-regarded but more likely to accept students with strange backgrounds. Here's another option: consider taking really-hard math/stats courses as a non-degree student at a place with a solid math/stats department. That would demonstrate that you understand what you're getting into and you know how to prepare for it. Aside: I can't remember who mentioned Booth's PhD/MBA. They award an MBA en route to the PhD in Business Econ in much the same way that an econ department awards an MA en route to the PhD in Econ.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%% Hi everybody, The results are in...the 2015 Jeeves Award winner is Econhead! Send a little reputation that way if you see fit (the star at the bottom of a post). Honorable mention to JrDonsimoni, fakeo, chateau, PANY, Food, and sulebrahim. In the spirit of jeeves, thanks for sharing what you've learned with the rest of us. It helps a bunch! Congrats! %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%

Ladies and gentlemen, The time has come to cast your ballot for our peer-voted award for forum team player--the 6th Annual Jeeves Award! The criteria are the sort of things you'd expect and that we all enjoy about this forum: 1) helpful commentary and advice 2) overall team-oriented behavior 3) positive outlook and/or humor 4) don't take admissions results or profiles into account 5) non-moderator status (moderator breaks ties) Of course the criteria are fluid, so feel free to assign weights as you see fit. The award is about stepping outside of yourself to help people you probably don't even know, which improves the quality of the applicant pool in general. Here are the results from some of the older threads: http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-economics/151844-time-vote-2014-jeeves-award.html http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (Time to vote for the 2013 Jeeves Award) (2012 Jeeves Award)http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (2012 Jeeves Award) (Time to vote for the 2011 Jeeves Award)http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (Time to vote for the 2011 Jeeves Award) (Time to vote for the 2010 Jeeves Award)http://www.www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...ves-award.html (Time to vote for the 2010 Jeeves Award) Vote by replying to the thread (rather than using the upvote button), and we'll tally when the thread dies out.

This seems like really good advice. To it, I'd add that stating your specific research interests cuts both ways. There's no shortage of anecdotes where someone makes precise his or her interests (and coursework as yankeefan mentions), states them, and then is rejected in part due to planned sabbaticals, etc. (stuff that wouldn't necessarily be public knowledge in advance) for the faculty members of interest. But this seems like a good thing: someone with a very well-defined and prepared agenda wouldn't be a good fit in a place where the faculty is going to be sparse for whatever reason. Bottom line: accurate information helps the match process