ACCT PHD

I honestly cannot tell if you are mocking me or not, but if you are that determined to learn this material, I recommend reading MWG (1-6) and DOING the "tedious" problems. Unfortunately, you cannot learn Micro Theory from reading a text. Maybe some Finance PhD or Econ PhD students can chime in here for some support... If you want to learn more about preferences and choices, I guess you can try Varian's Micro Theory book. I'm surprised you didn't cover any of this in Intermediate Micro. I am also surprised that these problems look tedious given your math background. I believe Yale posts all their old MicroTheory Quals online. You can try taking one of these for fun and see how you do. Maybe you are the Anakin Skywalker of grad students? :hmm:Even he needed training though... Also, you really need to be a bit more humble regarding this process. I say this in the most helpful way possible : Even if you are truly brilliant, Academia involves a lot of politics.

"And, I already have ideas for my desertion topic; it will a piece of cake. I should be able to complete it in 6 months to 1 year." I am still baffled by this comment. Please tell me we are misunderstanding you? Go do the first 6 chapters of MWG and come back to us when you have completed every problem. If high level math is still a joke, then I'll eat my words. :2cents:

Feeling the same way, and I think this is pretty common. I hate measuring work hours in a day because there is so much variability. So many people work 9-5 and spend most of their day on hulu or youtube. I try to do a few hours of programming a day and a few hours of reading and writing a day, mixing it up a bit before and after lunch. I also start TAing next week so that will make it a bit more structured. The Summer is nice because you can vary your work time. Take a week day off if you'd like and play with data on a Sunday afternoon if you desire. It's so hard to measure productivity sometimes :doh:

I don't think Georgetown has a PhD program in Finance...

Well, this is relevant : http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051611s.gif [clap]

You will have time for vacation! Everyone needs to decompress at some point. Imagine going 60-80 hours/week for 5 years straight. You will burn out. With that being said, you will probably be so involved and interested in your research that you will follow articles on vacation. Also, as you get closer to completing your dissertation, it is probably more difficult to take long vacations. But, all of the students I know who are from other countries take a couple of weeks off at Christmas and a couple over the course of the Summer to visit home. Especially, after first year. Slightly unrelated: There was a post on here a few months ago that discussed how oftentimes we exaggerate our work schedule. Don't fall into the habit of counting your hours. It's destructive - trust me. If you are able to get 5 solid hours of work done on your research in one day, this is much more valuable than an 18 hour day where you are distracted most of the time. I don't know - I have a different perspective on this whole work hour concept. There are only so many hours in a given day that we are capable of doing "high-level" thinking. I guess that's where teaching/TAing come in :-p But, I do kind of agree with PhDhope in that you will definitely not have the time or resources to take month-long trips to exotic islands. But visiting home and working lightly there for a week or two is totally possible over breaks. Hope this helps!

Depends on the cohort though. It's possible to be paired with an insufferable student, who will not only not provide you camaraderie, but may also try to pull you down. I imagine this is probably true more so for programs with larger cohort, as all the students will be competing for faculty support and will be on the job market at the same time. But, yeah, you are right, assuming your cohort is professional. I've just had the unpleasant experience of seeing some rather unprofessional people...

Shocked no one has replied to this. UPitt is the best of the list. They are particularly good with Managerial research though.

Excel cannot really work efficiently with the volume of data used in empirical research. It's not uncommon to have over a million observations and 20+ fields.

Interesting. Wish there was some way to integrate this with Papers as I have spent so much time matching my library and organizing it to my liking.

I'm a sucker for new, good technology. Can you please tell me how this is better than my current Papers + Skim setup (MAC)? I noticed the iPad version does not have some key features (local storage).

All depends. I interviewed for a program really early last year and received an offer in March, because they had not had a chance to interview other applicants due to delays caused by snow. If you are scheduled for an interview early on and the other applicants are later in the schedule, you may have to wait. Best to ask. I waited about 7 weeks for this offer.

I had a professor tell me something similar and now I am a student at one of the schools you listed in your first list, so don't give up hope!

I hear it's best to learn SAS first and then learn the other programming languages. SAS is probably the least intuitive and often takes the most input to get a result (e.g., 15 lines of code for one regression.) I find that STATA and MatLab are really easy after knowing some SAS. Also, these programming languages are not that difficult if you just want to do something functional. Macros and loops get more complicated. I recommend learning C# or C++ to get a better idea of how programming works. Just my advice.

Funny story : The day I got my admissions letter for Grad School was the day that my Undergrad team lost to my Grad School team in the NCAA (?) Basketball Tournament.