blinvisible

The program was revamped in the last couple years and as no one has been through the new program yet(which is made to resemble the US style system - the old PhD program is quite different in requirements). Specific information about it quite scarce, but keep in mind they are trying to make it as much like a US grad school as possible. The above information about funding is misleading: As an Australian, you can apply for a (tax free) APA Australian Postgraduate Awards (APA) which lasts for 3 years. However because the first year of the unimelb program is all classes and not research, you are not eligible for this award year 1. However, if you would have otherwise qualified for the APA, the university will give you the equivalent stipend for the first year, after which you will need to apply for the APA. The 80+ grade requirement is roughly what the APA requires. Thus, provided you have sufficient grades upon entering, you will not have to worry about housing and feeding yourself in *any* year of the program.

I think you should take a look at some of the programs business schools, computer science and electrical engineering departments have to offer as they may better fit your interests than econ PhD programs.

The reason people take the advanced math classes is for signalling purposes. It's pretty uncontroversial to say that a glowing letter from a well known economist is the best signal you can get but many people here don't have that option and for those, good advice is to differentiate yourself in the best available way. I'd sum this up by saying that the 'conventional wisdom' and your article have different audiences. You're extraordinary and aren't subject to the ordinary 'rules'. :)

I wouldn't read too much into the lack of mathematics, I'd suggest that you don't need too much more of a signal to the adcoms when you have Josh Gans saying you're a once-a-decade sort of student.

I suspect it will be difficult to support a whole family on a stipend alone without going into debt. However, as a PhD student, you will have a more flexible schedule than a standard 9-5 job and so would be able to stay at home and work/care for the kids some days allowing your wife to work at least part time.

If I were in that situation a year ago, I'd choose Stanford GSB. Having been at a business school as opposed to an econ dept for most of a year, I'd make the same decision by a much wider margin. You get involved in research sooner, generally better facilities/faculty access and a slightly more comfortable life from a higher stipend. Moreover, from what I understand from Stanford, you have access to the entire university, not just the business school. Clearly you can do the research you want to do anywhere, you'll meet the people doing similar work at other institutions at conferences regardless and being accepted to all the top schools indicates that you're likely to do well no matter where you go.

As a fellow unimelb graduate (but a math major), the subjects I'd be looking at are: Real Analysis (and its prerequisites) Metric and Hilbert Spaces (if you can manage it) Vector Calculus is nice and all but you probably won't find all that div/curl/Stokes' thm stuff all that useful. Of the options here, I'd definitely go option 1. But more generally, the important thing is that you do an excellent honours thesis and get great recommendations from the faculty there. A friend of mine did that without much math background and got offers from all the top US schools so it is certainly possible. Feel free to PM me if there's anything you don't want to ask in public.

Optimization courses are my recommendation. You're going to be setting up problems that need heavy machinery to solve. I'm not sure if numerical optimization is exactly what you want but it will certainly have useful elements.

I stopped work two weeks before leaving the country and then had another two weeks here before math camp started much of that time was either trying to get rid of stuff back in Australia or organizing mundane things over here like a bed and furniture.

A friend of mine just had an interview, they were asked questions about their past research as well as ideas for future research. It would appear the interview is what you make of it, before people jump to conclusions based on the sample size of 1 displayed here. For what it's worth, my gut feel is that by investing a small amount of time to conduct these interviews, they're hoping to get a better incoming group than they would otherwise have received. And it has little to do with determining the outside options of the students.

"Was my SOP unclear?"

Either (i) You are being told the truth and your file will get read or (ii) They are giving you a brush off Either way, it is best to not contact them further.

As far as I can tell, the departments handle their admissions individually. I don't have any news about the 2012 admissions.

I'm the first year in the program, I'm happy to answer any questions people have.

For the people asking about Caltech, my experience last year was to hear nothing until the middle of March when they rejected me (by this stage I'd figured it out). That is they sent out accepts early and left the rejects to the very last minute.

The benefit of the downvote is that if enough people do it, the post is hidden. This allows us to collectively censor incorrect information and unnecessary snark. This forum exists primarily as a source of information (with the occasional exception of the sweat thread/results discussion) and downvote allows us to keep it that way.

I think a good place to start is Brad DeLong's blog. It gets updated multiple times a day and you get linked to all sorts of other blogs which allows you to expand your regular reading as you see fit. He's pretty partisan though which may bother some people. However, you should get used to reading technical things if you want to do an econ PhD.

Using MATLAB as a statistical package seems a little masochistic when there is purpose built software like R, SAS, Stata (and R is even free). Having said that, I'll echo Galoisj's remarks about learning by doing and reading others' code. This is probably why I advocate approaching the problem from software with more statistical structure.

Let J,H be their ages now. J=3H J+3=6(H-1) Solve to get H=3, J=9

I had a similar decision to make last year and I ended up including that stuff in an off-handed sort of way. I didn't feel as though I had anything else to add to the statement. However it seems as though you have more to say, and should say it.

Social Choice Theory is not really in vogue as you tend to run into impossibility results when you attach even small levels of generality. However if it is what interests you and you believe you can advance the literature, then by all means go for it.

If you are 100% certain that you want to do a certain thing, and if revealing that preference hurts your chances of entry into a school, it is probably the case that that school is not a good place for you to do a Ph.D.

To the OP: I came from an Australian undergrad with a mathematics background (very good grades in math) but only a few courses in econ. As is mentioned below, a major hurdle is going to be getting at least one economist to write you a recommendation (I had one as well as my (maths) honours supervisor and a statistics professor). If my application experience is anything to go by, some schools seem to value a mathematical background more than others: I was rejected from all econ departments except Princeton and UMN where I was waitlisted (and eventually rejected) but given how selective these schools can afford to be, it would seem they value a solid math background more than most. I'd recommend doing stats over econometrics at an Aussie uni. Having done a bit of both, only stats has the rigour that you will experience in grad school. It sounds like your background is pretty similar to mine so feel free to PM me if there's anything you'd like to ask me.

When I was researching schools, I found that Chicago seemed to make a large number of unfunded offers presumably with the idea that if you're 'good enough', you'll be funded after first year or whatever. This created the impression that even if you do get in, and get funded, there are a bunch of hardworking people out to get your funding. This conjures an image of a cutthroat competitive environment which does not appeal to me at all. As someone who was planning to transplant my life from the other side of the world and had little in the way of a safety net in the US, there was no way that I was going to put myself into a situation where I could be doing 'well' and lose my funding. Now I have no idea whether my impression was a fair one or not (nor could I reasonably find out), but it was enough for me to take the application fee and use it on another school's application.

I can't speak for cities like NY or SF, but coming from Melbourne to Durham, I was shocked how low rent is here (like a 70% discount for a comparable apartment). I'm probably in the situation where I can support myself and a partner on my stipend in an apartment to ourselves as well as be able to afford an airfare home every 18 months or so. We don't live particularly extravagantly and the workload isn't too conducive to vast amounts of free time which helps to save money. But of course that is considering my stipend is fairly generous and the cost of living relatively low compared to where you have your sights. Savings were definitely needed initially to get set up (I needed about AUD$10k) but once those pesky initial costs were taken care of, it's been fine.