soapcase

Many DSE grads go to the industry but those who do apply for PhDs should easily get accepted to a top 50 school. Getting admission to a top 20 is an entirely different ball game though.

Hi, I am a grad student and RA working with a team of co-authors that are spread across different time zones. Since we are working on a large project (no, it's not a RCT!) we are considering whether to invest in a team/task management website/app like asana, basecamp, slack etc. Gentzkow and Shapiro (http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/CodeAndData.pdf) suggest a few websites but they don't offer a comprehensive review. I was wondering if anyone here had any recommendations? Thanks!

I have come to realise that a lot depends on the teaching philosophy of the professor. Some profs are very narrow minded and just want you to further their own agenda and some actually take on students even if they just guide them broadly. It would be obviously be helpful if you can find someone who is as excited about a particular sub field as you are, but this may be hard and unfortunately, I don't know what is the best thing to do in such a case: does one cave in and tailor one's interest acc to that of the prof or should you seek out other interests in different fields (assuming that that there is only one prof who was, sort of, interested in your topic earlier)?

While it is true that classes are held in the evening, the number of students who are doing PhD part-time has declined substantially and there are probably just a couple now. There is also a move to push for classes in the afternoon, but not decision has been taken on that for sure. Best of luck to all those who are waiting for their decisions.

That's fantastic. You may want to buy his grad textbook along with mostly harmless econometrics (at amazon the two together will set you back by about $100). I like W too because as you said he explains things very neatly. Greene is more like an encyclopedia. Morever, since you have already been using W., you will find it easier to refer to his grad textbook. (One of the most annoying things in econometrics is that diff authors have diff notations). Anyway, best of luck.

I am looking at the mac air online and they come with only i5. How did you get i5 on it? to everyone else: thank you very much.

Thanks for the quick reply. I will have a look at the ThinkPads. Do you know if Asus is any good? I like your suggestion of a desktop+tablet combo and will consider it, but my gut feeling is to go with one laptop just for the sake of convenience. As for the answer to your question: I haven't really started working intensively yet, so I can't give you a precise estimate. My datasets will have a few hundred variables and few thousand respondents. Now that I say it, I just realised that this would not make it really a large dataset per se. I guess, I want to buy a laptop that is stable and doesn't hang frequently when I want to multitask. (I have a macbook pro, i5, 4gb ram that would regularly becoming unresponsive for a few seconds.)

Assuming that you have all the required math courses, I would still recommend taking grad classes in your fields of interests and study as hard as you can. At the very least you will come out having learnt more and a better understanding of your motivations for grad school

For schools outside UK, check out ISS in netherlands. US doesn't have much to offer, except Development Studies PhD Program: Home . You may want to look into something like development sociology at Cornellhttp://devsoc.cals.cornell.edu/ or social sciences at maxwell Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Syracuse also has a PhD in social sciences that you may be interested in: Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Further, Caltech also has an interesting interdisc prog: Caltech: Humanities and Social Sciences

Hope this is not too late. You can look up usnews.com for rankings of grad school. I would also add UC Berkeley to your list. If I were you, I would focus on working on your research proposal and clearly articulating your research questions. Try to identify profs who specialize in your area of interest (in this case religion, I guess) and then apply to those graduate schools. Some names that come to mind are Chibber (Berkeley), Varshney (Brown), Willkinson (Yale). Other people that work on India are: Prerna Singh who is at Harvard's department of govt. She was Atul Kohli's PhD student (I think). Speaking of Atul Kohli, he is at Woodrow Wilson School (WWS). You have already mentioned Chicago - they have Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne of Rudolph and Rudolph (who have worked extensively on Indian politics) UPenn has an exclusive center devoted to research in India. Devesh Kapur U Penn. His recent work (along with Pratap Bhanu Mehta) has examined the role of institutions like bureaucracy, the parliament etc. in India. Also, Kanchan Chandra is at New York University. You also also want to apply to schools which have a south asia focus. The following is a list, arranged in no specific order: Brandeis-South Asian Studies ProgramWellesley College South Asia Studies Tufts Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies Yale University South Asian Studies Council Columbia University South Asia Institute Cornell University South Asia Program North Carolina Center for South Asia Studies Syracuse University South Asia Center University of California at Berkeley University of Chicago South Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Michigan Center for South Asian Studies University of Pennsylvania South Asia Regional Center University of Texas, Austin University of Virginia Center for South Asian Studies University of Washington South Asia Program University of Wisconsin, Madison MIT-Global Initiative The South Asian Politics Seminar by Brown, Harvard and MIT Centre for Advanced Study of India - UPenn

Georgetown?

If you have read W. cover to cover, you should be fine. You may want to review the material in Green's appendix.

Since the previous threads on laptop recommendations were a bit dated, I wanted to know what the folks on this forum thought about which new laptop to buy. I don't want to get into a discussion of mac vs windows and I am more or less decided on the latter since they are cheaper, but I would like to hear from you on choice of processor and amount of RAM. My work in empirical micro requires me to do programing on MATLAB and work on large datasets on STATA (and maybe even GIS later). What is the difference between the 2nd and 3rd intel processors? Is i7 really required or can one work with an i5? What about dual core vs. quad? Finally, is 6GB memory enough or should I consider at least 8GB and perhaps even 16GB? If you have specific computer models that you would like to recommend that would make my search a lot easier. Thank you! Edit: I should probably mention my 'budget constraint' as well - anything under $1000, preferably.

I have a whole lot of papers saved on my computer that I would like to classify. I don't like to use folders because most of the times the papers cover multiple topics. Do you guys know of any software that can help me organize - something like an iTunes but for research perhaps? Thanks so much.