Insti

Yeah, unless you are some special case (have not taken math since high school for example) I think it is a huge mistake to study before your program begins. You will need all your energy, determination, motivation, etc. to survive. Be as fresh as possible.

I have two friends which deferred their acceptances. One was a lower ranked school on the East Coast and the other guy did the same for a top 30 school on the Ease coast. In both cases they deferred in the sense that their acceptance was "promised" - they did not have to re-apply. The one guy also had funding "promised". I do not know what kind of deal it was since they cannot officially promise you funding, but maybe he got a verbal commitment or something. In any case, when we talked about it he said that they will give him funding and he was sure of it. The other guy did not get funding, but this was because his original acceptance was without funding as well. In both cases the guys had a good reason to defer. I cant imagine someone held it against them, since both of them are now happy at the schools where they deferred (both did attend from the next year).

I too think that emailing the is fine. I have had several people email me last year and I responded to all. As far as I can tell if students have the time they will respond. We all have a lot to gain from good peers.

Seriously, how did this thread come to here? Read the first post, then read the last post - they have nothing in common besides the author.

I basically have had the exact same experience as PhDPlease. With the only exception that I sleep less most nights. Expect to have absolutely no time for anything else, except maybe a beer on Friday night or catching a movie. The program will take all of your time and if you hate it and hate doing the work it will be hell. If you love what you are doing, it will not be such a bad experience. Most of the time I find my self enjoying my work and not feeling the need to "take a break", so working 12-14 hour days is not a big issue.

Also look at nordic schools. Their deadlines are in April as far as I can remember. I had the same plan B as yours and i considered schools in germany and scandinavia

Also, you should know that all of the best students in the world will be applying to top15 schools. A lot of these students will have had the opportunity to work with or study under celebrity professors and a lot of them will have professors who are much more well known than yours. So don't think you are in an exceptionally good situation there. Also, as jonthawk said, it is not so important who writes the letter as what is in the letter. Of course, it always helps to have professors who people know, but that comes second to the quality of the letter.

The space in the SoP is extremely limited. My take on it is to tell people things about my self they could not otherwise deduct from transcripts CV etc. you want to convince those people you will be a good student in their program use the SoP to provide new arguments not to repeat old ones

You just broke you-know-which site.

No one bad grad will ruin your chances. I will have to side with Catrina here and say that adcoms will assume you were going to pass marginally with a D or a C which is way worse than a B.

You should know what will happen to your transcript if you drop this class. Will you get 'Withdraw' or something similar on it? Adcoms my have questions as to why you dropped it.

Saltis, no I mean this - Complex Eigenvalues Honestly, you do not need anything fancy for this.

It applies to everything. In economics we do not naturally have complex numbers, the only way to encounter them is through some weird interaction of variables or when you are studying dynamical systems. But these are so rare and require no special knowledge about complex numbers that taking the class is not useful.

Keep in mind that some schools have a requirement for international applicants to have an MA before they can offer them funding, except if the candidate is truly outstanding. Try to see if the schools you are applying to have this restriction.

I would assume you are at Columbia, the university, rather than the country. In this case go and ask your professors and advisers. It is an amazing school with amazing professors who send people to amazing PhD programs every year (including their own), they have vastly more experience and understanding of the profession than any of us here (unless some of their professors are on this board). Talk to them, be completely open and they will help you. I am yet to meet or hear of a professor who hates helping their students do the best they can.