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.

Honestly, when have you ever been to the store and they charged you 5+3i dollars for the 10+7i bananas you bought? Or when have you heard on the news that the GDP last quarter was 2-i % lower than the previous year? Or when have you heard of a company making 4+11i % higher profits this year? Or when have you heard of a paper which says the impact of one additional year of education on the expected wages is 3+4i%?

Not a good idea usually. When I was applying some of my letters arrived quite late. Most schools say they can not guarantee they will review your application at all. The thing is that you need all your letters to arrive by the time schools start making decisions. This time, however, could be much later than the deadline date. It is really risky, though and I would not recommend it.

Given your profile those universities seem to be a good range. What you should consider is applying to more schools as the admissions process can be quite noisy. What is lacking from your profile is proof-based math classes and grad econ classes. Both of these could be quite hurtful. Have you talked with your professors about this? What do your LoR writers think about the schools you should apply? If you want you can send me a private message and we can talk more about this - I can be much more specific.

No area of econ utilizes complex analysis. Have you ever heard of a conpanys profits being 10+5i? There are no complex numbers in econ and this makes complex analysis next to useless. Sure it will teach you how to be rigorous but you will not he able to apply any of the techniques learnt there ever. Most of them are specific to complex numbers. Also no math taken in undergrad can be considered "fancy". There are so many people are with such better math skills, noone would be impressed by having more math in your research articles.

I would say numerical analysis is slightly more useful than complex analysis. It will teach you a bit about programing matlab to solve stuff for you which is useful for some types of macro and finance.

I guess I will be the one delivering tough love here. Maybe a top-40 is realistic, but you might want to consider adding a few safeties. Apart from the weak math background, those Bs in grad classes would hurt you a lot. Moreover, there is quite a few of them so the adcoms will not see it as a fluke, but rather as a somewhat good signal. I for example had a bad semester during my masters which lead me to a couple of bad grades (B in macro and micro), which I believe is what kept me from top40 for the most part. Looking at thuswindburn's profile he only got 1 A- and 1 B+, quite better than your grad record. I am not trying to say that you will not get anywhere good or that you do not have a shot, but rather suggesting you might want to put in more than a few safeties.

I believe the schools ask you about which profs you would like to work with so that they can construct a somewhat balanced class. Believe me, no school wants to admit 25 people who all want to do micro and work with the same professor. Also, it is not feasible for a certain professor to advise a lot of students. I think this is something that we have discussed here, but most schools (if not all) seem to have quotas (we want roughly 10 micro, 10 macro and 10 metrics students to enroll). So if you apply for the same school as candidate X, but you guys choose a different field you might face different competition.

For the SoP, I would do it just as you said. Keep it short and try to connect it with the general theme of the paragraph you put it in. Also, try to convey it as something you learned from. For transcripts - yes, you will need to send an official transcript again. I dont recall any schools demanding your fall grades though, it is students that wanted to send them in. Also, good luck to you all and may the market clearing conditions be favorable to you!

I second the above poster. You can do it cheaper by just taking math as a nondegree student. Also, i dont think a master in econ would be a good move for you as you wont have the chance to take all the math you need. Also i dont think you will have the prereqs for a master in math or stats.

What are your other options? What do you plan to do after you graduate from the MSc program?