tomlac

@phdfinance1: I suggest you arrange a visit to Emory and I am sure you will be impressed by the quality of the faculty and their supportiveness toward students. Every door was open even the most established guys, and people talk like it's a family. Atlanta is a fantastic place to live as well. As for me, Emory is definitely one of my top choices and I'm waiting on a couple of waitlists, so I haven't responded to the offer yet.

Agreed. The reason that I was not enthusiastic about Berkeley was purely due to geographical reasons - I have a two-body problem and strongly prefer to be on the east coast. The faculty is definitely one of the best and after conversing with several of them I found they are very friendly and enthusiastic about their students and are committed to their progress. Now that my two-body is on the verge of becoming one-body (lol!) I'm open to west coast locations as well, so I'd definitely consider Berkeley as one of my top choices.

You are not supposed to pressure others for this kind of decision - it's not an easy decision to be made and they deserve to take their time until they are comfortable deciding one way or the other. Having said that, I'm also on the Wharton finance waitlist, which is "large" according to the coordinator at the visit day. Were you there on the visit day? PM me if so.

Looks like everyone is staying on the same floor lol. See you guys tomorrow or tonight!

I can vouch for Emory as a top notch empirical asset pricing program. I also know many PhD students there and I'd say it is one of the most collegial finance departments in the US. The faculty is very strong (think Jegadeesh, Green, Shanken) and is one of the most friendly and supportive I've ever known. Granted they only placed one cohort so far, but placement has been good and there was a star student there who got many top 10 flyouts. I knew he had a serious two-body problem (one of his cohort is also his wife and Purdue took them both) and he'd definitely be in top 10 if otherwise. I don't know much about UBC but I think you should definitely put Emory on top of your list. Disclaimer: I received an offer from Emory too although I'm still deciding.

Don't know if this is already well known, but for marketing folks, there's a comprehensive list on placements/salaries each year here: http://docsig.org/FinalWWW2010.pdf If you go to the main site you can find info back to 2006. I wish finance had something like this!!

I will be declining my offer from Haas soon. Hope it helps and best of luck!

Here is data on finance PhD placements at top schools « Economics Job Market Rumors Finally! Someone calculated the per-capita output ranks. What do you guys think?

See my post on programming languages: SAS is THE standard for data management and is probably a must learn for all business phds. Even on smaller datasets, there are many routine tasks that excel simply can't handle (think SQL joins, subqueries, etc). Granted, SAS is just a mediocre stats platform, its data management capability and speed are unmatched.

I think PhD courses are virtually impossible to fail (i.e sub-B) if you at least put some time into it. Example: one of my best friends, who has NO (zero) math training in undergrad (not even calculus, he's a philosophy major), was able to get As for all his econ courses in a top 10 quant marketing program. Granted he worked his *** off, but just to say that you don't have to worry if you haven't read MWG for a while (or, in my case, never, lol).

Anyone received an offer from Columbia yet? It seems strange they sent out rejections first...

What?! I haven't received nothing from Columbia. No email, no website update. What does this mean?

Are you staying at the Marriott on the waterfront? I stay there all the time on business trips to Boston. The food there is kinda bad lol but try room service! Good luck on your interview tomorrow!

I received an acceptance email followed by a phone call from Cornell (Johnson). I will probably turn it down soon depending on whether Wharton takes me from waitlist.

To answer your questions above: 1. Nothing much. You can simply export the finished dataset to a common text format (eg csv) then read it into Stata. You can also use Stat/Transfer to transfer directly into dta format but I prefer to keep everything in text so that the data can be used by multiple programs. 2. I suggest not to bother with ODBC. The links are unstable at best and it still exposes you to the memory problem that Stata has. SAS is actually not that difficult to learn. Sure it's a little verbose but it has a clear syntax structure, and you should have no problem picking it up. 3. I'm very familiar with Python and to me it's not a good language for finance/accounting. The main problem is speed. Python is often by far the slowest language for the same task (some aggregation work for a high frequency database takes 3 days with Python but only 5 hours with C++, with the most advanced machine you can get short of a mainframe). If you want to learn a new language, I'd suggest Fortran, which I use most frequently. With the latest IMSL libraries it has as rich a feature set as Matlab but many times faster (with the Intel compiler). The learning curve is a bit steep but since you are familiar with C, you should have no problem picking it up. 4. I don't know what you mean by short recursions; care to define a bit more precisely? Hope this helps.

If you have worked in say investment banking you'll know the difference between working 100 hours a week as an IB analyst/associate and as a phd/AP. In banking most of your hours is spend doing sh$t (copying/pasting from Excel to Powerpoint) and after a while you begin to wonder whether the money is enough to compensate for this completely menial existence. In academia, your hours are heavily spent on thinking of intellectually stimulating ideas, and at least you feel like a person and not a completely expendable cog in a huge machine. So there's a reward in the hours themselves if you are truly into academia.

The problem with this plan is not with getting an RAship, but getting a visa. As you know you can't work in the US without an H1b, and H1b requires the worker to be paid "prevailing wage" which is quite high for RA. As such, no professor will hire a person who's in a foreign country and bring them here for research. You are much better off working with local professors as IIT/IIM has some really good faculty in OB. Or you can see if there is any visiting profs from US schools and work for them in India.

I'll tell you why: Stata is really optimized to take advantage of CPUs' processing power, as such, it's really fast for CPU-intensive tasks such as regression, matrix calculations, graphics, etc, especially on a multi-CPU/thread machine. However, it is NOT optimized for memory utilization, thus for memory-intensive tasks it's very slow and unstable (how many times have you seen the 'op sys refuses to provide memory' nonsense? I've seen a million times trying to allocate 1gb of memory when I have 32gb on my machine). Most data management tasks are memory rather than CPU-intensive, e.g. sorting, merge/join, subsetting, etc. Therefore Stata performs poorly for these tasks. By contrast, the folks at SAS institute really fine-tuned the memory utilization of SAS over the years, resulting in a superb product for data management (and a poor product for statistical analysis). What I usually do is to clean the data first in SAS, then export it to other formats and use other languages for analysis.

If you don't have a family, NYC is not a bad place to live as a PhD. If you go to NYU you can find some very affordable places (much better quality than Manhattan apts too!) in Jersey City waterfront/Hoboken that is 10 mins away by PATH. If you have a family/children though, it's a different story, since you have to stay in Manhattan to get the decent schools, and the cost of preschool/kindergarten is prohibitively high.

Going into a PhD program with making more money as a goal is not the correct mentality. You might as well get an MBA or MFE and work in an IB or HF and make 3x as much as a professor. PhD, and by extension business academia, is a lifestyle choice, and the people who eventually make it to the top are bound to be those who are truly attracted by this lifestyle.

Chemistry Blog » Blog Archive » Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry See above link. B-school PhD is a walk in the park compared to other rackets.

Anyone has any info/experience on Wharton finance waitlists? Any historical numbers on how many (if any) they take from the wait list? Wharton is my top choice and I'd like to gauge my odds. Thanks.

Ha, I do hope you get accepted by Stanford!! That's partly selfish as well so that you'll free up a spot at Wharton! lol. WHARTON please take me from the waitlist!

Wharton waitlist reported on TGC? Looks like no offers or rejections yet. Hmmm interesting.

I think Columbia interviews SOME but not all admits. Stern on the other hand, does have interviews for everyone who are eventually admitted. Frankly, nowadays there seems to be no "invited interviews" anymore and everything seems to be done over the phone, probably to save money. Disclaimer: I haven't heard from either programs.