Integral

Econphd.net's field rankings were an excellent resource, but yes -- they are a decade old and departments change. I don't know if there are updated in-field rankings aside from hunches, guesswork, and "informed knowledge" lurking around. You'll need to hunt and peck at individual department websites to get up to date information.

Note that Conley's paper is about research outcomes, not initial AP placement, so it doesn't tell us much (if anything) about the benefits of being a middling T5 vs "the best in your year" at a T20 for placement purposes.

Transferring up is very difficult, and you may be required to retake coursework. There's no reason why you couldn't spend your third or fourth year studying at the T5 you desire. If you're really that good, your advisors could arrange for you to take a year off visiting that other school. Note also that it may be better to be the #1 student at a top-20 than a middling student at at top-5. You'll have more resources devoted to you at the top-20, extremely strong letters, and the placement coordinator/your advisors will pull for you. (I do not have data to back this intuition up though...someone could presumably go through the placements of all schools in the past few years and check middling T7 candidates against top-class T20 candidates).

The marginal value of the verbal (above some middling threshold) is precisely zero. I don't even remember what I got on the verbal part three years ago. Send in the 170Q. Isn't 170 the upper bound nowadays? So yes, send in that one.

Math: I'd do the following. Complete Calc I-III, LA, Diff Eq, intro stats, and WUSTL's required intro to proofs course by second semester sophomore year. That gives you 4 semesters to take advanced courses. Junior year, take the 4111-4121 analysis sequence. Consider taking the 493-494 statistics sequence. If you like macro, take 495. Senior year, take additional courses in topology (417-418) and graduate economics. Look up the math major's Track E Economics: Talk to professors to get a feel for their "grad-track" courses - the subset of courses that are harder and more academically oriented. Take Econ 413 as early as you can, probably sophomore or junior year.

An undergraduate degree in economics is solid preparation for graduate work in business (MBA), law (JD), and public policy (MPP). If you have enough econometrics, it can be excellent preparation for a statistics MS program or graduate work in survey methodology.

Echoing msokrates here. There is a book. "The Workflow of Data Analysis using Stata," by J Scott Long. It's going to set you back about $55. Buy it. It will change your life, or at least how you go about doing empirical research. It's an A-to-Z set of guidelines for documenting your empirical work. Don't worry about the "Stata" in the title, 90% of the book applies to any empirical project in any programming language. He goes over all of the steps, from setting up your directory structure, to inputting raw data, to cleaning data, to analysis, to presentation, and describes useful tips on leaving a paper trail so that you can reproduce the analysis months later. I cannot recommend the book enough. Documentation, readable code, plentiful comments, and reproducibility are the most important technical skills you can have. For an idea of "best practices," pitched at an undergraduate level, see here: http://www.haverford.edu/economics/faculty/rball/Instructions.pdf. The book I mention above is a much longer treatment and goes into far more detail. It is well worth your time to develop a workflow.

Another vote for about 600-ish words, no more than 2 single-spaced pages. Use schools' requirements as a guideline. UC-Davis was as low as 500; some other schools limited the SOP to 800. So 600ish is good for a general draft; make some longer and some shorter as you need.

Oh, that gets hard. Am I under oath? :P Here's my feeling. 1-11: As above. Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Northwestern, and Penn (the "top 10"). 12-25...fudge a bit and let me have 15 schools: Ten that probably deserve it: Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Caltech, UCLA, UCSD, Cornell, Duke, Carnegie-Mellon, and Brown. Then, I don't know...pick a couple from: WUSTL, Maryland (?), Boston U, Rochester, UVA, UNC, Michigan State, and Boston C (?) (my bias here being obvious). How you rank inside that group depends on your interests. For macro, Minnesota is higher. For applied micro, Michigan State is higher. For econometrics, UCSD is very high, indeed top-10 or top-3 material. For experimental, Caltech is strong. At the end of the day it's less about strict ranking, and more about "bundles of schools you should apply to if you want to do X." I know less about international schools and will refrain from commenting on them.

One more vote for Top10 = {MIT, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, Penn, NYU, Columbia, Northwestern} Yes, that's 11 schools. Maybe toss in Minnesota (especially for macro, and for their legendary first year).

1. It's certainly worth asking, though it shouldn't affect your application decision. 2. I have a buddy at BU and will ask him. 3. Marginal cost is low, apply to BU regardless of answer.

I wouldn't say it's an uncommon combination, but perhaps I'm biased by my own experience. MWG + Varian was the textbook combo in my undergrad's PhD program (ranked roughly 40-60 in econ). The first semester covered the first 14 chapters of Varian in lecture, with problem sets coming out of the parallel chapters in MWG; the second semester was all out of MWG. The idea was to ease the students into MWG - some of whom had weaker mathematics backgrounds. An MWG+Varian course can be taught in two ways: either with Varian as the main text and MWG as a supplement for more advanced students, or with MWG as the main text and Varian as a supplement for weaker students. OP should certainly figure out which is the case before enrolling in the course.

Easily the most true post in this thread.

I use a Nexus 7. Ranks high up on the list of "best $200 I've ever spent." I do think the 7" form factor dominates the 10" for leisure reading, assuming your eyes are good enough (mine are right on the margin). 10" is too large to cart around everywhere; 7" fits in a coat pocket. I had a 10" tablet in my first year and never used it. I use my Nexus7 every day.

I"m treating this as "only" two books, so I'm shooting to maximize average value, as opposed to marginal value given my current bookshelf. Academic: Dejong and Dave, Structural Macroeconometrics Leisure: Kierkegaard, Either/Or Why: Dejong and Dave contains a two-year or even three-year graduate macro sequence within its pages. There is very little in applied macroeconomics you need that isn't in that book. Kierkegaard's book is a treasure-trove. Part A is a collection of aesthetic essays that bring richness and variety; Part B is a tightly-focused ethical essay. I never get tired of it.