Emorymkt

The situation with the Econ phd program is still evolving. However, the important thing is that we at the business school will make certain that we can provide any needed training.

As long as the faculty is still active in terms of publishing I would not put a time limit on a sub area. For example, I wrote my job market paper on loyalty programs in 2000 and published it in 2004. I havent devoted a lot of time to loyalty programs over the past few years but I now have a couple of current projects. My point is that if the faculty person is still publishing it's probably easy to get back into a topic (if the prof is still interested).In terms of your second question i don't know a good way to interact with faculty pre admission. There are just too many applicants out there. If you have a great background then yes faculty may be willing to interact and recruit you pre app, but if your background is this strong then you'd likely be admitted anyway.

I'm not clear what you you mean. based on the faculty's productivity in a certain area? or just productivity?

there will always be a measure of sink or swim in phd programs because of the nature of the profession. however, we are much more in the mode of "highly supportive." we bring in few (2) students per year and have little interest in kicking people out. sometimes it may happen but this is more due to the person not being geared to a research career rather than our treating the phd program as a tournament.

Guys, assessing writing skills is a challenge. The statement is the primary thing that I look at but the truth is that it is too easy for the applicant to get help. So the honest answer is that I will read the sop. I also assume that oral and written language skills are pretty highly correlated.

Hey guys,It looks you guys were busy the last couple of days. Fairly amusing. Let me clarify a couple of things...First, Why am I here? I'm here because doctoral education is extremely important to me. Doctoral education is a critically important element of a research program. Unfortunately, this is also an area where there is very little information available. My thinking is that if I can provide information that helps improve decision making by applicants I may also be able to enhance the pool of applicants that I see at Emory.In terms of the questions you guys ask all that I ask is that you pay a bit more attention to my answers. What should be obvious at this point in the thread is that questions about minutiae like about awa test scores (after i have commented about how language skills are assessed) or what some other department is doing are sort of silly questions to ask a faculty member.ML

You guys are starting to make me regret my participation in the forum. In admissions - on the quant side - schools look for technical skills and aptitude. Test scores, undergrad coursework and previous grad work helps us assess this dimension. We also want communications skills. The field is about written and oral communication. Test scores on gre verbal and toefel tend not to be diagnostic so we really on essays and interviews. Work experience may or may not matters. It depends on what you were doing.analyzing panel data at iri is great being a cashier at walmart is much less interesting. don't make this more complicated than it needs to be.Beyond these generalities schools may have particular goals. In the next cycle I would really like students with engineering and operations research backgrounds who want to work on applied topics. Other schools may well prefer students with training in Econ. This is something you can probably figure out by looking at faculty interests.

Scores need to be reasonable but language skills are assessed via interviews and sop.

Let me try this again. I don't pay any attention to the language related test scores. A poorly written statement of purpose can hurt a candidate. In terms of spoken English this is assessed via a phone or Skype interview.

I don't know what awa stands for. In terms of assessing language skills we rely on interviews via phone or Skype.

It is difficult to find apps with good English skills and solid technical training. Communication skills are critical across the board because we want to place students at top business schools.

No idea. Just ask someone in finance.

I don't know enough to answer. In general it doesn't matter if it's a technical Econ program or engineering. There is problem with a pure marketing major because it usually lacks sufficient technical training to allow the student to quickly become a quantitative researcher. I don't know what a pre phd program is.

Ff - in most cases the admissions process is about intellectual horsepower. In my case, I want to see technical aptitude first and an interest in a topic of interest (crm, sports) second.

Apple Cider - It is the nature of the experience that matters. if you were working on bid data sets using sophistictaed methods then market research experience would be attractive. if you were designing surveies or running focus groups i would be less interested. however, other fold might find that expereince attractive. In terms of faculty contact my guess is that most faculty don't want it. in an average year we may get a 100 apps. i'm just not going to want to respond to emails prior to the applications being seen. i do think that you can contact the coordinator to see if you are in the ballpark. FF - fit can be just about anything but in general you want to have similar interests as the faculty. as an obvious example, a CB applicant won't fit with Texas Dallas. Like i said before, i'm (personally) looking for students with advanced technical skills and an interest in applied problems. so in my case fit with involve both topics and methods.