Catguy

AFAIK, the only school that ask you technical questions is Boston College and they were: Black-Scholes, biased estimator and Modigliani-Miller

If OP is who I think he is, he should have received plenty of inside information about Rochester... :p I would go to UT Austin in a heartbeat, although probably is not the best t20 school for asset pricing....

For MM, Smith is probably the best place since there's someone pretty famous in that area. I think his name is Kyle and he wrote some papers regarding that. Fot AP (that is a quite generic area), they are quite similar and, maybe, CMU is marginally better.

Rochester is quite good in finance. But the attrition rate is too high...

I use the ASU ranking Just to be clear, I think that: - the t50 is Rochester since it is the only school that placed recently at both Purdue and Iowa State (besides Oklahoma that is not t50) - the t30 is ASU itself since it is the only t30 I can think about with really worse placements. Obviously i don't want the OP to reveal him/herself. Just know that my previous comments correspond to these universities....

what bother me is that the t50 school I'm thinking about has some very good faculty, even better than the t30 I'm thinking about. But, maybe, I'm thinking about the wrong schools....

I'm trying to find out which are the two universities. There're only two universities that placed recently finance APs at both Purdue and Iowa State: one is definitely not t50, the other one is a former t30 (now t50). If the university is the one I think, it does not really have a great reputation in terms of attrition rate. On the other hand, I can only think about one t30 university with a bad placement. And I don't know anything about it...

I was in a similar situation last year and I went for the one with higher ranked faculty since all told me that the student is a major factor in placement. The faculty is important for how high you can reasonably aim. Now I realize that it was a good choice... Obviously this a general statement, since I don't know which schools are you talking about....

Whilst there's life, there's hope! :encouragement: [ATTACH=CONFIG]6942[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6939[/ATTACH] By the way, as you go down the ranking the probability becomes smaller. t75-100 the probability is zero...

nevermind

Did the same last year (and I had a sort of connection at the university...).

Arizona State has a finance depts ranking that is considered very important

I still prefer win 7, but it is difficult to find a new laptop without win 8. Given that, I would go for a good Dell E6430 (if you want a good weight/performance tradeoff) or Precision M4800 (if you want a lot of raw power). If you want some very light stuff, go for a Lenovo X1 Carbon. If you want light and powerful, there is the Dell Precision M3800 with QHD+ display (that is, however, very expensive)

One/two standard, one unofficial. For instance, I noticed that universities with a professor that graduated from my alma mater usually scheduled an additional informal chat with that professor (unless he/she is actually the one interviewing candidates). This, obviously, if you're doing everything by Skype...

There are also schools with 2.5 rounds of interviews...

Federal Reserve (x2?), Cornerstone Research, Indian School of Business, SEC, Warwick, Johns Hopkins (x2?) Rochester is (in)famous for a very high attrition rate. But my opinion is very biased... Feel free to PM me for more details...

Boston College is the school asking technical questions.

I agree. Indeed, some of my primary research interests are close to financial regulation/stability. However, I'm realistic and I know that it is easier to have a significant impact if you're at the Fed or at a good school. You may be earning $120k at Petoria University, but you won't have many opportunities to contribute to the advancement of human knowledge. Yes. They are based on a brief analysis I did last year.

Regarding the placements, there are IMHO different "tiers". For instance (average placement) Tier 1 (top 50-100): Chicago, Berkeley, UPenn, NYU, etc.. Tier 2 (top 100-150): USC, UMD, OSU, UIUC, etc.. Tier 3 (top 150-research schools): GSU, Iowa, Oklahoma, etc.. Tier 4 (research schools): VA Tech, Michigan State, etc.. Tier 5 (teaching schools): rest

I think that the placement is comparable to low t20/t25 schools (UMD, USC, UIUC, BC, etc...). But, as I said, I agree that no one in the profession consider OSU a t10 school. Many doesn't even consider it a t20 one (and I disagree a bit)...

Mine was a bit a hyperbole. It's around 40% in the last ten year (ranging from 20% to 75% depending on the year). OSU is a very good program, no one is denying that. Mine was mainly a reply to people comparing OSU to Stanford based only on the pure ASU ranking. Regarding my myopic obsession, I suggest looking around on the web or talking with finance people. You would be surprised by how many people have my same "obsession" (and probably even more than me).

I don't think that he is leaving soon and, in any case, OSU has other good professors. My point was that you cannot consider a department top10 or even top20 if it relies so much on the publications of a single celebrity professor.

50% (if not more) of the publications are authored by a specific person...

Hint: look at the authors of the papers