octane90

Hey, I did my undergrad at Clemson. First thing is you are probably going to want a car, you are living in rural South Carolina so its nice to be mobile. Almost all grad housing is off-campus, but there are a lot of great options. One of the great things about being in the middle of nowhere rent is super cheap. You'll be looking around $350/month for something pretty nice up to $700 for something really nice. Those are for shared apartments where you have your own bedroom and bathroom, but share a common area. Check out The Pointe at Berkeley, it's a nice apartment community that will even match you with roommates. I lived there for a year and loved it. Other places to look are Tiger Properties or Foothills Property. You can also use reddit or craigslist to try to get in touch with potential roommates. As far as the culture goes, it is very Southern. So that means a lot of slow moving, slow talking country folk. However, they are the nicest people you will ever meet. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about their funding situation, but I would imagine if you make nice with the professors they will help you out. Also, like I said Clemson's cost of living is very low I think they give ~16K-20K normally which is way more then you need to live there year-round. Feel free to ask me anything and welcome to the Clemson family!

I'm an undergrad at Clemson. The best thing about Clemson is that the professors care about you and will go out of their way to help you be successful. I will say that the PhD program is not going to be extremely mathematically rigorous, there is a lot of focus on empirical micro. We do have some younger faculty that are fairly active in trade and development so that could be a plus for you. Baier in particular is fairly well known for trade and has strong ties to government positions if that interests you. As far as placements go there is a strong record of putting people into private consulting roles with a little less success finding academic jobs. Other than that Clemson is a great little town, everyone is extremely friendly and the football game day experience is unmatched. The other huge plus is the insanely low cost of living, rent and food are very cheap. While Clemson is a small town, the alumni base is strong with connections in all over South Carolina and in Atlanta and Charlotte. That might be important if you are looking for private industry positions as well.

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad: BA Econ, BS Physics, Math minor (Large Top 25 Public) Undergrad GPA: 3.92 Type of Grad: N/A Grad GPA: N/A GRE: 780 Q 630 V 4.5 AW Math Courses: Calc I-III, Diff Eq, Intro Stat, Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, Stochastic Methods, Financial Mathematics, Math Methods for Theoretical Physics I & II (all A’s) Econ Courses: Intro Micro, Intermediate Micro, Intermediate Macro, Game Theory, Intro Econometrics, Antitrust Policy, Public Choice, International Trade, 2 Honors Seminars, Honors Thesis, Environmental Economics(@LSE Summer School) (all A’s) Other Courses: Physics Major Letters of Recommendation: Honors Thesis Advisor(well known, old guy), Econ Professor(Chicago grad), Physics Professor Research Experience: Honors Thesis on empirical micro, some minor physics/material science co-authored publications Teaching Experience: N/A Research Interests: Applied Econometrics, Sports Economics, Political Economy SOP: standard I guess? Other: Phi Beta Kappa RESULTS: Acceptances: BU($$) Waitlists: none Rejections: MIT, Chicago, Princeton, LSE, Duke, NSF Pending: none What would you have done differently? I would have applied to more programs in the 10-20 range. I also would have got a 3rd letter from an econ professor, taken Real Analysis, and perhaps retaken GRE for a perfect Q score.

Who else will be attending BU this fall?