MikeS

I will also attend.

Institution: Ohio State University Program: Economics PhD Decision: Accepted Funding: Not yet Notification date: 1/13 Notified through: E-mail Posted on GC: Yes Comments: Nice start for the season!

Guys, what do you think of Bartle's Elements of Real Analysis or Efe Ok's Real Analysis with Economics Applications? Where do they stand in terms of difficulty? Is Rudin better? I am looking for something comprehensive and not too basic, but I don't want it to assume I know too much stuff.

That's what I'm planning to do too, but I will need funding for the MRes year. I wonder how they make funding decisions for MSc people who are continuing. If grades are in so late,maybe MSc students are at a disadvantage there?

@zhang639 thanks for the information about PhD placement. I wish we had more. Also, the PhD class size at UCL and funding information are very important. If their class size is smaller than 20, then funding seems good (Funding). I might attend the MSc course with you guys if I manage to get funding. But even if I do, I have to know there will be a good chance of MRes funding.

Do they make 15-18 offers or 15-18 students enroll? Also, I just found this on UCL's website:

I also received an offer from MSc Economics at UCL and accepted it, though I'm still waiting for another program. Since they do not require any deposit, I think it is very common to accept the offer right away, and then withdraw it if you are going to attend another school. Just be sure to notify them as soon as you can to not hold a place that someone other may get. They also mention in the general conditions of the offer that they understand that you taking up the place is conditional on you being able to fund it. So lack of funding is a "legitimate" reason to cancel your acceptance.

Institution: UCL Program: M.Sc Economics Decision: Accepted conditionally Funding: Nothing yet Notification date: 22/01/13 Notified through: E-mail to check the portal Posted on GC: yes Comments: Waiting for Cambridge Diploma, funding is an issue too.

I occasionally participate in coding competitions. I am not very good at them but they are always very entertaining and are a good brain exercise. Sometimes I also look into contests at kaggle.com. You all should definitely take a look too. They hold statistical prediction/data mining contests with good cash prizes on a regular basis. They also currently host the $3mln Heritage Health Prize competition (though it's about to end with the big prize unclaimed).

The identity (x^a)^b = x^(ab) for real numbers x, a, b is only defined for positive x, i.e. when you write sqrt(x^2) = x, you necessarily assume (by definition!) that x > 0, but in the original function sqrt(x^2) x does not have to be positive, therefore functions y=sqrt(x^2) and {y=x AND x >0} are not equivalent (they differ in their domains). An equivalent function to sqrt(x^2) is abs(x).

As usual, you can think of the three girls as "one object" which needs to be positioned among 4 boys; 5 ways are possible (g=girl, b=boy): gggbbbb bgggbbb bbgggbb bbbgggb bbbbggg In each of these 5 cases, the positions of individual girls and boys can be different. More specifically, 3 girls in a given case can be rearranged in 3! ways, and 4 boys can be rearranged in 4! ways. So we have 5 * 3! * 4! as our final answer.

If 20 are not in any of the groups, we are left with 80 "interesting" students. Since we are told that there are more students on the fencing team, that number should be at least 71. If it is 71 then we have 80 students, among whom 71 are in the team and 70 are in the club. Therefore, the number of students who attend both = 71 + 70 - 80 = 61 (|A| + |B| - |A ∩ B|, where A is the set of the students in the team, B is the set of the students in the club). You can draw a Venn diagram if you want to see things more clearly. Finally, you need to observe that if there were more students on the fencing team (e.g. 72, 73, etc), the number of students who attend both would be larger. So 61 is the minimum.

What Zeno describes seems to be a general attitude in academic circles. It is not that surprising that people in academia consider factual research much more important than "mental gymnastics", since the former requires not only above average mental abilities, but also a lot of hard work to form an intuitive understanding of what has already been discovered in the field. But then again, my understanding is that olympiad medals are not earned without similar (in quality, but not in quantity) hard work.

@chateauheart that is exactly the case. College programmes in my country are usually very inflexible. So I ended up learning a lot of unnecessary stuff, but I objectively lack the preparation people going to top PhDs usually have. Interestingly , UCL MSc page asks to reflect on any skills of working with spreadsheets and "mathematical programming". So, I have talked about pre-college related things quite a lot in my PS. I just hope that isn't too much.

Thanks, it's good to know there are that kind of people at econ departments. I don't have 3 gold medals, though :D, that guy looks like a beast!