ForbiddenDonut

Good luck. Remember, there is a human being on the other side reading your application, and adcoms at any decent university are staffed with professors who are busy working on research and teaching classes. Patience is a scarce resource in this cycle, but by God after your apps are all in at least attempt to do something more worthwhile with your time besides constantly refreshing this page and GradCafe. For those of you in your senior year, cherish your final few months with your friends. Regardless of graduate school, it is incredibly difficult to get together with them for fun after college is over. Sincerely, old 2nd year nerd.

Example: Pure: matching models Applied: matching models for students and schools Empirical: An evaluation of the system, based on educational matching models, for matching incoming freshman to NYC public schools in the mid-2000s Also, a somewhat less-complicated example of quantitative theory in macro might be Hansen (1985) http://individual.utoronto.ca/zheli/C9.pdf Note the footnotes on the table on page 321 (or read the whole paper if you're so inclined) indicate it's a comparison of his model run with simulated data compared with real-world US macro data.

I wouldn't really lump Hoestra in. Florida and Texas A&M are both in the 40-50 range of US News. That far down the rankings you can't strictly say a university a few spots behind another is of a lower pedigree. Carell is maybe less of a stretch (40s into 30s) but nowhere near the universe of a jump like List. Say a T60 goes to a T30, T40 goes to a T25, it's more impressive (disclaimer: in my honest opinion). EDIT: For the record, I think we can all agree that if you're not at an elite school but you can get a job at a university at the same level of prestige (rankings or whatever) as your PhD, you did really well in today's market. But I'm setting the bar higher in a thread regarding big jumps.

Yes, next time you're in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Singapore, go to a local tailor who can make you a bespoke suit at a significant discount compared to what you'd pay in Saville Row.

FWIW, I don't know whether this has had an impact on TM showing up in search results, but Google's search algorithms have evolved significantly over the past 5 years (e.g. Hummingbird, personalization, etc).

"I'm not sure how much where I get my PhD matters." Please don't take it personally, but I'll be blunt: this tells me you're a little unprepared for the realities of the Econ PhD job market. Where you get your PhD matters a great deal, especially for academia, to a lesser extent for industry. What do you want to do with your degree? I don't even know if I heard of U of Memphis before, let alone knew that they had a PhD program. Looks like they're not even ranked by US News, which would make an admission into a Top 30 or 40 school a magnitude or two of difference, just using USN as a rule of thumb for this kind of rank disparity. That Memphis doesn't list their recent job placements online should tell you something. Your degree would be in Business, technically? While you say it would be equivalent to a econ degree, that's now how it's going to look at first glance on your resume, especially from someone with no familiarity with Memphis. Without any more knowledge about your background, goals, and financial situation, on the face of it going to Memphis instead of trying to shoot higher after Texas sounds like a terrible idea.

Is the $1500 restricted to buying physical copies of books, or are you just setting aside $1500 to buying books? Are you actually going to read these all books more than once and/or use them as a reference for many years? If not then just save your money and buy some core texts you know you'll need often and borrow the rest. Or if you just want to show off a collection of books, then go crazy; it's your money. EDIT: Awesome my 666th post.

EDIT: Nevermind, I"m thinking of Property and Prophets

More specifically, it's not the size of the incoming class, it's the ratio of students who pass prelims to faculty.

I'm struggling to come up with a reason as to why you should go to Rice. If the Professors at Rice don't like you backing out of the offer, screw em. They in that case obviously don't have your best interests at hand. Life is too short to care about people being mad about you jumping 20 ranks. They'll forget about it by next year.

Also if you have to travel to someplace in between New York City and Los Angeles (known as "Flyover Country"), just practice saying "My favorite Ted Nugent song is Wango Tango" while drinking a Bud Light and the locals will leave you alone.

How dare you question the wisdom of veteran member italos? He is a rising star in Greek central banking.

The major roadblock for me is that there is nothing interesting and worth studying and researching besides economics. As far as I know, there is nothing else in the world to solve except objective functions and Nash Equilibria. Welp, back to these problem sets...

Last year, my application with OSU was pending from January to March/April. It took me a conversation over the phone with the grad coordinator in late March to get him to tell me that my app is still up in the air but probably wouldn't get funding. I withdrew having already had other viable (but much lower-ranked) options.

Congratulations Catrina! Happy to see that this Fall you'll be maximizing objective functions till your face starts to melt...

Can you elaborate, please?

What are your goals? Why don't you like your current program?

I'm in a similarly-ranked program, and I can't think of a time yet where I've used RA in econometrics. Heavy on prob and stats and basic linear algebra but no RA.

Use the search function on this forum to look for past threads that covered this topic. I bought two of my LOR writers each a ~$20 bottle of wine because they were long-distance, and I bought the other one lunch and a beer. All you really need to do is hand-write them a thank you note, but being salaried full-time when I was applying, I could afford to blow money on token gifts. Writing letters is a part of their job. Do it after all their letters are in but before all the results arrive.

You are clearly interested in top programs, but for anyone else interested, Florida State is a low-ranked school that does a lot of public choice and law and econ research. We are about to make another senior hire in Law and Econ.

Just read his CV. I'm either going to use it as motivation to study for this Micro I exam or ask myself "why bother anymore?"

I would generalize my view (that is to say it is neither yours nor yankeefan's) as "a position that provides only a trivial amount of time or less to pursue research interests is a wasted PhD."

This cannot be emphasized enough, yet unfortunately I was never taught this in school and do not expect to get any training in this in my program. Luckily, I had a boss for the past two years who was very strict about commenting in code, directory structure, keeping track of versions, using readme files, etc. It made data and code much more manageable in large projects, and if anyone wants to explore what you did, it's easy for them to search though your data and processes.

But where your LOR writers got their PhDs and what connections they have can be objective. For example, a strong letter from professor who got his/her PhD from Kansas will not carry as much weight for a Yale adcom as one from a Yale or Harvard PhD, all else equal. Plus I have seen posts where the student is worried about the strength of their LORs, and/or they have an LOR from a business or other non-econ/math prof which is usually an objective negative mark on the profile.

dafuq, Wisconsin (Madison) had distance learning in upper-level math?