f p ramsey

I am not at Stanford Economics, but can confidently tell you that the RA-ship during the second year is highly valued by both students and faculty. See it as an additional opportunity, not a burden. You have a tough choice ahead. Visit days will be very informative – try to go to all of them. If you want something concrete to do in the meantime, go [one more time] through their faculty lists, and count the number of potential advisors whose fields match your interests. This is different from name recognition; look for tenured faculty that are still actively publishing (the younger the better, conditional on tenure), and go through their CVs to see their track record as advisors. This is more informative than comparing placement of the past few cohorts.

The math grades are worrying. What percentile do they correspond to, roughly?

Fair enough. What I meant was: if you actually read their papers, you can and should be direct about it. I don't believe you need to "work it into" the conversation. Also, having an idea of what their work is on may help, but is absolutely not necessary. It is perfectly acceptable to ask a professor "What are your research interests?" or better yet "What are you working on right now?". Don't feel like you need to do your homework before talking to people—or you'll risk never getting around to it.

Do not use more than 1 page. Listing research interests (on your CV) is quite pretentious; I would drop this. Work in progress is also risky: unless you have an actual draft you can attach to your application or is on your website, this might backfire. Talk about it in your SOP, sure, but don't list it unless it's a very mature project. Teaching experience should indicate if you were lecturing or TAing, and the course name. I don't see what more detail you could add. Irrelevant work experience should stay only if you need to justify gaps between your degrees. Bottom line is that your CV is almost irrelevant, as all the crucial information (education and contact information) is reproduced in other parts of the application.

I would advise against following Kaysa's suggestions. Do talk to professors about grad school (preferably people you've taken classes from), but don't do the "casual drop" about their research. It's transparent and some find it annoying. And please please don't ask them what keeps them up at night. The B+ in calculus is not a serious concern. I would be relatively more worried of my lack of real grad classes in econ if you're shooting for top 5. See if you can take the PhD micro sequence next year. An A in the first quarter/semester would be a great boost to your profile. The summer is a great time for an RAship in your department, if you can get one.

I'm afraid both are so heavily discounted that it's not worth pursuing them just for admissions purposes. If you're sufficiently close to one of your letter writers you could ask them to do a "guided self-study" on one of those topics (I would recomend probability over differential equations) and attest to your progress in their letter. Since they probably won't have the time to actually guide you, what this would mean is agreeing on a textbook, you working yourself through it, and showing proof that you worked hard (a notebook full of solved problems, say).

tm_member, this is incredibly silly. This is first time I've seen you give less-than-excellent advice, and I'm surprised at how bad this is. It almost seems like you're trolling. No administrator would work like this, for the simple reason that no committee would want the screening to be done this way. A 169 is no different from a 170, and the number of 170s does not change this fact. Plus, it is much easier to instruct the secretary/administrator to use a hard cut-off (which is 165ish at top programs, or so I've heard). tl;dr: get a 90+ percentile on the GRE Q, and then don't worry about it. All of this ignores the sad truth that the first screening criterion is pedigree (undergraduate institution or where you did RA or a masters). Some top programs will not open files coming from schools outside a well-defined whitelist. I know that my application ended up in such an auto-reject pile -- at a school where I was ultimately admitted, thanks to an external intervention -- precisely because my institution is not well known. Note that I'm not saying this is irrational on the committee's part, as they need to have admitted students from a certain school to properly evaluate new applicants. It is no coincidence that there is significant clustering (among international applicants, at least) across programs.

Academics only. A non-academic – especially one who doesn't have a PhD – cannot assess your preparation and aptitute for graduate school.

"You'll get in everywhere you apply", as they say. Apply to Top 10 and don't sweat it. No need for other "safety schools" unless specifically suggested by letter writers. No publications is a complete non-issue—see this thread. Nobody remembers how to solve differential equations beyond separation of variables (that's my excuse, at least). Surely you've done some optimization in your analysis classes, and even if you've never seen KKT before, it won't take more than an afternoon to learn it. If by optimization you mean dynamic programming, the majority of incoming students (even at the very top schools) have never seen it before. Your math background is clearly not an issue! From what I've gathered, your AW score may harm you, if at all, at UC schools (Berkeley). I wouldn't retake. There is a large intersection between CS and some parts of microeconomic/game theory that you may wish to explore. Some links to get you started: Turing's Invisible Hand, Jason Hartline's webpage, Nicolas Lambert's webpage.

Whether you decide to retake the GRE or not, you absolutely must have a proficient (possibly native) English speaker proofread your application material, as publicaffairsny mentioned. Given the sample of English writing ability in your original post, I would say that a 4.0 is far away. I would spend more time figuring out why you received no offers last round (talk to your letter-writers), and possibly aiming a bit lower this year.

If you have already mastered Baby Rudin (i.e., really worked your way line by line through most proofs; chapters 2 through 7 are enough), then you already have the necessary fluency in mathematical proofs needed to start graduate micro right away. Also, go straight to MWG. You can keep an intermediate book such as Varian at hand for complementary readings, but don't use it as a main text. MWG is very well-suited for self-study (but beware of the solution manual you can find online, as it is riddled with mistakes).

Writing (and uploading) recommendation letters is part of your professor's job, and with a handsome hourly wage at that. Be considerate with their time, but the sooner you realize this is not a personal favor, the better. I'd worry more about your cost (time and $) of submitting so many applications.

Cerealist's comments regarding letter-writers and getting an MA first are spot-on. The sad truth is that your potential letter-writers are by far the weakest part of your profile, and might cost you 20+ ranking positions. The problem is not so much that they will not be known by who reads the letters (this is normal), but that quick google searches (one and two) show that they are not international-caliber researchers. Additionally, only one has a US PhD (plus, it's not recent and is from a low-ranked place). These two factors mean that neither letters can credibly communicate your readiness and aptitute for graduate school in economics. This is the real show-stopper, not lack of research experience or whatever other concerns you might have. Don't even bother RAing for them, in my opinion: no matter how strong the letters will become, their content will be discounted to irrelevance. I strongly advise you to consider an MA first, as Cerealist has suggested. Aim high: you have an excellent chance at the best MA programs in Europe given your math grades and GRE (which is excellent by the way; don't even consider retaking it). Weak letters will matter much less here. Get into a good MA, impress a couple of professors there, and you have a real shot at a Top 10 later on.

repeated, this is great write-up, thanks a lot! Glad you split your answer in three posts, so I could good it more than once :) Just a clarification: when you say that the GSB metrics sequence is "very bad", you mean that it's (too) basic? Or that it's not taught well?

Hi repeated, thanks for the offer! How are relations with students at the GSB? Besides taking some classes together, is there much interaction (on research) outside of class? In your cohort, how many students do theory? At what point in the program (right away, first summer, after all classwork is done, etc.) are you expected to start working on research? When was the first time you discussed a new research idea with a professor, if you've done so already? (I mean setting up an appointment with a potential advisor, not just a 5-minute chat after class.)