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specious

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Everything posted by specious

  1. I'm a firm advocate for undergrads to use their junior year summer internship to explore industry internships. You can always RA during the school year, but cannot really participate in private sector internships then. Experiencing both will help you clarify your career goals.
  2. My understanding is that business school econ programs tend to win cross-admits against traditional econ programs because of the better funding they provide and the better faculty resources accessible to the students in those programs (depending on the university culture, this is a moot point since you can easily work with any faculty in either department). Core classes and academic training generally are the same across programs. Hard to imagine placements differing in two equivalent programs at the same university other than for differences in input quality in the students.
  3. Are you a junior at an Ivy? Do you have excellent grades in quant coursework (3.8+ GPA)? My advice would be to do the summer analyst gig at a top 5 ibank and then apply to finance programs your first year in the full-time job. You'll build a significant savings cushion to make grad school much more enjoyable and won't really be too disadvantaged (for finance programs). Take a look at the profiles of current students at the top finance PhD programs. You'll find that many go this route (Ivy -> Wall Street -> PhD). If you're a marginal candidate and are set on the finance PhD, then you should consider RAing (but honestly, I would think hard about forgoing your internship opportunity).
  4. No, I would recommend not taking the course if the highest grade you can achieve is a B+. Are there any math courses you can take instead?
  5. Please use the search function! This topic has been discussed ad nauseum and awards were already given out!
  6. I know someone who retook a math/stats class s/he received a C in. This person wound up improving her/his GPA (by having the previous grade over-written) and then got admitted to a Top 5 econ PhD program. just one data point here
  7. Hi, will either course be offer again in the summer? Thanks.
  8. yeah, it sounds like yield has been much higher in some of the hotter schools like Stanford. now that I think about my previous claim, if a school unilaterally reduces its class size, then the contemporaneous and lagged effect should be an increase in yield of lower ranked schools. I'd even hazard to guess that higher than expected yield this year, could mean that admission rates will decline in the future for certain top 10 schools as they attempt to readjust class sizes to their desired equilibrium. Why may have yield been so high? I posit one potential explanation: applicant quality may have risen but admission probabilities across top 10 schools has grown less correlated. So, you may have a smaller number of cross-admits and schools admitting students underestimate yield thinking that a larger pool of their talent admitted students will decline.
  9. My general understanding has been that T20 programs have been reducing class sizes to be able to better fund matriculated students and reduce attrition rates over the last 2-3 years. For example, if Chicago Econ reduced the incoming cohort size to 20 from 40 in the last 2 years that alone would translate into tougher admission standards for the T10.
  10. Do you think the shortcoming in your application is your coursework or your letters? Would it be possible for you to RA for a 1 year while reapplying?
  11. Your plan looks good, but I would honestly push to apply to PhD programs this Fall.
  12. Declined a bunch of offers yesterday. Good luck to all!
  13. i think many visit days conclude next week. hopefully, that'll help the market to clear
  14. ^ above advice is sensible. Here's some other unconventional advice for you: you may not have to finish your master's degree if you're admitted to a PhD program after applying this Fall. Of course, this could set you back a year if you are unsatisfied with your results, but I think you have what it takes to take your application across the finish line (and it could save you a lot of tuition). Again, I would lighten your courseload, focus on getting a good letter from your RA gig, start your applications to external funding sources, knock-out the GRE, and go part-time in your Master's program in the Fall, taking maybe another grad class at the T20 PhD program near you.
  15. As I've mentioned in a separate thread, I highly recommend that you only take this class and RA over the summer. It's your call but overdosing on math can mess up what is panning out to be a solid application to T20 programs.
  16. There certainly is a GRE score arms race that ETS is exploiting by making the top range of scores finer (but as I've mentioned this could come down to an extremely small number of questions; on some tests, getting 1 question wrong can drop you from a 170 to a 168). The Duke data is an excellent example of this. Hear me out: Back on the 800 scale, we saw a drift upwards in the score, but the average never reached 800. It asymptotically approached 800 through the the final year of reporting in 2011-12. In the first year that they report the adoption of the new scores (in 2012-2013), the average was a 167. Now, you may think, gosh this isn't a perfect score! But check out the concordance table between the old and new scores: https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/concordance_information.pdf. A 166 Q GRE score maps to a 800! And the scores have only drifted upwards since then. What was once a cutoff of the 90th percentile (or 800 on the old scale) has edged higher and higher. We see the Northwestern quote above, and I've seen many other quotes to the same effect from other institutions saying that admitted students tend to have a score in the 95th percentile or above. And to tm_member's comment, the equilibrium among East Asian candidates is already to achieve a perfect or near-perfect score on the GRE. As the tone of my writing suggests, I find this absurd and ETS should go back to a truncated right tail in their mapping of scores to percentiles. But I'm sure it's highly profitable for ETS not to do so, precisely because the exam is COSTLY.
  17. I would recommend taking another graduate econ class in the Fall (Grad Micro). There should be a Top 20 econ program near you (hopefully, you can make the commute work). (Honestly, it could look weird given the other courses you've taken, but people from the area who've done well in this class also tend to break the Top 10.) In terms of RA placements, it would be Fed > IMF > World Bank. I think all these institutions allow tuition stipends so going part-time in your master's program and RAing at one of those places could work. I believe this is commonly done in the program you're attending. I think you're very enthusiastic and have ambitious plans, but I would encourage you to temper your courseload and smooth the difficulty and number of your courses. I think you're in a very solid position now having done well in the Grad Metrics course and snagging the recommendation from a famous professor. The summer RA course you'll be taking is known to require a lot of extra work outside lectures to cover all your bases. Honestly, I would recommend just taking that course and maybe Measure Theory in the Fall (if you don't take Grad Micro at the Top 20 program). It should be doable - you should be thinking of how to preserve the strong signals already collected in your application.
  18. Very good advice. Depending on the exam, the top scores may be separated by a as few as 1 or 2 questions (checkout the official published score mappings to get an example of this). The difference between a 167 and 169 may be trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it could have relatively substantial ramifications. By virtue of simply getting lucky on which exam you draw and how you perform on that day, you could realize a material improvement in your score (material in the sense of getting past a mechanical cutoff). And because you (as well as everyone else) only send schools your max score, scoring at least a 167 but probably a 170 is important. It was a fantastic business decision by ETS to give GRE scores more a more finer partition w/r/t correct responses. Paired with the ability to selectively submit score reports, I'm sure this has translated into a revenue bump for the firm. The old 800 scale (with its coarser partition) was arguable less stressful (indeed a 166 or 167 maps to 800 on the old scale, depending on the exam).
  19. I received a funded offer to UBC's Econ MA program that should cover most of the costs of attending. I also have a top 10 PhD offer. Assuming that I could defer that offer, would it be crazy to actually do so and attend UBC for a year? I'm interested in doing research involving more structural modelling and don't want a lack of technical competency to be a barrier to that. I've heard from other PhD economists that many students without sufficient technical training in their experience make it through the first two year's of coursework but disproportionately choose more applied fields (Americans making up most of this camp). While I double majored in math and economics at a top undergraduate program, I didn't take any graduate coursework in econ and don't want a lack of familiarity with graduate coursework to limit which fields I could pursue. Am I overthinking this?
  20. This match-up is probably coming up frequently now in the wake up of the latest US News and World Report Rankings equilibrating the two schools. Is the consensus that Chicago wins in case of interests in macro-finance and Northwestern for micro-theory, IO, and development? At the risk of frustrating participants in this discussion, I won't divulge why I'm interested in this question, but I'm sure it'll benefit a broader audience.
  21. ^^ totally agree with you that conditional on OP's interests and funding, Princeton may be the way to go. My point was that if I was a malleable sponge that could choose a dissertation based on a school's strengths and had no financial constraints, I would go to Berkeley given this choice. Again, this is my perception of the school's outstanding culture but still excellent placements after speaking with many people.
  22. OP, how large is the gap between your undergraduate degree and your public policy degree?
  23. Really tough choice. All the Berkeley alums and current students I've spoken to absolutely loved their experience there. It's one of the most nurturing programs. I'm under the impression that Princeton is a bit less warm but with more star faculty. I think the value-add could be potentially higher in Berkeley. (Just one data point, but Berkeley has two people on the Restud tour this year: Restud Tour | The Review of Economic Studies). Obviously, you have advice from more informed posters than me above, but if money weren't a concern and I didn't have strong interests in any particular field, I would go with Berkeley. Also, it's a much cooler area IMO.
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