I thought I might as well already start this type of thread this year, as all decisions are out and made now, I guess.
PROFILE:
Type of Undergrad: UK Top 3 Econ programme
Undergrad GPA: First (Top 5 in the year)
Type of Grad: UK Top 3 Econ programme
Grad GPA: TBC (so far First level, Top 3 in the year)
GRE: 170Q, 169V, 5.5AW
Math Courses: none ... audited Real Analysis sequence and self-taught some prob and stats theory but nothing on transcripts
Econ Courses: UG: Intro & Intermediate Micro, Macro, Metrics, Advanced Game Theory (all >70); Grad: Micro, Macro, Metrics sequence (all >70), advanced micrometrics, macro, micro, IO (tbc)
Other Courses: politics and philosophy courses (~70 for most)
Letters of Recommendation: one top 50 Repec who liked me (RA'ed for him), one top 750 Repec who seems to like me to (thesis advisor), one business school prof not on repec (ugrad tutor)
Research Experience: master's thesis, one summer RA + paper project arising from this; could possibly call some of my industry internships vaguely research related
Teaching Experience: none
Research Interests: micro theory, behavioural, IO
SOP: stayed down to the facts: explained course system and contents, and described contents of research projects
Other: nothing
RESULTS:
Acceptances: MIT (funding waitlisted, declined before decision known), Stanford (attending), Princeton, Chicago, Chicago Booth, Northwestern, UC San Diego, NYU, Columbia
Waitlists: Yale (declined before decision known)
Rejections: Harvard, HBS, HKS, Stanford GSB, UC Berkeley, Michigan Ann Arbor
Pending: ---
Attending: Stanford
Comments: my results are almost perfectly correlated with two of my class-mates who have very similar profiles in terms of courses, grades, LoRs, ... I hence have updated my prior about the randomness of the process away from what seems the consensus on this forum: the randomness is not person fixed effects (some are luckier than others) but institution fixed effects (some institutions like some TYPES of candidates more than other institutions), for example, this seems to be consistent with none of us three getting into Harvard but all into MIT.
What would you have done differently? Not spend ~$500 on applications to harvard schools. Maybe apply to fewer safeties.