voble

May I ask once again this question: In your experience, do you think it is easy to get a job (RA, summer teaching etc) at the university during that 2-months holiday period? Or should I be prepared to rely on the 10-months stipend for the whole year? I know that it depends on the university, but I just wanted to get a general idea.

Thank you very much for your helpful responses. I will definitely contact with the related department once I start the program, but for now I just wanted to get a sense of what my net stipend will be. For a rough estimate, I think I should be ready to pay 20% as tax, it seems. Are there anybody here who has a very different tax rate in a northeast/blue state (like 11% as kicpatl17 stated above, or something very high)? And secondly, if I want to work at my university during that 2-month holiday, do you think I will be able to get a job easily (RA, summer teaching or whatever, doesn't matter really). Or is it the case that not everybody is able to get such jobs during summer? I just want to know whether I will have to depend on the 10-month stipend for the whole year. I will have either F1 or J1 visa, so this job should be part-time, I guess, but I'm not sure.

Hi everyone. I would like to ask some questions regarding stipends at Economics PhD programs. 1) What is the income tax rate for stipend, and what percentage of my stipend will be my net stipend? I guess that this tax rate depends on the total stipend. If this is the case, what would be my approximate net stipend in case of 26k$, 30k$, 34k$ and 38k$ stipend? 2) Some universities say that their yearly stipend is for 10 months. Does this mean that the remaining 2-months time will be holiday? If so, can I work in this 2-months period (either at the university as RA or outside) to earn some more revenue? Thank you very much in advance. EDIT BY MODERATOR: This thread is closed as it is off-topic. Advice on taxes and income should be directed to HR departments at the school you are interested in and/or an accountant.

I think top10 is quite reasonable and close to the ranking in my mind.

I wonder if MIT is sending its decisions one by one, or did they already send all of them at once. Eco1992, do you have any idea?

Thank you f150!

Congratulations! Guys, did you receive your email some time after the initial admissions on gradcafe/urch (which implies that they are sending emails one by one)? Or do you think that they have already sent all of them at once and they are done with today's admissions? Based on this, I will decide whether to sleep or whether to continue to obsessively refresh my inbox :)

But it is just a few people who get admitted or waitlisted, not tens of applicants. I think it is too early to make this conclusion (or I just want to believe so!).

Did you received a rejection?

I'm very surprised by chicago's sending its decisions so early and on Sunday. I initially thought it was a trolling. Congratulations to those who are admitted. May I ask at what time you received the email?

I think you should not use just a single ranking to get an idea. Rather, I would recommend having a look at all different rankings to get a general idea of the ranking of a university. Each ranking uses a different methodology and therefore a university may be ranked highly in one ranking while this is not the case in another ranking. In general, people are referring to the world ranking rather then the US, but this difference is not really important since the majority of them are in the US and just a few of them are in the UK (and a few in the Europe). Popular rankings are: US News and World Report Rankings Shanghai Ranking (also called as ARWU) Repec-Ideas Rankings Times Higher Education Rankings QS World University Rankings URAP Rankings Tilburg Ranking (https://econtop.uvt.nl/rankinglist.php) I recommend seeing the methodology of each ranking to understand how it is calculated. This way, you can obtain different perspectives and different pieces of information. This can also help you get a more reliable picture of the rankings of different universities since each of these rankings has its own weaknesses/strangeness.

Good to know this. Thank you.

I (erroneously) thought that April 15 would be the final date for everyone -admitted or waitlisted-. Thank you for the information. But if a school keeps me waitlisted past April 15 while I have to respond to another school where I am admitted, there will be a problem. And what if I wait until, say, April 16 and accept the offer of a school which made me an offer in March? I think I will lose my place, right?

Guys, is it common that a waitlist lasts until April 15? Or should we expect to hear in the beginning of April? Of course it depends, but I want to know the general case.

Chateauheart, you are one of the members in this forum whose comments I find very helpful and informative, and you certainly have more experience than I have. Regarding your comment above, I would like to ask about your reasons. Please note that I really want to understand the issue, rather than refute. Actually, I don't know why I am defending Cambridge even though I have no relation with it at the moment. I just found it unfair to evaluate the strength of a department on the basis of "tens of people" graduating from a department. And then I I just wrote my perception about Cambridge and found myself in this argument. Firstly, I agree that those rankings that put Cambridge Econ in #9 or #11 may not be a good indicator of research productivity. But other rankings (i.e. ARWU, URAP and US News) I think use somewhat reliable/meaningful methodology and they take into account publications, article impact, citation impact etc (you can see their methodology, or probably you already know). And all those rankings rank Cambridge Econ like 17th, 18th, 21th, 25th etc in the world. While this is the case, why do you say that Cambridge is "no way" around top20. What is the reason? Are all those rankings meaningless/arbitrary measurements? Is even the USNews which ranked CambridgeEcon 21th in the world in 2015 meaningless? And did you actually assessed their publications personally and find it poor quality? Did you have an experience in Cambridge Econ or have a close friend there and hear bad things? I am just trying to understand your reasons, reasons other than "I have some unintelligent friends from XXX University => therefore it is bad". Again, I hope I am not being rude. Excuse me if I am being so. I really want to understand. Secondly, you say that Cambridge Econ is in top7 in the UK. Why? I barely know names of 7 econ departments in the UK. If these rankings are meaningless, why are they working in the negative direction for Cambridge and positive for other UK schools? Other than LSE, Oxford (and maybe UCL, maybe not) I don't think other schools are better than Cambridge Econ. As for prestige, I think we should talk about the "general prestige" and the "prestige of Econ department". I believe all Cambridge departments have the general prestige regardless of your studies and regardless of interaction with other departments. It is just the brand name and the image in the minds of people. As for the prestige of the Econ department among economists, yes, the general prestige of Cambridge may not apply exactly to the Econ department, but I think it is still "Cambridge" and should not be out of top20 in terms of brand name in economics. I don't know. Maybe I am wrong. I am just writing what I think.