lajolla

Hi everyone, I would like to get in somewhere with enough funding because money is an issue, but I'm also applying to the Smith College math post-bac program for women and jobs at the Federal Reserve and economic consulting firms as back-ups, so things will be good. I think I would like to enter academia after the Ph. D., but I haven't tried private sector work, so I don't know if that'd be just as good, so I guess I'd just like options. I'll be graduating next year with an Economics B.A. with Mathematics minor from UCLA. My current GPA is 3.5 overall and 3.7 major. I've taken Linear Algebra and am currently taking Real Analysis and Partial Differential Equations during the summer. I'll take more math classes my senior year, including Optimization and Mathematical Economics in the fall. My GRE score was 170/170/5.5. I did an undergraduate independent research project about Zipf's law in urban economics, and I was a research assistant for one year for a graduate student working on her dissertation in public finance. I'll be starting as a research assistant this fall for the professor who advised my independent research project. I'm interested in all research fields equally. I'm thinking I should apply to ten schools: UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, Berkeley, Caltech, UC Davis, Duke, NYU, Georgetown, and Columbia (where my adviser went). Which schools should I add or remove? I'm concerned about whether I'd be uncomfortable as an Asian female in the Midwest or South. Does anyone with experience here think I should be concerned? I'm also concerned that half are public schools, and I need funding, so should I apply to more private schools instead? Thank you very much for any advice and suggestions! I hope everyone's having a good summer :)