leafarartes

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad: BA Econ, BS Math & CS in 2015 @ Large State School Top 25 Econ Undergrad GPA: 3.90 Type of Grad: N/A Grad GPA: NA GRE: 167/159/4.5 Q/V/A Math Courses: Diff EQ, Lin Alg, Advanced Calc (~Analysis), Intro Algebra, Probability Theory, Econ Courses: Microeconomic Analysis (Phd Seq), Econometrics I, II, International, Development, Labor, Game Theory Other Courses: Lots of CS (was primary major) Letters of Recommendation: 1 CS Prof (thesis adviser), 2 Econ Prof (thesis adviser and honors program director) Research Experience: CS UG thesis and Econ UG thesis Teaching Experience: TA for undergraduate CS course (basic Java, algorithms, data structures, etc) Research Interests: Mechanism Design, Game Theory, Micro SOP: Thought it was decent Other: Working as software engineer at an investment bank for last 2 years (weird, right?) RESULTS: Acceptances: Columbia ($$$), UCLA ($) Waitlists: Northwestern Rejections: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Stanford-Biz, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, Penn, NYU, Caltech Pending: NU I guess, but I told them to take me off the WL Attending: Columbia~ Comments: Can't complain, Columbia will be awesome. Plus I already live here. I got distracted by a software dev job offer after school and took it since it looked like easy money. I'm sure this had admissions committees scratching their heads and questioning how serious I am. I only applied to top 15ish since I have a job I (mostly) like, so I feel fortunate to even get 1 acceptance. Though the rejections did sting! What would you have done differently? Meh. I'm sure the weird gap hurt a lot. Given I got into CU, I don't regret taking the job after school since it solidified that I miss research, but I'd be singing a diff tune if I struck out I'm sure. How accurate were others' predictions of your range of admissions? Seems to be a common theme but most people who aren't in academia or haven't applied to it before were quite surprised as to how competitive admissions are for PhD programs! They thought it was silly that I was concerned I may not getting into any...it was close!

Not sure if they're done notifying people. They're quite ambiguous by what they mean, but they said at this point the ones they have internally as "pending" are essentially waitlisted. Not sure if they've actually notified everyone they have as rejected though. Best of luck