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laborsabre

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Everything posted by laborsabre

  1. laborsabre
    I would add on to this by saying that measure-theoretic probability theory is a pretty useful in many fields. I am a current PhD candidate and I wish I had a better grasp of it. It is very helpful for theory and econometrics.
  2. laborsabre
    You can generally just candidly tell the program your competing offer and say it would really help you out if they could increase your stipend. Just be polite and email the appropriate person (usually a graduate advisor or the graduate program chair). No need to dance around this - negotiation occurs regularly, and most departments have policies built to deal with it. usually the worst that happens is they say no, and the best that happens is they actually give you what you ask for.
  3. laborsabre
    I wanted to add one more comment to this thread from the perspective of a 3rd year PhD student. I agree it is worth considering moving in your case, but you should also ask yourself what you expect to gain from switching programs. In terms of coursework, you might have better access to 2nd year courses in the fields you like. But this aspect is a little overrated, because 2nd year courses are often just surveys of the literature (and you can get just as much out of replicating a famous paper in the literature yourself). If they are more methodological (so you get a skill out of the course) you can often just audit a course at another department. Given the virtual format that has become common during the pandemic this has become even easier to do (I audited a nice structural labor class and it was awesome). These two facts make the coursework value from switching much lower. The other reason to switch, which seems to be your main reason, is the connections/advisors. While this is a stronger argument, if your advisor leaves you can continue to have them on your committee in many cases (even if unofficially). Even if they are going to the fed, you can often keep them on as an unofficial advisor. I have a few faculty I speak to at other schools and they have always been willing to give me advice/direct me where I need to go. I also think that having an exact match with the research interests of your advisor is overrated for two reasons. First, joint publications with a senior faculty member are heavily discounted. Second RA work is mainly useful only indirectly, be providing you skills/references/connections. You can RA with people only loosely related to your field of interest and still benefit because many of the tools used (especially in applied) are very similar across subfields. So I would recommend you seriously consider how you can make do at your current program. If there is no one in your field (if you have no applied micro faculty at all) then that is one thing. But if there are faculty in applied but they do not exactly study poverty I would think carefully whether switching (which has pretty large costs) is best for you.
  4. laborsabre
    Given you go to a top school, adcoms know that these courses are often curved and that you are competing with PhD students for the A/A+. An A- is probably around the 60th percentile, and it's probably fine for conveying that you can not fail micro, which is the point of taking it in undergrad. I wouldn't worry at all. You can take micro 2 if you want, but it'll probably be of only marginal benefit. Honestly for you it's going to come down to the letters of rec and luck (everything is very noisy, especially with covid). If you were to invest in some aspect of your profile it's faculty letters. You want them to convey that you are talented (using some hard metric like percentage of undergrads they have advised) and a good fit for a PhD.
  5. laborsabre
    I'd go even further: some programs actually explicitly say not to email professors during the application process.
  6. laborsabre
    Don't take this as absolute truth, but I went to undergrad at the school I am now getting a PhD. I was a double major in Poli sci and econ, and my experience was that there was not too much cross-communication between departments. So I don't even know if they'd know you applied to other programs outside the department (the school uses a centralized portal, but decisions are department specific I think). It's also decently common for econ PhD applicants to send in apps to Poli sci programs. I definitely considered it, and I didn't get the sense that this looks bad.
  7. laborsabre
    You are correct that they have few development placements and they have a large focus on security type positions. But you can check their placement page and you'll find a decent number of post-docs and academic positions, definitely nothing to sneeze at. I agree they might not focus on the areas of policy you care about, and I think definitely it's probably not as good a match for international students.
  8. laborsabre
    You seem like a really good fit for a program like the RAND Policy Analysis PhD program. I looked into the program extensively during my application process and it seems like they'd weight your profile almost better than a traditional econ PhD profile. They like candidates with policy experience. They also have excellent government/think tank placements.
  9. laborsabre
    I want to echo startz: with the courses you've taken I don't think people will care very much about one or two A-s especially in a math department class. It's more concerning in a grad econ class where grades are curved to be A or B, so the + and - are more meaningful signals of class rank.
  10. laborsabre
    Synthesizing what the last few posters have said, I think a decent strategy then is to maybe throw one or two top 20 schools into your application portfolio, while not being under the false impression that you are likely to be admitted. It is worthwhile to dig deep into the connections your letter writers have with faculty at other schools. Because academic hiring is so top skewed, you might find out some faculty at your school actually went to pretty good programs, and have connections to faculty at schools you are interested in.
  11. laborsabre
    I think it is an average of an A- or B+ with no individual course grades below a B, although I cannot find the document to confirm.
  12. laborsabre
    At my school the comps have been changed to allow students who achieve high enough grades in the core sequence to skip potentially all of them. There will still be first-years who need to take them, and my impression is that they will be done virtually.
  13. laborsabre
    Econ departments are usually quite ok with undergrads taking grad classes. That's not the issue. I think the difference between math and economics is that economics undergrad classes are at a vastly different level than grad classes, while I'd imagine (although this is speculation) that there is not a huge gap between an upper level undergrad math class and a grad math class. I think fundamentally this is because economics is not a hard science - it's a social science. The people who are undergrad econ majors span the gamut from people who will go on to sales or marketing to people who will perform theoretical economics research (basically applied math). As a result undergrad classes tend to lean more into the softer less rigorious aspects of economics. So it's not that they are so impossible, it's more that people are often caught by surprised by how different it is than intermediate undergrad classes.
  14. laborsabre
    I actually agree more with Bayes re: taking grad micro. There is an interesting trade-off when it comes to grad micro: it is the best signal of your ability to pass your first year, because the micro sequence is the one that most often causes attrition. However, it being a good signal means that if you fail it, you are sending a good signal that you cannot handle the rigor. Given your performance in intermediate and introductory micro, you should consider carefully whether you are ready to take grad micro. The alternative of taking the math and perhaps the most rigorous non-grad micro/metrics classes you can seems like the best option. Then, if after taking the analysis class you feel ready then you can take grad micro. The truth is that many successful applicants from top undergrads do not take grad micro prior to their first-year. And many of them will just barely squeak by in grad micro during their first year, but this is okay, because if you do not want to be a theorist it is not necessary to excel in the micro sequence. All that being said, your general interest in policy issues, minor in political science and interest in applied micro make you a good candidate for public policy PhD programs. You should check those out. They also tend to be a little more forgiving when it comes to math background.
  15. laborsabre
    I agree with the last two commenters that the visit can be very helpful on your end in making your decision. But I do see where you are coming from, and if you think the additional information is not helpful, I don't see an issue with not going. The additional information would not be helpful if: a. You are convinced you will not go to this place even if it is the best place on earth. b. You are convinced you will go even if it is the most terrible place on earth. c. You already have visited the school and know what you are getting into if you choose it. These are rarely satisfied for most people (even for people that get only offer) but they were for me (I fell into c) so I did not go. I think there might be some marginal benefits to going, like meeting your cohort-mates (this is a decently important aspect) and maybe making some early faculty connections, but I think these are second order.
  16. laborsabre
    I agree with this. I think some of dogbones' questions are unconventional, but they do seem genuine.
  17. laborsabre
    Thanks this is exactly what I was asking. I get the value from getting it to hedge against future uncertainty, but I was mainly interested if there is any additional value. In my case the cost was mainly sitting in a class for 2.5 hours each week and writing a 25 page paper. I have decided this is a minor cost, and I will get the master's. Thanks all.
  18. laborsabre
    Hi all, I am a current 2nd year in my PhD program. My program allows PhD students to tack on a master's in the course of their PhD by doing a little extra work (sometimes no extra work depending on which fields you choose). I am weighing the cost benefit at the moment, and I am curious if there is any added benefit to someone with no intention of quitting the PhD. Put a different way, beyond the improvement of your outside option, does having an intermediate master's listed on your CV matter at all after you have a PhD/when you go on the market? From what I gather it seems to open some internship doors prior to graduation, but other than that the value added seems small. All thoughts are appreciated.
  19. laborsabre
    Oh okay. I misinterpreted. I thought your desire to do these additional degrees was because you had non-academic policy jobs in mind that might not involve a PhD. In that case, I would make my main point even stronger: there really is no value in getting either degree you mentioned. The econ MA is the one that will be your best bet. Anything else is just noise as someone else said. Data science courses can sometimes be helpful to audit to learn techniques but I do not see them as providing much signaling value, especially since most data science programs are very new and expensive. They also tend to focus on prediction, which while important is of second order importance in a lot of academic work. I double majored in political science in undergrad, and have a close friend who is a professor in political science. From my discussions with him and past experience, IR will not be helpful at all. The overlap will probably mostly involve some game theoretic models, but they probably would not be covered at the level of an econ PhD first year course. Even if they were, there is pretty much 0 signaling value to the IR masters. My comment about the math/engineering MAs was more to say that people with those degrees get into econ PhD programs (I know several in my program). So the skills you learn in those programs help. But I would almost never recommend someone go out of there way to get those degrees when you can just go get an econ MA (like you are doing). A good analogy is this: imagine you want to learn Chinese. People find it easier to learn Chinese after first learning another East Asian language (like Japanese). This does not mean that one should go learn Japanese first when an introductory Chinese course is available.
  20. laborsabre
    From my experience so far, it does not seem to me that there is any additional prestige gained from having additional degrees. I think the traditional wisdom, that additional degrees should only be used to erase bad undergrad performance, is the correct wisdom. Economists highly discount non-economics degrees (except for maybe engineering or math, but these aren't usually seen as better than econ degrees). I would suggest using spare time and money doing RA work or, if your interest lies in policy, doing an internship at some policy oriented institution (this will not make you more competitive for a PhD, but it will help you get a policy job that does not require a PhD should you decide to stop after the master's).
  21. laborsabre
    UCLA has several faculty that are active in economic history, and it has an economic history specialization. An economic history course is also required for the Masters you can get along the way to a PhD.
  22. laborsabre
    When I wrote my reply, I was thinking about econ programs. However, I do agree with tutonic that applied micro people do tend to apply to both top public policy programs as well as econ programs (I am one of those people who did that during my application season). The implication being that as you go up the rankings to the top 5 public policy programs, you get an applicant pool that is much closer to that of a top econ department (or, more specifically, the empirical/applied micro portion of an econ PhD applicant pool). But I would guess that farther down the public policy PhD rankings you get a much different applicant pool, where you might have a better chance. The thing for you to consider is if these schools that are further down the ranking will get you to where you want to be career or goal-wise. Regarding the RAND program: It is worse for academic placement but might be fine (maybe even better) in some circumstances for industry focused people. I read a lot about it and went to a big pre-admissions event for them, interviewed with an alum, did the pre-application and applied. You can pm me if you want more details, but here is a brief summary of what I know. Based on the literature I read while at the event, they have a strong record of placing people in government agencies and private companies. Jobs that people call "industry" in the econ world. Many of the job titles did in fact include "economist." There were not a lot of people placed into academia, and indeed, most people going in know they do not want an academic job. The program also can be finished much quicker than a typical econ PhD, with a good chunk doing it in 4 years and some even in 3 (but this is rare). The applicant pool has a much lower typical GRE score than top econ PhDs. This is verbatim from the pre-applicaiton information they sent me: "More precisely, the quantitative GRE scores for the middle 50 percent of the last entering class ranged from 158 to 166." The pool is also composed of many people who have prior work experience outside academia. They also seems to care much more about prior work experience, unlike econ PhD programs. Regarding your final question: I think your main problem in general are some of those math grades. You have taken enough math for an econ or public policy PhD, but you unfortunately scored lower than most competitive applicants applying to top schools. This is perhaps mitigated for the public policy PhDs by your master's, so as tutonic said your best assessment will come from your program faculty.
  23. laborsabre
    For top ranked programs, without a letter from a well-known economist, you may get filtered out because of the C in Calc II and the B's in the other math grades. Your quant GRE score is also on the margin for top 20 schools. Retaking the GRE one more time might have higher returns for your profile, because a higher score will help alleviate concerns over your math ability. Regarding how this impacts your chances at lower ranked school I am not sure. I do know however that almost all credible programs care a lot about your perceived ability to pass the first year, and math grades matter a lot for that perception. Also, a master's in public policy will probably not count for much, and might even count against you at higher ranked programs. You seem better suited (as you mentioned) for a public policy PhD. These PhD's, while different, offer some advantages over econ PhD especially for those interested in government work. I would check out the public policy programs at well-known schools as well as Pardee RAND Graduate School, which offers a PhD in public policy. This PhD program seems to give more credit to people with work experience, and they will also surely count your masters for you rather than against you. They finally have very good job placement in the government and think tank world. They have a pre-application where they will rate your chances of admission up-front which is very helpful.
  24. laborsabre
    Addressing your concerns is difficult because while the material taught at most programs is similar, testing styles vary widely. Here is my input though, take it with the qualifier I just stated. Re first concern: in my program clever FOC manipulation was mainly on homework assignments: professors generally did not expect you to correctly play with massive FOCs to get a neat equation in the span of a test and if they did it was understood to be something most people wouldn't finish. However, you should expect some minimum amount of algebra in many problems, but based on your math background it shouldn't be that much worse then stuff you have seen before. My experience has been that the macro sequence involved more terrible FOCs on tests. Re second concern: in my program Kakutani's Fixed Point Theorem was the main one we used for stuff like equilibrium existence. We didn't prove it in the class, but supporting material and some of the proof details were provided. We also did go over all the main assumptions and how it fits into the main proof. If the Theorem was a tool, we read the instructions manual but didn't take it apart. This did bother some people, especially those with a more rigorous math background. I think part of this is because econ as a field has zoomed in on a few esoteric fixed point theorems that aren't widely used in many math departments. Anyway, the best advice I heard was "we are economists, not mathematicians." And to be fair I think this is good to keep in mind, otherwise you might drive yourself crazy. On the flip side you might grow too lazy, so I'm still learning to balance it myself. To use an analogy, let's say you are a biologist trying to study microorganisms. You use an electron microscope for your research. You could spend a long time learning to build one from scratch, but then you could have spent that time actually studying what you intended to study. As long as you are sufficiently sure you know how to work it correctly, and you know enough to trust the tool, building complex electronics might be best left to engineers.
  25. laborsabre
    I just finished my quals and got the results (I go to a T20 school). I would have appreciated more information from recent first years going into all of it, so I'll try and post my thoughts. I would qualify it by saying that I think any advice is program and indeed professor dependent. The first thing I would say is that you should really understand your professors style. I had professors who had tests that included almost verbatim past year questions and others that designed completely unique and indeed thought provoking questions. Studying for tests designed by these two types of questions is very different. I got a lot of advice along the lines of "just do AS MANY PROBLEMS AS YOU CAN." This is solid advice for some professors who reuse questions, but it can be a major waste of time for others. Use finals and midterms to figure out which professors are which, and adjust accordingly. For some professors study time is best used mastering intuition. Others it is mastering a set of techniques. Others it is memorizing cute algebra tricks. For me personally, I found very little value in reading a massive number of texts. I found much more value in discussing problems with people. A lot of people online and in person say something to the effect of "you'll have no life your first year." This is generalized advice. Maybe it is true for some people, but I think for a person of average preparation it is possible to live a balanced life. I think part of this is just realizing that studying has diminishing returns, and you just won't learn everything to the level you want. I accepted this my first quarter and had a really enjoyable second quarter. Admittedly I let this mentality go a little far third quarter. Learn how to handle a question you can't answer. I took a lot of exams that had one or several questions (by questions I mean like a whole third of a test sometimes) that I could not adequately answer. The times I accepted this, moved on, and tried to convey my understanding as best as possible were when I did best. I found sometimes that a little intuition can go a long way, to the point where you can sometimes get the answer without the math. This won't give you full points, but it'll get you some and it's honestly a better skill. It's also good to realize that many economic models were built to capture observations about the real world. And the famous ones are ones that also yielded interesting additional insight. In this way the math is often "rigged" to go a certain way (ok this is a little harsh, but I think rigged gets the idea across). Finally, from my discussions with international classmates in my American program, a big hurdle is question interpretation. Many problems, especially professor designed game theory questions can be really hard to interpret. Since many problems are multi part and are designed to "work" mathematically only one way, interpretation is probably a huge thing to study, especially if you are a non-Native English speaker.
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