asianecon Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 "Not all universities forbid applications on behalf of dead people. But given this handicap, they have to compensate with excellent LORs and demonstrated research ability." it's illegal for them to deny an applicant solely based on being handicapped...maybe that's why...haha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asianecon Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 "Not all universities forbid applications on behalf of dead people. But given this handicap, they have to compensate with excellent LORs and demonstrated research ability." it's illegal for them to deny an applicant solely based on being handicapped...maybe that's why...haha ;) sorry for the double post...server is screwing up... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emperor Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 Not really. I know someone who got into Harvard despite being dead. Not all universities forbid applications on behalf of dead people. But given this handicap, they have to compensate with excellent LORs and demonstrated research ability. Which Tucker has. (Sorry Emperor, coudn't resist ...:)) It’s not very sporting when you prove my point so effortlessly! Despite all the proofs you have written in your career, you are still struggling with elementary logic. The dead person analogy is obviously irrelevant. (Sorry mon ami, I could not resist either. :)) Good luck to everyone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Econ2006 Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 hmm...just a speculation: what if ad coms nowadays are dominated by junior faculty that needs to publish a lot to get tenure and what if they dont really care about the research potential of the student but only his/her potential as a research assistant? this makes sense: you don't want a co-author but you want a brilliant kid who can solve your problems and prove your propositions/theorems. can the trend of wanting more math from applicants be due to this shift of the preference of ad coms and their private benefits? I think you may have a point here. Though I think if adcoms are dominated by junior faculty, they are that much closer to the grad school experience, and are still focused on the level of math they needed/used to succeed. I would guess that if ad coms were made up of mostly senior faculty, math ability beyond a certain level (say, analysis), wouldn't be as highly prized (and research ability might be more valued), especially when evaluating applicants who don't intend to do theoretical work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheekyrusski Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 Ross The article that you're referring to in JPE was published while Levitt was in grad school at MIT.. His undergraduate thesis at Harvard for which he won the award for best undergraduate thesis was on thoroughbred breeding. Also, regarding Levitt's math background when he began at MIT, 'Levitt had taken exactly one math course as an undergraduate and had forgotten even that. During his first graduate class, he asked the student next to him about a formula on the board: Is there any difference between the derivative sign that's straight up-and-down and the curly one? "You are in so much trouble," he was told.' All of this information is taken directly from Stephen Dubner's 2003 New York Times Magazine article on Levitt, which burgeoned into Freakonomics. Dubner may well 'exaggerate the truth' in order to create the right image for Levitt - after all, it enhances the prestige of a person if he went from being a mathematical ignoramus to a Bates Medal winner. I agree with 'economistsdoitwithmodels' - there is a lot to be said for mathematics done in other courses. Levitt was an 'insider' from the beginning by studying at Harvard and his formal maths background mattered much less. I would like to believe that today's adcoms would equally carefully look at the maths implicit in other courses (perhaps only possible if these guys know the course being taught - another advantage for 'insiders'). However, despite a few brave souls in this forum asserting that maths is not all-important today, I have yet to be convinced otherwise. There are just too many people that I know that have interesting backgrounds as well as clear display of research potential and yet they have been consistently overlooked by schools. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elhuevon Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 Levitt replied: http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2006/03/15/could-steve-levitt-get-into-a-top-economics-phd-program-today Nice work guys! Now the real question: do we all (Levitt included) systematically underestimate how much luck was involved in our success and overestimate skill? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Antichron Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 That's awesome. Levitt posted a link to this thread on his blog: http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
econ_hopeful Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 I wrote to Prof. Levitt through his Freakonomics e-mail to tell him about his thread here at TestMagic. He also sent me a reply with additional details about his pre-graduate school profile: For what it is worth, if you want to add it to the discussion: I did work as a management consultant for two years before going back to get a Ph.D. My only college math course was calculus 1a, the very first intro calculus course. I got 800s on math and logic section of GRE. My letter writers were Alberto Alesina, Philippe Weil (my thesis advisor), and one of my bosses at the consulting firm. I got the NSF after my first year at MIT...I didn't know enough to apply to NSF when applying to grad schools. I am told by the admissions people at University of Chicago that if I had applied there (I didn't), they would have thrown my application out before a faculty member ever saw it because I had too little math. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snappythecrab Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 hahaha, that's awesome Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyecon Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 That is so freakin' cool. TM rules the universe! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
no one knows Posted March 15, 2006 Share Posted March 15, 2006 Wow it is amazing how this thread turned up on that blog! What a small world! *furiously checks all previous posts to find if he made a carrer ending faux pas in one of the threads* This is a 'counterfactual conditional', an 'unsolved' problem in philosophy. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_philosophy I was a philosophy major. Let me assure you that the whole discipline is an unsolved problem! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OneMoreEcon Posted March 15, 2006 Author Share Posted March 15, 2006 Damn... I should have started this thread a few weeks ago so that we could all try to use our new Steven Levitt connection to network our way into the schools of our choice (or at least those schools he could help with). :D Regarding crslr's post, I think Levitt has published more than that ranking makes it appear, probably in part due to the "top 30" journals it includes. There are rankings from RePec (http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html) that make Levitt look more prolific (probably due to his publishing in Poli Sci journals, and maybe some law journals). He ranks 86 overall and 162 for number of pages published (but I think this is based on entire career - at least the part available at RePec - so many ahead of Levitt have a few decades of publishing that he has to catch up to). But it's also interesting to see that Daron Acemoglu ranks 11 for number of pages published, and he's been out of grad school for roughly the same time as Levitt. Not that our two most recent Bates Clark Medal winners are comparable in many ways.:) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
olhado Posted May 27, 2006 Share Posted May 27, 2006 i think its definitely the case that the amt of math needed for a first year econ grad sequence is totally overrated. while applying i had the shit scared out of me by professors and graduate students that an econ phd was just “math math math” all the time, but I haven’t really used anything but multivariable calc, linear algebra (all in greene appendix), and some rudimentary real analysis. whether “math math math” is the way to get IN, well, i now think this might be overrated too (its definitely department specific). on the one hand, I know for a fact that I was rejected from one department specifically because of (lack of) math background. On the other, as a 1st year student in a top-10 program (not MIT), I’m underwhelmed by the mathematical sophistication of my classmates - of course, the top few are trained to the hilt, but that leaves another 20 or so that are all over the map. i’d say in almost everyone’s case, a good relationship with a letter writer seems to have been one, if not the, decisive factor. (note to applicants – a nice letter from a prof who taught you is not immensely helpful. a summer research project with a – preferably tenured – faculty member who will write you a glowing rec at the end, now that’s where the big money is. and if you're like steve and can win a prize for your undergraduate thesis... well, then you're probably not in the position of having to strategize to get in anyway). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erin Posted November 8, 2010 Share Posted November 8, 2010 I should take a look at my stats more often. It appears that Steve Levitt has seen this thread: Could Steve Levitt get into a top economics Ph.D. program today? - NYTimes.com Pretty funny, if you ask me. :D Edit: Oops. It seems this has already been noted. Sorry! :blush: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.