And now for…
General tips for everyoneHere is the most important tip for everyone:
Don’t just apply to “top” schools. For some degrees—an MBA for example—people question whether it’s worthwhile to go to a non-top school. But for econ departments, there’s no question. Both Miles and Noah have marveled at the number of smart people working at non-top schools. That includes some well-known bloggers, by the way—Tyler Cowen teaches at George Mason University (ranked
64th), Mark Thoma teaches at the University of Oregon (ranked
56th), and Scott Sumner teaches at Bentley, for example. Additionally, a flood of new international students is expanding the supply of quality students. That means that the number of high-quality schools is increasing; tomorrow’s top 20 will be like today’s top 10, and tomorrow’s top 100 will be like today’s top 50.
Apply to schools outside of the top 20—any school in the top 100 is worth considering, especially if it is strong in areas you are interested in. If your classmates aren’t as elite as you would like, that just means that you will get more attention from the professors, who almost all came out of top programs themselves. When Noah said in his earlier post that econ PhD students are virtually guaranteed to get jobs in an econ-related field, that applied to schools far down in the ranking. Everyone participates in the legendary
centrally managed econ job market. Very few people ever fall through the cracks.
Next—and this should go without saying—
don’t be afraid to retake the GRE. If you want to get into a top 10 school, you probably need a perfect or near-perfect score on the math portion of the GRE. For schools lower down the rankings, a good GRE math score is still important. Fortunately, the GRE math section is relatively simple to study for—there are only a finite number of topics covered, and with a little work you can “overlearn” all of them, so you can do them even under time pressure and when you are nervous. In any case, you can keep retaking the test until you get a good score (especially if the early tries are practice tests from the GRE prep books and prep software), and then you’re OK!
Here’s one thing that may surprise you:
Getting an econ master’s degree alone won’t help. Although master’s degrees in economics are common among
international students who apply to econ PhD programs, American applicants do just fine without a master’s degree on their record. If you want that extra diploma, realize that once you are in a PhD program, you will get a master’s degree automatically after two years. And if you end up dropping out of the PhD program, that master’s degree will be worth more than a stand-alone master’s would. The one reason to get a master’s degree is if it can help you remedy a big deficiency in your record, say not having taken enough math or stats classes, not having taken any econ classes, or not having been able to get anyone whose name admissions committees would recognize to write you a letter of recommendation.
For getting into grad school, much more valuable than a master’s is
a stint as a research assistant in the Federal Reserve System or at a think tank—though these days, such positions can often be as hard to get into as a PhD program!
Finally—and if you’re reading this, chances are you’re already doing this—
read some econ blogs. (See Miles’s speculations about the future of the econ blogosphere
here.) Econ blogs are no substitute for econ classes, but they’re a great complement. Blogs are good for picking up the lingo of academic economists, and learning to think like an economist. Don’t be afraid to
write a blog either, even if no one ever reads it (you don’t have to be writing at the same level as
Evan Soltas or
Yichuan Wang); you can still put it on your CV, or just practice writing down your thoughts. And when you write your dissertation, and do research later on in your career,
you are going to have to think for yourself outside the context of a class. One way to practice thinking critically is by critiquing others’ blog posts, at least in your head.
Anyway, if you want to have intellectual stimulation and good work-life balance, and a near-guarantee of a well-paying job in your field of interest, an econ PhD could be just the thing for you. Don’t be scared of the math and the jargon. We’d love to have you.
Update: Miles’s colleague Jeff Smith at the University of Michigan
amplifies many of the things we say on his blog. For a
complete guide, be sure to see what Jeff has to say, too.
原帖链接:
http://qz.com/116081/the-complete-guide-to-getting-into-an-economics-phd-program/