As I suggested
more than a year ago, this last fall of 2016 I
had the opportunity to apply to PhD programs in Economics.
In the hope that my experience may be helpful to someone out
there also thinking about applying to graduate programs (in Economics in particular),
in this first post after another long hiatus (who would have thought work and
being an adult would be busy!) I will join the chorus of other great and
helpful advice online in covering my application process, as well as some hints
for maximizing one’s chances of success. These are of course by no means
prescriptions, and no case—let alone mine—is representative of the overall
process and of typical results, even for similar applicant profiles.
Boilerplate/ disclaimer language aside, let’s dive in!
I had my sights on applying to PhD programs since at the
very least late Junior year of college.
While I had long-considered pursuing a PhD as early as freshman year, it
wasn’t until then that I fully made up my mind to jump into the process. So the
first lesson is that it’s never too late to get one’s act together and produce
a successful applicant profile, and my case is by far not on the extreme of the
range of experiences and ages at which many candidates apply or start
preparing. Moreover, the process will inherently be long and oftentimes
stressful. I myself mulled over versions of my Statements of Purpose for
months, and each component of my application (as I will cover down below) came
very piecemeal, months at a time over the span of a couple of years (that being
said, I have first-hand knowledge of other very successful candidates who have
gone through the process of deciding to apply to submitting applications
literally within November and December of the same application year, so every
story is different).
By the beginning of Senior year though, and after some
research over the summer, I didn’t consider my mathematics or research
background particularly up to snuff, and hence decided that the best approach
for me in particular would be to beef up these two components and, hopefully in
the process, make closer connections with members of the faculty or research
supervisors who could advise me and potentially serve as writers of my letters
of recommendation.
So after a Senior year spent focusing harder on the math
classes I was missing, on producing a good research paper in my Senior Seminar
(which I have written about before), and registering and preparing for the GRE,
I began working at Cornerstone Research, the economic consulting firm.
After a year of relatively carefree, adult bliss, the bulk
of my application process began around June or July of 2016.
While I had already done a lot of work since graduation to
prep for the application process (i.e. I took the GRE a month after graduation,
took Analysis as a post-bacc while working at my research job, began a very
early, generic draft of my SOP, and started researching schools to apply to),
over the summer I dedicated myself to finally choosing schools, doing research
on my fields of interest, and getting advice from people and potential
recommenders.
During the later months of summer and early fall, I formally
reached out to recommenders and met with them in person whenever feasible. I then
finalized my school list to send my recommenders the actual invites to write
their letters as early as possible, and from that, I prepared a tracker to make
sure everything was submitted in a timely fashion and nothing fell through the
cracks (chances are you’ll be applying to dozens of schools so this is
essential, and even I realized last-minute that I was missing some particular
items, such as the optional diversity statements or NYU’s optional video
essay). While the shape of the tracker evolved as I completed more parts of
each application, the final form had the following fields:
- School Name
- Program (Economics/ Business Economics/ Applied Economics,
etc.)
- Application Deadline
- Username (for the Application itself)
- Progress Updates1
- Application Form (i.e. the portions of each application
relating to demographic info, educational or professional history, etc.)
- Transcript (U: Unofficial Okay / O: Official Required; C:
Color Transcript; G: Grayscale Transcript)
- Letters of Recommendation (Number Required)
- Resume/ CV
- GRE Score
- Statement of Purpose
- Abstract of Courses
- Writing Sample
- Application Fee (dollar amount)
- Other/ Miscellaneous (e.g. Diversity Statement; Supplemental
Applications; Video Essay)
1 This section of the tracker contained
checkmarks for whenever each of the listed items was a required component of
the application for a given school (or the word “Optional” for when it was
instead an optional component). Each checkmark/ “Optional” started off as red
for each school, and as I started on each school I would change the
corresponding checkmarks for whatever I worked on to yellow, and finally to
green when complete (the self-fulfillment I felt when the whole tracker was
marked green was beyond words).
With the tracker set up, I first took care of completing the
logistical items, such as sending official GRE score reports to the list of
schools, secured copies of transcripts and sent the official hard copies wherever
necessary, officially sent my recommendation invites to all my recommenders, as
well as formally created my online accounts in the application systems for each
of the schools I was applying to, and filled in all the demographic and program
of interest info. This allowed me to feel productive by marking items in my
tracker from red to yellow and finally to green, and let me de-stress by
finishing the particularly tedious components early, buying me more time to
continue research on schools and the faculty in each one that I would like to
work with (a critical portion of each statement of purpose).
Indeed, with all of the above being done by the start or so
of October, I spent the rest of that month and all of November with perhaps the
most time-consuming aspect: finalizing each statement of purpose by filling in
the generic template (describing my background and research interests) with why
I was particularly interested in each program I was applying to, and discussing
the work of every professor who shared some of my interests and who I thus
thought would be able to guide me. I was
officially done with all my applications by November 23rd, about a
week before the deadline for a couple of the earliest schools on December 1st.
Thus, the last several weeks to a month of the application process all I had to
do was simply follow-up with my recommenders as necessary; this was great as I
had a particularly busy stretch at work right from the end of November to the
middle of February, and I’m sure I would have been incredibly stressed out had
I also had components of my applications yet to finish (for those still in
school, finishing in late November will mean wrapping up this somewhat
stressful process right before the finals stretch, which I’m sure you’ll
appreciate).
I also want to make special mention of applying to the NSF,
which I believe was an important signal to the programs I applied to of my real
interest in graduate school and research, and was an early start at helping to
formulate my research interests, coaxing my recommenders’ letters to be
finished early, and generally getting me in the application groove. Moreover,
if you’re one of the couple of dozen Economics candidates who win the prize,
the NSF could be the key to some fantastic programs and of course, great
funding!
I’ll wrap up this post by providing more details about my
process and results, and with some overarching hints and themes.
As an applicant, I submitted applications to PhD programs at
twenty-one (yes, that’s twenty-one)
programs in Economics and closely-related areas of study (i.e. Applied and
Business Economics, and Finance), and if it’s any indication of both the
competitiveness and absolute randomness of the process, received six favorable
decisions from these programs: four fully-funded acceptances to the PhD
programs I actually applied to, one acceptance to a related Master’s program
(with a rejection to the PhD program itself), and one inquiry regarding my
interest in admission with no first-year funding.
This brings me to my first, and possibly most valuable piece
of advice (to the extent I myself can judge the value of my own guidance): the
whole process is a crapshoot; the best you can do is to weave a cohesive narrative
for your interest in research and the programs you’re applying to, and
understand from the start that it is a fairly random process with a lot of
noise, both within and across applicants’ sets of results. While history is
informative, it is by no means predictive, and you should not take someone
else’s success or failure in the past as a signal for your own performance, no
matter how similar their background and perceived experiences to yours.
To that extent, to maintain your sanity, simply remain
organized and patient. Discipline yourself through the process by maintaining
steady progress with the application components, and try to shelter yourself
from the barrage of websites out there where people post legitimate (and
sometimes non-legitimate) results. While it may seem fruitful to know what is
being released by graduate programs, it won’t in any way change what you have
already submitted or affect your chances; I myself despaired during the waiting
process seeing the favorable results others were getting at the beginning while
I sat in radio silence, and ultimately discovered I was subjecting myself to
unnecessary grief.
Regarding hints for the application process itself, remember
that marginal costs to some of the application components (or entire
applications to extra schools) are incredibly small compared to the expected
marginal benefit that could be obtained from possibly getting in somewhere that
might be a good fit. So while it might be mentally taxing or painful, or while the
extra cost from an application fee or an additional GRE score report might seem
expensive, now is not the time to be stingy or lazy. Work hard, spend the time
no matter how painful, and spend the extra money if feasibly within your means;
it could pay off handsomely in the future and in a great school outcome!
However, having said that, try not to apply to too many
programs to which you may not be a great fit. My general rule for selecting
schools was to ask myself: “would I really
go here if this were the only school
I got into?”. Yet, because I prioritized selecting a school list early in order
to allow my recommenders ample time to work on their letters and forms at their
leisure, I admit I probably applied to schools that I ended up discovering
weren’t great fits with my background or interests during the process of
writing statements of purpose.
This brings me to my other piece of advice regarding the
application components: while many people say the Statement of Purpose doesn’t
really matter, I would actually suggest not to sleep on the SOP. Even though it was by far the most time-consuming
component (as it was school-specific and required lots of research), I think
that the time I spent and investment I made in properly tailoring each SOP to
each school and expressing my research interests and fit with each particular
program ultimately showed. I would suggest to not underestimate research
interests as a factor in the admission decisions of each school; I personally
believe that focusing on this factor and properly expressing it pushed me to
the very end in many of my top schools who saw potential in the kind of work I
want to do (remember that, more than anything, graduate schools are looking to
prepare research professionals and to find people who could contribute during
their time there to research that matches the work of their faculty).
Since most of the application components won’t vary
school-by-school, the SOP is your chance to really make an application
special. For me, at least, holding
basically every other component constant (which really is the case given that
the rest of the application is just GPA and set of courses, letters of
recommendation, GRE scores, etc.), I feel that where I ended up doing the best
was where I had more detailed, impassioned Statements of Purpose that really
made a case for myself at that school; why the school and I were a mutually
beneficial match based on research interests and also non-academic factors.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, at the risk of being
trite, do not underestimate yourself or your potential. While some delicate calibration
and an honest conversation with yourself regarding the strength of your
background and application components is necessary, remember that this process
is inherently self-selective. If you have a genuine and impassioned interest in
pursuing research, then you should make sure apply broadly, but boldly.
Remember there are people there to help and guide you (starting with the very
recommenders whom you have trusted a significant portion of your overall
application package to.) Ask for honest feedback, have people read your SOP,
and have some confidence, with the understanding that it’s a random process
that can often let down even the best of us.
And ultimately, while there’s a lot of noise, I myself was
surprised with how good my top results were, and had I decided not to apply to
those top schools thinking I wasn’t worth it, writing this post could be a very
different process right now.
At the end of it, I come out of a lengthy and stressful
process one of the particularly lucky ones. I had the privilege of debating
between four great PhD programs in Economics at Harvard, Princeton, the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of Maryland, each with
their compelling attributes and exemplary faculty and opportunities.
I’m excited to finally begin my graduate school this coming fall at Harvard’s Department of Economics—having chosen this program due to the
strength and breadth of its faculty’s research output and interests, the
possibility of conducting innovative research in fields such as Cultural
Economics that would be considered niche elsewhere, and the great opportunity
that it represents to feel challenged, fulfilled, and welcome in an academic
community that will hopefully produce an effective and creative researcher soon.
I very much intend to revive this blog by periodically
posting about what I’m sure will be an exciting grad school experience and on
anything else that may be on my mind (let’s hope any hiatus isn’t six years
this time).
I’d like to finish this post by encouraging those who are
considering graduate school in Economics to absolutely give it a shot; the
preparation and process can be grueling, and the end-results inherently arrive
with a lot of noise, but with discipline and luck, the pay-off should be more
than rewarding.
