Applying to PhD Programs in Economics: Tips and Process

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 23^rd, about a week before the deadline for a couple of the earliest schools on December 1^st. 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.