Undergraduates applying for Ph.D. in economics
Qingmin Liu
To undergraduate students who want to apply for Ph.D. programs in economics:
(a) Take some of the core courses for the first-year and second-year Ph.D. students. That’s what many successful applicants do. It is important to plan ahead. You can do so in your junior year or early. If you find yourself comfortable in these courses and your performances are among the A students of the Ph.D. program, you can apply for that program. If you struggle in these classes, you may want to reconsider the idea of doing a Ph.D. in economics. The opportunity cost is high. Some schools rarely open Ph.D. courses to undergraduate students; some do. Ask the professors for permission to get into their classes.
(b) Research experience is important. Literature review and data collection are not tremendously valuable research experiences for top Ph.D. programs, even if you work for famed researchers. Often, serious research ideas come from a second-year Ph.D. course. If possible, use your working papers as your writing samples. Do not write a writing sample for the sake of it. Make sure you know the literature before you write. If you do not know what to write, you’re not ready for a Ph.D. Instead, apply for a pre-doc or MA.
(c) Many applicants have pre-doc research experiences. Unlike course instructors, pre-doc advisors train and invest in their advisees, and observe their research potentials. They have stronger incentives to place their advisees. However, if your work is gathering and cleaning up data, the labor adds little to no value to your Ph.D. application. Unfortunately, theorists seldom supervise pre-docs.
(d) Ask the professors who know you well to write recommendation letters on your behalf. You must have impressed them in a class they taught or through your research collaboration with them. Ask them explicitly which schools you belong to. By doing so, you might increase your chance at the schools you really belong to. Your intermediate micro professors most likely do not know you well enough to recommend you to top schools, even if you achieve a perfect score. These courses do not show your creativity, taste, and skills required for Ph.D. research. As such, letters from these instructors will unlikely to convince admission committees to take you over others.
(e) Take useful mathematical courses. If graduate-level courses at your math department are aimed at training professional mathematicians, you may explore math courses at your engineering department. If you are not theory oriented, I see no reason to take graduate-level math courses. Ultimately, your aim is to do good economics, but if you decide to take a math course, make sure you do well. A bad grade will hurt your application greatly. You can check out this page: http://www.tomsargent.com/math_courses.html