srpankratyev

Greetings! I am an undergraduate student from top2 Russian economics program. Next year I will graduate, and I do have a desire to get to a good Economics PhD program, but I do not have any confidence whether I will succeed with my characteristics. May I ask for an advice whether I have chances to get to a program I want to and should I give it a try? I have an obstacle: I have pretty low GPA (2.89). This is to a big extend due to that I have actually transferred to my current university from another one (in the middle of the first year), and because of specifications of the education system of my country some good grades were transformed as satisfactory what spoiled my GPA. Apart from that I will likely get a recommendation from a comparatively famous American professor, another recommendation from the professor (with European PhD) from my Uni. I'm thinking about to find one more professor to work with. In addition, I'm an intern in a prestigious Russian think tank, probably I will become an intern in an international laboratory of my university. I have had various Math courses (Discrete, Stochastic processes, Game Theory, Dynamic optimization etc.) and some graduate level courses. Bachelor graduates from my university have entered universities like UCSD, NYU etc. (but usually with GPA like 3.85) I don't want to enter a university lower that PennState. I dream to get to the NYU and I would love to study at the UCSD or UCLA. I have an alternative to go to the prestigious MA in Economics in Russia and after that probably to get to a higher-level program (Berkeley and the like). May I ask whether I have chances to get to the programs I want to (from PennState to NYU)? Thanks in advance!