yankervitch

Hey Zhao and gth822 -- Have you heard anything from the department about FA? I heard from them back in February but have had radio silence since.... feel free to send a direct message.

This year, via email... The subject line was "University X Program PhD Admissions: Bad News" The email itself was fairly kind, although it did mention that we'd also get a snail mail letter confirming our rejection because of a redundancy. (There's some irony in that, given that the school in question is a top engineering school.) C'est la vie.

Good luck to all... out of curiosity, what was the focus that people applied for in MS&E? It's a relatively larger department in terms of what's ongoing in research, than most IEOR depts (or at least, they're better at enumerating their various research interests...). FWIW, I applied under the policy track and haven't heard anything.

My personal vote would be for Duke. From a professional standpoint: In your post, you seem to focus on one individual at Cambridge who you would be working with, while you mention there are a host of individuals at Duke that you could potentially collaborate with. I realize this may be less common in the UK, but what were to happen if this individual left (for, say, somewhere in the US? Or to the continent? Or took a sabbatical)? You can always carve out your own niche, but having other people working on similar issues that you're interested in will make it considerably easier to carry out your research. What if, after working for a few months, you find that there's a personality clash between you and that professor? Would you be able to switch supervisors? From a personal standpoint: If you're worried about intellectual culture: Duke, like any other major research university, cares about nothing but the research you put out. You may find a few supportive peers and mentors - but the focus is always going to be on the work you can produce. Life in Duke and Durham is going to be very different; the South has a very distinct culture and the 'Triangle' research area has its own culture on top of that. From "further down the road": Having an international scholarship certainly can't hurt career prospects down the road. What are the funding trends in your field? If you stay at Cambridge, are you going to network with many of the same lecturers and professors that you were exposed to as an undergraduate, or will you have an equally good opportunity to network with an international group of researchers and graduate students as you would at Duke?

Too true!

As a scientist (or at least, falling more on the technical than the humanities side of things), I'd like to point out that government is also by far the biggest investor in scientific research. So I'm a little surprised that there aren't more fellow left-leaning scientists so far, although, of course, response bias...

The wait is deadly... haven't heard anything from my programs yet either.

I'm in the Georgetown program right now - it's definitely good preparation for quantitative work in finance, but the focus is more on statistics and applied math (modeling/computing). Not sure what our placement is like for finance; a few students (mostly relatively fresh faces from undergrad, wherever that may be) have been using the program as a springboard for PhD work. If you're worried about the GRE, don't be. If your interest is math, then the quant section will be a breeze. A lot of the students here have taken the GRE, but I think the majority didn't bother.

I applied to the PhD program (ESD); probably would have applied to the MS last year if timing had worked out better. MIT is just such an amazing place to be I imagine the competition is insane.

I'm thinking of applying and noticed that the handbook recommends full time students take just 3 courses a semester. After poking around a few other grad programs (econ) there, that seems to be the norm for grad students. Any idea why 3, instead of 4, classes are taken each semester? Is the workload for each class that difficult, or does the department encourage other activities (taking a language, finding an RA position on campus, something non-math related...)? It does work out nicer in terms of credit numbers to take just 3 courses a semester, but the idea of a 1.5 year master's seems a little odd.