socks1367

Your range might actually be too low! I don't see a real reason you couldn't stretch and be competitive in top-20 if your math grades are as strong as your GPA indicates and some of your professors can vouch for research ability (which, given you've received grants, sounds likely). The GRE scores you've posted aren't good enough, though, and you'd need to retake. It'd be more than fine if they were reversed and you had quant 169 and verbal 158, but with quant that low, your application won't really be considered at most schools in your range. School receive a lot of applications and a lot of them will just do something like "anyone with GRE below 162/3/4/5 goes in the bin". You have time to retake, so you should schedule that asap and aim for 165+ - you have a lot of math, it should be doable. Most places won't look at five letters (most places won't even look at four without a very good reason), so you should really sit down and figure out which three are going be the strongest for you. This may involve having a very frank conversation with each of your letter writers about how strong their letters will be!

NBER has a pretty good listing of RA positions that are open to people with bachelors - the idea is usually that these people might go on to apply for a PhD after a year or too. http://www.nber.org/jobs/nonnberjobs.html From a quick glance, there doesn't seem to be a lot of opportunities in the DC area, but there are some opportunities in your research area. The Dupas/Fafchamps posting might particularly interest you.

160 quant is too low - below the cutoff at most schools (for example, Georgetown says "Applicants who score below the 80th percentile are most likely not considered.", and 160Q is 74th percentile). You probably want >163-4 or so. You still have time to study and retake in about a month. If your third letter of reference is from working in policy, it likely won't have a lot of weight, unless it comes from a PhD economist who moved from academia to policy. Can you get a third academic letter? That's a weird mix of school to apply to - Georgetown is solidly ranked, Carnegie Melon is fairly lower down, and Fordham is unranked. I think Fordham is maybe likely (emphasis on the maybe) to admit you with this profile, but they have pretty bad job outcomes - maybe on the margin of "not worth going there at all". You should talk to someone about your choice of schools and try to figure out what range you actually want to target. Three is also a very low number of applications to send out - there's a lot of randomness in the application process, and most people do closer to 10. What are the other math courses on your transcripts, and grades on them?

Certainly not with those GRE scores. You want Q scores well north of 160. If you look at GRE stats, only 8% of the 14,735 students who took the GRE intending to apply for Econ programs in 2013-2016 did worse than 150 in quant. The majority were over 160.

I understand Uvic econ only accepted one phd this year, and they've sent out all the MA offers they're going to be sending.