nekopilot02

1) Duke Econ is very good. They have a lot of strong faculty with a wide breadth of research interests. In financial economics you're looking at George Tauchen and Tim Bollerslev (among others) who are big names. Also, as an econ masters student you can take classes at Fuqua (the business school) which has a lot of distinguished faculty too. 2) Durham is pretty cheap. Maybe comparable to Michigan though. I'm not too sure on the comparison. 3) I cannot speak for the econ department but in general it seems that graduate life at Duke is pretty vibrant (especially if you're in to basketball =D). There's a large amount of graduate students in the Econ department. All this being said, as an undergraduate I hated my experience with the Duke Economics department. I felt like they didn't care at all and treated me like I was just another number in the system. This might be different for masters but there are a lot of students in that program as well. Though, I think if you are a pretty autonomous person with set goals this might not be an issue for you. I, on the other hand, was trying to find a direction and they were not helpful in the least. Hopefully this was useful! Good luck!

I don't know that much about Rutgers (except their bioinformatics is pretty awesome). NCSU is an enormously large statistics department but there is also an insane amount of resources like SAMSI, RTP research facilities, close to both UNC and Duke (my department!!) which have great stats departments too. Raleigh is a pretty good city to live in. There is a lot to do but it's also very easy to get away from 'city life'. Especially without funding I think that living in NC would be cheaper than NY. I think the only drawback is that the graduate program is very large. Despite this, I know that the department works really hard to be as personal as possible. Hope this helps!

Yeah I guess you could say I'm pretty indifferent between Finance and Statistics. I certainly am interested in both but I think there are pros and cons to both.

So I've been accepted as mentioned above, UNC Finance PhD program with limited funding and UPenn Statistics PhD program with full funding. Both are pretty strong programs with awesome faculty. I've talked to graduate students from both programs and they are all very satisfied with their experience. Breakdown of the offers- UPenn: - in the Wharton school of Business; large faculty but small number of graduate students, faculty consists of both bayesians and frequentists - large city environment - statistics phd gives you alot of options later in life but can be somewhat difficult to find a faculty position - tends to be more mathematically intense than Finance - full financial support UNC: - in Chapel Hill; small-ish faculty and small number of graduate students, faculty mainly focused on corporate finance but also has some new asset pricing people - small college town environment (also, i've been in NC for the last 12 years) - it's easy (relatively) to find a faculty position with a finance phd because there is such a limited number of them, also UNC does a great job with career placement - I lean towards more quantitative interests so some of the more macro-econ based courses tend to be less interesting - partial financial support for first 2 years, with full financial support contingent on passing qualifiers Please help with any insights you may have. I've been turning this decision over and over in my head for a while now.