RWBG

There are now two acceptances posted. If these are in fact real, I would appreciate it if one of the posters could claim it here.

Anyone want to claim the Rochester acceptance by e-mail just posted?

In previous years, they've mostly gone out through e-mail or by phone. I'd be pretty surprised if they've regressed to using mail. EDIT: I should remove the "mostly." Every posted decision - rejection, acceptance, or waitlist - in the past five years has been by phone or e-mail.

They didn't mention that, unfortunately. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough; my expectation is that at least a few people from this board will hear from them. With a umich acceptance, I have a feeling you'll be a good indicator, actually! Best of luck.

I e-mailed Rochester, and they said the committee has met, and they'll be making offers very shortly. I would expect by the end of this week.

Someone claimed it earlier in this thread, which probably means it's real. That being said, it's really strange that there was only one, which leads me to believe that they must not be done with offers yet. Best of luck!

It looks like they sent out rejections and waitlists by mail, according to the results page. I also haven't received anything yet, and I'm just assuming it's still in the mail. Edit: I should also mention, I e-mailed Rachel Davis to ask whether she could confirm I was rejected, and she told me decision letters were mailed out, and that I should contact her if I didn't receive one in a few weeks. That was a little over a week ago.

For what it's worth, the DGS isn't on the adcom, and the stipend indicated is a 4k increase in stipend from last year's, which was generous relative to Rochester's living costs to begin with. Coupled with the fact that it was Sunday evening, I think there are a couple of reasons to be skeptical of that posting, absent a claim here.

Anyone want to claim it? That would be somewhat irregular, though not impossible.

Yeah, Harvard PEG is a different program, and a really awesome one at that. I didn't apply, because they accept <3% applicants. But their faculty committee is such a concentrated ball of awesome it's ridiculous. Congrats to whomever wants to claim those admits.

Hey Tufnel, you've probably seen this, but: http://xkcd.com/670/

Interesting! Although curve information doesn't help deal with selection bias; at my school, there are specialist and non-specialist econ courses, and they tend to have the same averages, but the specialist courses are much more math intensive/difficult, and tend to attract the more committed students. I always wondered whether members of adcoms would bother looking for that kind of information. On a somewhat related but different note, do you ever find yourself googling referees? Two of my referees are non-polisci (one econ, one law & econ) and I've wondered whether their reference letters will be taken as seriously by committees that may not be immediately familiar with them, even if they're quite renowned in their fields.

I think the more commonly used term is "pissing contest," haha. But I don't think coach was trying to say that the conversation had degenerated into one, but more so cautioning that a topic like this can head in that direction. So I wouldn't take it as a slight on the conversation so far; once again, I should emphasize that you haven't come across as overly competitive. As far as mechanism design, it had been my impression that a lot of microeconomic theory constructs models "backwards" from empirical observation/data (or at least purports to), so I don't know if that's what distinguishes mechanism design. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point/misunderstanding mechanism design?

http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=(politics|government|political)

GG, you seem pretty sharp, and I'd feel optimistic about your chances as well. I don't know what schools you applied to, but I have a feeling your SOP would be pretty convincing, and from what I read in your other thread, your stats are not uncompetitive. I think a number of law schools mark on pretty hard curves, and grad schools are likely to know that; I know the average entering GPA for the law school at my school was a 3.85, but grades at the school were curved to a 2.7-3.0.

Well, we're the reaching the limits of what my knowledge of agriculture/agricultural economics would allow me to comment on substantively. My vague impressions are that there are instances in which modern agricultural techniques have been applied incorrectly, leading to long term costs that are more significant than the short term benefits, but that there isn't generally a huge amount of evidence to suggest that a lot of the current practices being used are likely to leave the land unusable a few years from now. But I don't have a lot to back that up. In terms of carbon pricing; sure, but the accounting should also take into account pretty massive domestic farm subsidies, gasoline taxes, etc. I'm not sure if taking into account all those factors into account, whether the lack of carbon pricing is actually enough to show domestic producers are disadvantaged relative to foreign producers, were all the externalities accounted for. Good discussion! Although I'm not necessarily convinced, your arguments are not unreasonable. Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to empirical questions that I lack to knowledge to answer one way or another.

I should note, my skepticism of the local food "movement" does not entail a skepticism for particular elements of local food. I completely agree that there are instances where knowing a particularly strong local source can insure you have access to better food, and sometimes for cheaper. My main opposition to it as a "movement" relates to its universalism; a more rational approach to me would not be to say "buy local food" more broadly, but to make choices on a case by case basis dependent on the sources in question and associated costs. I definitely think that per-unit costs (environmental and otherwise) is the appropriate way to look at agricultural cost accounting, not per-acre. And while accounting in these instances might be difficult, people still do it to some extent, and the results usually don't support the locavore movement. http://agecon.ucdavi...les/v13n2_2.pdf Finally, I'm not sure if spreading production is necessarily the best idea. Sure, if you want to grow some food yourself and use your unused lawn to do so, you can get food at no cost without creating added environmental costs (assuming you don't take into account your own labor as a cost...) But agriculture seems to be subject to some pretty strong economies of scale, so in terms of the larger food production system, personal gardens are unlikely to have empirical significance. In a bit of a different/potentially more controversial direction, given growing populations/growing demand for food, I think people should be focusing on increasing production efficiency. Locavorists tend to advocate for things to move in the opposite direction. Anyways, not to get the discussion sidetracked from stressing over admissions!

Briefly, I think that the local food movement has two main components: (1) keep money local, and (2) environmental externalities. I think the local money argument ends up being similar to anti-outsourcing, anti-trade arguments that don't take into account principles of comparative advantage. And I think "local food" as a response to environmental externalities is often misdirected. There are a lot of circumstances where inefficient distribution networks of smaller local producers can actually increase the environmental externalities of locally-sourced food. Additionally, there are circumstances where growing conditions/other factors can actually make shipping in food more environmentally friendly than producing it locally; an example that I think was given is that it is less environmentally damaging to ship in lamb from Australia then for a number of European producers to raise it themselves. In terms of the whole health/taste stuff, I think it just suffices to say that stuff isn't universally true, so it's not really an argument for local food generally.

I've always been a bit skeptical of the merits of the locavore movement. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it, GopherGrad. http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2011/LuskNorwoodlocavore.html Also, I'm really jealous of those of you who have eaten at El Bulli, Noma, and the likes. I spend a large proportion of my disposable income on food, but my travel budget in the past few years has been limited to places I've been going for debating tournaments.

I would agree with coach that people shouldn't get overly fixated on/worried about math. After all, this isn't economics (where math signals are much more heavily emphasized.) In fact, NYU, one of the most mathy programs, has this to say to applicants: "We have no set minimum math background. But we have a very analytical program, the more math you know, the better off you are. If you have not had calculus or statistics (recently!), we will suggest you do some work over the summer prior to matriculation if we offer you admission. [since we do make such suggestions - you should assume that not knowing how to take a derivative would not disqualify you from admission.] And if you are reading this early enough -- take a math course your senior year. " That being said, I wouldn't want people to be discouraged from taking math classes either. I'm not a great mathematician, but I found the math stuff I've studied pretty useful. And while math is certainly not a sufficient signal to get you into grad school in political science, when you're looking for any signals you can get, I can't imagine it can hurt! Also, for what it's worth, I don't think things have degenerated into a "urinating contest." Veracious-star is head and shoulders above everyone else here in terms of math preparation, but has been remarkably and commendably humble about it. Veracious-star: I just noticed your post on mechanism design, and I can't say I know enough about it to comment. From what little I know, as I understand it, mechanism design involves a strategic interaction where one of the players determines the payoff structure. Does "working backwards from equilibrium" mean they find the equilibrium in any payoff matrix they would propose, and then use backwards induction based on the outcome when choosing which payoff matrix/"mechanism" to propose? If this is what that means, I imagine there would be a lot of cool applications, though I imagine its applicability would depend on the structure of the situation in question.

No need to get despondent yet. Only a few acceptances have been posted so far, and it looks as though in previous years (two years ago, for example) acceptances went out over two days. Given that the acceptances to Berkeley seemed to be posted at around 5 pm PST (the latest time I would expect anyone to be sending out admissions offers at Berkeley), I think there's some evidence to suggest that they may not be done.

SOG, when you say "red herring," do you actually mean "straw man"? Note: This is a red herring.

For the record, cross-referencing with Duke and UCSD's offical statistics suggests the numbers might be a bit off. UCSD's numbers match for 2004, but Duke's seem off for every year, although their closest seems to be 2003. EDIT: I also found at least one instance where the numbers on the website suggested 45 people were accepted, and 47 people enrolled.

This is the first I've come across Peterson's. If it's true, it includes master's students.

Hey, I already did the math thing. Go check page 9. Get your own material.