I went with accounting (I know, hated here), but always had the utmost respect for Chicago econ. Sounds like some real insiders are on here, so something to consider, but it's a major coup just to get accepted there, so congrats!
Chicago PhD admission
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I personally know several people, myself included, who had offers from one, or even all, of those other places, but came to Chicago instead. Chicago eating students is also a false rumor debunked several times already. That being said, it is not the perfect program, and if you have another option in Top 5 excluding Top 3, it's a tough choice.
Harvard, Stanford, MIT. Name the fourth that strictly dominates Chicago.
Agree with 5C24. Although Chicago treat their students badly, it is still a top 5 and you get genius classmates/profs around you. It helps.
Why do you say its top5? What is your metric to feel so confident in saying "top 5"?
In what dimension do you want the comparison? Because I've heard many people say that Berkeley/Yale/NYU/Northwestern are better than Chicago in one way or another.
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As I mentioned above, the quality of classmates and faculties. Berkeley or Yale might be comparable to Chicago. But isn't it normal to have 6-7 top 5s?
Now your turn. Show Chicago is at least weakly dominated.Well the classmates were awesome and smart. In this domain I can clearly also include Northwestern classmates because if you are in Chicago you end up meeting Northwestern guys and in general they are just as good as Chicago guys. I have met people who studied at other universities but I am not an authority because I only met a few of them. With the limited interaction I had I would feel very bad if I ever said Chicago students >> UPenn students or Columbia students or some other places. But I only met a few people. Still, if you think that every year there are only 100 intelligent candidates and the "top 5" pick all these 100 intelligent candidates then you are fooling yourself. There is a lot of smart people out there and everyone has their own special skill, even if you are not intelligent enough to identify other peoples skills.
Now when it comes to the faculty I can say that they are mostly only productive in their own research or in kissing ass to get the job (or both). Some of them are in some ways incompetent in almost every other domain, most notably in advising or being decent human beings. If you people like going to the movies and watching other people do s**t while you sit quietly then maybe Chicago is exactly what you want. But if you intend to train to become a good researcher it might be more helpful if you pick a department where the faculty knows how to identify the important questions in economics and knows how to communicate this skill with students plus any other required skills to become a good researcher. I can't comment on other universities (with some notable exceptions) but Chicago faculty are horrible at faculty jobs while having been "good researchers" a few times in their life.
Honestly, you could literally replace the Chicago faculty with a bunch of chimps and then have senior guys step in to write JM recommendation letters and the market outcomes would not be any worse because students rely more on students than on professors at Chicago.
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My recommendation is to reach out to as many current students / recent alumni / faculty members as you can to get the true insider's perspective. There might be contradictory stories but that's life. You'd be surprised how many people will offer to help and share their experiment. We've all been in your seat.
3B1E, on the other hand, is clearly not an insider. Neither are most of folks who regularly appear to dump on any Chicago-related threads on EMJR. That too is life, I suppose.
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Don't panic. My friend is now in his 3rd year at Chicago. Back to the time when he was applying, he heard nothing when lots of people started posting acceptance on Gradcafe. After 2 days, he got his acceptance letter. Don't know why but it seems that they take 2 to 3 days to deliver all the letters.
I didnt receive any email, this means that I have been rejected? Or there will be another round?
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^2b26, thanks for the info.
But the number of acceptance on the gradcafe yesterday is approximately the same as the total number of acceptances last year. From this information, I thought that it is done and that this is an implicit rejection. Your message made me hopeful. On the other hand, the fact that they already waitlisted many people lead me to think that they already went through all the applications and made their decisions, so that not hearing anything should imply rejection... Do you still think there is hope?