This PhD in Financial Economics is currently my top choice for next september:
https://tepper.cmu.edu/prospective-students/phd/program/financial-economics
Does anyone have any opinion on this program? Any advice, or possibly a word of caution?
Is it worth moving to Pittsburgh?
inb4 gtfo undergrad
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.
How are they viewed in academic econ, rankings wise? top 50?
Are they on the rise, on the decline?
Does CMU being is a world-class destination for STEM lend any gravitas to the econ department?
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.
Still with such small cohorts...attrition should be close to zero, isn't it?
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.
Spot on with the autistic
OP here. I Have aspergers. Sweet.
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.Spot on with the autistic
OP here. I Have aspergers. Sweet.
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.Spot on with the autistic
dont worry we noticed
Still with such small cohorts...attrition should be close to zero, isn't it?
Cmu core and prelims are as bad if not worse than chicago or penn. 30k stipend goes a long way in pittsburgh, which is slightly less of a s**thole than most of the rust belt. Tiny cohorts (1-2 people in finance, 4-5 in econ) and 90% of the tepper faculty is mega autistic so its easy to get cabin fever. Placement quality has very high variance.
No. Especially in finance they are fond of kicking people out after prelims. Involuntary attrition in finance is probably close to 50%.
The prelims are brutal and they are scheduled in early January of your second year, which makes for a miserable winter break. It is also a long time since the first semester when you take core micro and macro,so you effectively have to re-learn all that material. Prelims are a huge negative of the program, especially in finance.
Pittsburgh is nice and on the stipend you can live quite well. Focus of the department seems to be changing as there are a bunch of recent hires doing reduced form empirics. But if you want to do research in that there will be zero senior people to work with (although SK is there so maybe he has more connection value than most juniors).
Access to CMUs computer science department can be a plus depending on what you want to do. There's the option to get a masters in machine learning at no additional cost, but it means a bunch of extra courses. One (finance) student went that route and ended up at a nice hedge fund. Another (accounting) got a good academic placement. YMMV.