Archive for February, 2004

UC Davis placement

Monday, February 2nd, 2004

Rankings of UC Davis’ economics faculty’s alma maters… 10,11,6,4,20,1,4,4,3,4,51,6,21,12,4,17,7,1,16,4,4,80,3,3,1 and 1.

These rankings come from this page (methodology here) and for the faculty members who had their CV readily available from this page.

Davis is ranked 35. The average of the faculty alma maters is about 11.5.

From this page and this page, you can see where PhD students graduating from Davis are placed. These are mostly teaching jobs in state universities. There’s a couple placements as lecturers at Berkeley and quite a few placements at the Fed, the World Bank and the IMF.

David Kay Biography

Sunday, February 1st, 2004

I’m watching Kay’s testimony at CSPAN.org.

Why grad school?

Sunday, February 1st, 2004

  • to teach
  • to learn
  • to make a contribution
  • to be innovative
  • to understand
  • to work with ideas

I need to show capability, motivation and focus. It’s important that I’m a good fit with the program, that people can work with me and that I’m able to work independently.

My GRE scores show my capability. Capability is a relative attribute. I must be as or more capable than other candidates. As a normalized score, the GRE can do that. By leveling the playing field, the GRE demonstrates that I’m in at least the 86th percentile in both major areas that the test measures. Each score is good, but the combined score shows that I’m a balanced in my abilities. I could not find correlation data for quantitative and verbal scores, but this page puts my combined score at the 99.7 percentile (which seems high when you compare my scores against other prospective econ students… see this data set).

Bit head

Sunday, February 1st, 2004

Bin-head is someone that has a bin (as in rubbish) for a head. ‘Bit’ is at least in the right category.