Review of London School of Economics’ Masters in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from a 2019- 2020 graduate-Part 1
I have attended LSE MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics .This is a famous program in economics circle which has probably produced more PhD graduates percentage wise for decades(this program was started in 60’s with a different name though).I am regularly asked about my experience at EME and I see myself typing similar stuff repeatedly. So I have decided to compile all those messages in a single blog concisely.
The article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss the logistical aspects of EME-like coursework, background of students, social life , support etc. In the second section ,I discuss my experience-both good and bad while also reflecting whether I would do it again . In the third section, I have provided the profile of some of my classmates, who come from different backgrounds to give a brief overview of the type of students who usually are admitted to EME along with their experience to give a more balanced view of the program…So that you can make an uniformed choice whether this program is a right fit for you.
Part 1:Features of the course
- Introduction-
LSE MSc EME is known as one of the best econ masters program in the world with the curriculum covering First and Second year Phd economics topics .There is also an option to proceed to PhD in Economics at LSE itself if you get a distinction (though funding is not guaranteed).It is also the technically most rigorous and very hectic course with students devoting one full year studying without having other activities . My favourite dialogue that year was — “Are we in the same masters”, which I used to say sarcastically to anyone who tried to make plans with me other than studying in a weekday.
2. Reputation-
This is one of the famous program in economics academic circle as it has know to produce countless graduates who have gone on to do Phds and establish a successful research career. In my cohort alone -there is 14 students (that I know of ) out of 37 who are currently pursuing PhD or will be starting in 2021.This is a 38 percentage which is a huge number for a MSc cohort .All of them will be pursuing in top economics schools like Harvard, LSE, Wisconsin ,UCL, Cornell, Cambridge ,Boston College, University of Zurich . There are still many more in similar top econ departments who are pursuing their Research Assistantships with plans for applying to Phds in the near future .Then there are some who have joined top economic consultancies and a few percentage have joined banks. Saying this, I would also like to warn ,that this course does not guarantee an admission at a PhD program or a RA position . Moreover ,this program is not so well suited if you wish to look for industry jobs(more on this later!) .Also there are many students in the larger and more well known program in common world-LSE MSc Economics who have also gotten into PhDs (though the percentage is much much smaller as compared to EME).
3.Background of Students who get in
Every student is in the near top or have got very good grades from very well known institutes across the world in their undergrad. This includes LSE ,Oxford ,Cambridge ,UCL, Toronto, Duke ,Fudan, National Taiwan University, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ,Universität Pompeu Fabra, Manheim ,Lady Sri Ram College etc .Basically they are all top departments in economics /universities in there own countries. From India ,People have been known to be admitted from higher ranked colleges in Delhi University, Presidency College, IIT’s ,IIM ,IISc. I already had a masters degree from University of Edinburgh which gave me an edge since I didn't come from a target school. There were also few like me who already had a masters degree.
Most students in my cohort had studied Economics.Some had background in mathematics, engineering and finance.
You also need to score a higher quantitative GRE score -I think it was 164. Nobody cares about verbal.
This course has also lead me to meet many brilliant peers whom I am happy to call friends .People regularly studied together and helped each other to understand the course material. There was no competition among us even though everyone was brilliant. This was something very rare and refreshing as almost every institution that I was part of was very competitive .The reason as one of my EME BFF ,Anqi (Angel) Shan beautifully puts — “EME is already so hard and difficult .It is better that we support each other to the finish line instead of competing and burning ourselves out ”
4. Funding/Fees:
There is no funding available from LSE itself and the fees is quite expensive for this program. So as a piece of advice, do think what you wish to achieve through this courses and invest accordingly.
Some people are funded but they are from external sources. I myself was funded by British Council STEM scholarship while few got findings from their own countries.For example-A German classmate got a partial funding from his government while another Spanish friend(Gerard ,more on him in the next article) got funded by Fundació la Caixa, a Spanish Bank.
5.Coursework:
Introductory Course for MSc EME(EC451)-
This is a three week course before the beginning of the coursework split into three parts: Microeconomics, Macroeconomics and Econometrics to give us taste of what was to come for the MSc program. Each part dealt with the what can described as the first year semester course of a Phd just in one week. I still have PTSD thinking of that period when many people including me hardly slept properly.
There was Microeconomics- which introduced the economic concepts of choice, preference and utility and included the e mathematics of correspondences and fixed-point theorems( Real Analysis).This was a total shock for people who came from econ background and have never encountered such concepts of mathematics in economics. For people from maths and engineering(at least those who have taken an advanced Real analysis course),this week was manageable.
Macroeconomics-I refuse to speak of that week ever in my life again. Honestly, speaking I don't know what happened that week. I have never studied macroeconomics before and suddenly felt like I was thrown in the deep end of the pool with material covering a full first year PhD course in just one week.
Econometrics-This was again a manageable course. This part introduces basic concepts and theory for mathematical statistics and probability required in graduate courses .The topic covere were Conditional expectation and projection, Algebra of least squares, Finite sample theory, Maximum likelihood ,Introduction to asymptotic theory, and Hypothesis testing. A tip just study the first few chapters of Bruce Hansens textbook availbale freely on his website.
We had exams at the end of the session. These marks do not count in your final transcript but if you wish to apply for Phd/Ra that year , Professors are going to look at those grades for writing recommendation as exams results are not available till next year February.
Advanced Microeconomics(EC487)
The first term was taught by Dr. Rafayal Ahmad who is a fellow at LSE. He is a very nice person who genuinely made a lot of efforts to help us understand the concepts and course material. The part covered by him was Producer Theory, General Equilibrium and Game theory. Rafayal also was our teaching assistant who made great efforts to explain us the assignments and was fairly patient while dealing with queries both over class/office hours.
The second term was taught by Prof.Balazs Scentez and covered topics like auction theory and mechanism design . He for a lack of better work, can be described as cool ..in fact cooler than a millennial. The way he conducted himself in lectures was just awesome .Infact the most boring topic ,can be made fun when he explained by his mannerism and his choice of words.I am a fan-girl and I really liked his lectures. The only problem was that he was bit slow and was not able to cover all the topics in the syllabus.
Econometric Analysis:
This course covered both first and second year Phd topics.
First semester was taught by Professor Hidalgo who is a renowned econometrician .He covered the topics on asymptotic statistical theory: modes of convergence, asymptotic unbiasedness, uniform integrability, central limit theorems, consistency and asymptotic distribution of implicitly defined extremum estimators. He was bit scary but I actually attended his office hours and he turned out to be every helpful explaining doubts in every turn .The materials covered in his class was very technical and theoretical which is an extremely excellent preparation when one wishes to pursue a PhD.
The second semester was taught by Professor Taisuke Otsu. He covered lots and lots of advanced topic ranging from nonparametric methods (kernel and series methods), generalized method of moments, conditional moment restriction, many and weak instruments, limited dependent variables, treatment effect and bootstrap. He was also our program director and was also known to have a very lively and funny office hours. I also liked his slides…which had the perfect amount of information… neither too less nor more.If one is interested to read more, one can always read more.
The teaching assistant Chen Qiu who is now at Cornell as an assistant professor and was the best TA that I have seen. He was smart ,sassy, organized and explained everything in such a systematic manner. He actually had planned the questions that he is going to tackle for each week tutorial for the entire year and send it before the start of the session.
Advanced Macro-Economics
I had never studied macroeconomics before so the material that was covered was too tough for me to understand as they were Phd 1 year and 2nd level.I may have a biased view but I did not enjoy it so much.
The first term was taught by Nobu Kyotaki who is a very famous macroeconomist. He covered lots of topics like dynamic programming , Real Business Cycle models, Overlapping Generations models, the Solow growth model, and first-generation endogenous growth models. But he was very traditional and taught in blackboards and we were expected to write notes. I was extremely lazy and also already very weak in macro so I could not keep up .Hence I could not thoroughly understand it.
The second term was taught by Benjamin Moll. He is again a very well known economist who is very kind ,helpful ,professional and really made efforts in the teaching .He joined LSE that year from Princeton .His part covered heterogeneity in macroeconomy and how to use various tools like Hamiltonians, Stochastic Calculus, Hamilton Jacobi-Bellman equations, etc that are useful in macroeconomics.
I did not attend any TA sessions because as I mentioned ,I was very weak in macroeconomics and could not keep up with the discussions .So it would be unfair to comment on the TA.
Fourth Optional Subject
We had to take another course as our optional. Many people chose subjects which had a thesis component as it not only provides a chance to hone good research and academic skills but also to ask recommendations from your supervisor while applying for a Phd. One major advantage of LSE economics department was that it had a faculty who were experts in almost every possible field of economics and hence provided a diverse options to choose as your optional.This included-International, Development, Quantitative, Public, Monetary, Contract Theory, Labour ,Industry ,Political , Economic Growth in Historical Perspective ,Further topics in Econometrics .
There were others who chose subjects from finance ,mathematics or statistics departments. This was usually opted by students who were looking to supplement their background with more mathematics courses for Phd programs or for those who wanted to have wider range of expertise so as to supplement their resume while searching for roles in consultancies or banks. Then there were also few students who were genuinely interested to know about that subject and hence opted for it. Some of the courses that my classmates took were Stochastic Calculus, Stochastic Analysis, Bayesian Statistics ,Quantitative methods for Finance and Risk Analysis, Applied Computational Finance. This is not a comprehensive list but only a few of the courses that my friends took.
I myself choose Further topics of Econometrics where we were introduced to topics at the frontier of econometric research of importance both at a theoretical and empirical level. The course consists of four series of ten lectures on specialised topics in econometrics which included: Bootstrap methods; dependence in economics; panel data models; non parametric methods. This was an entirely theoretical paper with no thesis requirement .I already had a thesis which was very related to economics and hence decided to take a subject which was purely on acquiring knowledge.
6.Study hours:
There is two hours lecture and 1 tutorial every week for each of the courses.But you have to put lot of hours of independent studies to cover the subject. In fact,it was not uncommon to study for 7-10 hours everyday (depending on your capacity to grasp the material ) with the hours even increasing before exams. This is because the course material is very advanced and we have to cover lot of materials which were PhD level in a span of just 1 year. Most of the students studied together in groups as it would have been too difficult to catch all the concepts all by yourselves.
7.Events and Social Scene:
LSE holds many lecture events and I personally had the opportunity to attend many of them and meet eminent (and influential) people from different fields. During my time -I attended lectures by Esther Dufflo (just two weeks after she won the Nobel),Amartya Sen, Sachin Pilot(Indian Politician),Xavier Bettel(Luxemburg Prime Minister) and Alain Wertheimer(Chairman of Chanel).
The department of Economics also holds series of lectures ,workshops and talks from many well known and respected professors and researchers, central banks and consultancies .
The economics department also organises little treats like introductory lunch, posh Christmas party at an upscale club ,cookie and painting day etc for the master students. This was always a good break from the hectic schedule that we had!
It was not all work and all play! London is an exciting place and every friday night and alternative weekends we did go out and had fun. (This was me and my group of friends).It really depended on the person to person. There were some who never went out but studied and then there were few on the opposite spectrum who partied almost every weekend and also had time for tinder dates!Basically it all boils down on how you handle pressure of academics that year and then balance out your social life.
8.Job Placements
The department does not provide much help in this area. True there are resources on how to apply for Phds, searching for research assistantships , example data tasks (you have to request it from the tutor),CV review and a few occasional job posts for RA’s or consultancies(an alumni may ask to circulate a particular job posting).But it is up to one to search and apply for these opportunities. Nobody is going to promote or spoon feed you.
It is up to the student on how to apply for Research assistantship which falls in two cycles-Fall and Spring. One good thing is that many in our cohort were applying for RA’s which was helpful in exchanging tips on how to tackle data tasks. Common places to search for these jobs were NBER account and the twitter accouunt (#econ _ra)
There is also a few who apply for Phds that same year which is very time consuming as you are already burdened with so much studies.(Please check my blog on PhD applications, if you need more details)
Then there is industry jobs .This year due to COVID the job search had become quite difficult. But there has been friends and classmates placed in Frontier Economics, Compass Lexicon ,UBC ,JP Morgan, Bain ,Reserve Bank of India etc. The general consensus of this category of people was that the ability to get a job was more due to LSE tag than have EME degree as its value is not known outside economics circle. Almost everyone seems to be of the general consensus that this degree was not so useful when searching jobs as it was more designed for people who wish to pursue an academic route.
But one thing is for sure, even with COVID ,where the job market was bad for at least other masters program, almost 95 % of the cohort was able to find a good job(one that matches their skills) , research position or get admitted to a Phd program.
Software/Library resources
We had software licences for R, Matlab and Stata. So this was perfect time to learn or brush up your skills free of cost (LSE provides some free courses for thisYou have to contact the library).One could easily login to LSE’s computer or remote login from one laptop for access to these software. I think you can also ask for licence but I was too lazy to type the email and just preferred the former way.
The library at LSE houses one of the biggest collections in UK and they have almost every book that you need. If you don't have that book, you can ask the library resource person for your department and he would order it for you. There is also free access to every journal of the world (you name it they have access)!
(To be continued………………………………………..……)
I will detail my own experience-good or bad and also some feedback from my fellow classmates in the next part .I have also included their profile …For you to understand their motivation and there journey. This will probably help you to decide whether LSE MSC EME is a right profile for you or not………..
Check the next part at:
