More Detail Information about Penn State Ag Econ Program

halkingUID：2291422

For anyone who are interested in the agricultural, environmental and regional economics (AEREC) program at Penn State.

Overall, the training at Penn State Ag Econ is pretty traditional, students are expected to explore themselves at their best. The No.1 feature of our training is the heavy coursework in fundamental theory and methods, especially if you are taking dual PhD degree path. You can work with multiple faculty, even with faculty outside of the department. But most of the faculty will not offer you idea to work on, not even a clue, especially for your dissertation you have to figure everything out on your own. Their role is to review your work, and make critics, instead of offering alternatives. In plain language, you are asked to convince them with your ideas and research before you go out and convince others.

More specifically:

1. You are not required to write any papers (e.g., the first year paper, 2nd year paper, 3rd year paper, and etc.) except your dissertation. But you are more than welcome to write papers independently following your interest and thoughts.

2. You are required to take two candidacy exams right after the first year: microeconomics theory, quantitative methods (including econometrics and mathematical economics). You are allowed to take them two times. If you fail either one after two try, you have to leave the program. About every year, there are students who fail the exams.

3. A new policy just coming out this year: all of the dissertation committees of Ag Econ must consist of at least 4 faculty members of Penn State. At least one of them has to be outside of the department, and outside of the discipline. If you are doing any dual PhD degree, you may need the fifth member in your committee to represent the outside member for the second degree, which has to be different from the outside member of Ag Econ.

4. You are expected to take 2 - 3 years heavy coursework, this is also why you are not required to write the first and second year papers. Usually you can not transfer credits from other institutes.

5. Now Penn state Ag Econ is almost the biggest department in the university, it has two PhD programs, at least 4 master programs, and at least 3 undergraduate programs. One of our undergraduate programs - community and economic development - is one of the most successful programs in the university. The point is that, you will be studying in a department with more or less interdisciplinary features.

6. Penn State Ag Econ PhD program now features with two areas: environmental economics, applied IO and food marketing. You will have 3 dual degree options: operations research, demography, international development. Actually, environmental and energy studies have been identified as the key direction of future research at the university level. So environmental economics will keep hiring in following years. We hired two this year. As for the dual degree, the operations research program is the one with the most rigorous training.

7. The department implicitly tries to keep a good balance between American students and international students in admission process, but sometime they may fail to do so, such as in 2012. And the program more or less has a preference on accepting students transferred from top economics PhD program. But you will still need to pass candidacy exams. Usually these are students who do not like pure theory, and prefer doing applied work, not necessarily because they failed at their programs.

8. Collaboration - The particular thing that I have enjoyed at Penn State is the interdisciplinary collaboration. I have finished one paper with people from industrial engineering on simulation, and I am coauthoring another paper with people from Statistics. This is not something commonly done by every PhD student, but it becomes more and more common.

9. Interaction between Ag Econ v.s. Econ - this is the most interesting thing that people are curious about. The answer is not much. The most of structural research that has been done in Ag Econ is in the area of environmental economics, while no one from economics is really interested in it. But there are some economics faculty who have close relationship with Ag Econ, such as Edward Coulson, Yoris Pinkse, Mark Roberts, and Herman Bierens (retired in 2012).

10. The Ag Econ master program - our master program is not designed for professionals. It is a program designed to prepare students for their PhD studies, and usually all students are fully funded. Most of our master students move on to PhD studies. Unfortunately, every year we only enroll very few master students, around 2 or 3 from what I know.

11. Funding - The Ag Econ program has been very successful in attracting large grants in last several years. In 2012, the whole department received more than 20 millions of grant money from outside, most of which are due to Ag Econ faculty. The students are usually funded with Department fund for Research Assistantship through their first 3.5 years in program. After that you may be funded through Teaching Assistantship or Research Assistantship with money from certain faculty. Bottom line is that, if you are enrolled with funding, your funding is ensured through the course of your study. Current salary level is about 18K/year (10 months), if you get summer funding, you can expect 23K/year, more or less.

12. Placement - from 2000 - 2009, the placement was really good, I remember someone got AP position at Georgetown, not sure about details. 2010, and 2011 our placement was not very good, partially due to the recession, partially due to big faculty loss. This year's placement looks good and starts picking up, we are able to place students to university like Texas A&M, California State University, and some top environmental research agencies. During the same time, from 2009 to 2012, we actually only had few students graduated each year.

13. To be continued....

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This article only reflects my personal opinions and views.

queUID：141188

Big Cong!!
感谢您一直以来的无私帮助和知道啊。

集体性UID：3429787

这个必须顶·····

homeneUID：2376683

很多农经项目只考微观不考计量，所以计量每年都会fail一些人吧

halkingUID：2291422

homene 发表于 2013-4-19 20:55
很多农经项目只考微观不考计量，所以计量每年都会fail一些人吧

No, it is the opposite.
In our program, most of people fail micro theory, especially in the first try.

Micro theory exam requires not only techniques, but also deep thought to answer. Usually we have 4 questions on the exam, at least one of them comes from Economics Faculty, and another one of them comes from B-School Faculty.

Also, Ag Econ does not offer its own advanced micro theory courses, students take it from Econ and B-school. Even for the econometrics courses, they are often taught jointly by Faculty from Ag Econ and Econ.

homeneUID：2376683

halking 发表于 2013-4-19 21:57
No, it is the opposite.
In our program, most of people fail micro theory, especially in the fi ...

啊。。。原来微观比计量还难过啊。。。不过中国的童鞋一般都能顺利通过吧？自我安慰一下

CJackieDUID：3430563

very detail，楼主好人！