18 Mar 2023

UC Santa Barbara

Economics, PhD (F23)

Wait listed via Other on 18 Mar 2023

Note

I know it's admissions season, and I wanted to offer a little insider context to students considering doing their PhD at UCSB. Basically, the takeaway is that you should avoid UCSB if you can. It's a good program with decent name ID, but it has been the environment here has been significantly worse than what I had envisioned when I started, and I mostly regret not taking an offer at a slightly lower ranked program when I was a prospective student. Here are some reasons: - It is difficult to understate how abysmal the facilities are. There is one room for group study that is almost always occupied by a TA holding office hours, and, if you are lucky enough to get access to that room, the only white board is completely stained and mostly unusable. The building is old. The offices are small and cramped. It's just not a physical environment that is conducive to learning. - It's difficult to compare professors across similarly ranked universities, but teaching (undergrads and grad students) is not a priority for the UCSB faculty. The professors that are doing the best research are seem particularly ineffective at teaching students to become better researchers. I have been really surprised by the egos of the professors at UCSB as well. With very few exceptions, our faculty are a bunch of MRM no names, but they have really fragile egos that you have to be super careful managing. - First year students have a substantial TA load, and there was sort of a bloodbath with prelims last year (all on the same micro test). Most of us were really surprised that just 10/15 passed (after a few years of everyone making it through). - The pay is bad (but improving after the UC strikes), and Santa Barbara is EXPENSIVE. - It's a bad environment for women, especially women who aren't white. There is a culture with a lot of dating within the department (there are three different couples among the faculty), which is not inherently a problem. But, we also recently allowed GC to start working with students again after he went on a hiatus for sexually harassment, and there was a lot of noise on twitter this fall about how his former student is doing the same thing in his new TT job. - Placement for the median JMC is mediocre. Yes, top JMCs usually get TT jobs, but most of us don't. My sense is that industry really does not draw much distinction between a 30th and 40th ranked program, and so it just seems better to be happy at a ~40th ranked school than unhappy at ~30th. I also look back and wonder if I would have been better off at the top of my cohort in a lower ranked program.

---