Grad schools for decision-making

November 3, 2011 4:57 PM

I need to find grad schools to apply to, especially ones that aren't top-tier. Field: Decision-making.

I'm looking to study decision-making, behavioral economics, and social behavior in graduate school. I have roughly a year and a half of lab background in this field, which includes all aspects of the research process - designing experiments, running them, entering data, and writing papers. While I feel that I'm qualified to work at nearly any lab with my background, my GPA is only 3.4 and there will be dozens, if not hundreds of applicants to the programs I have as my absolute top picks. So, what are some other schools in this range?

Criteria:

- Preferably, the program should have minimal or no tuition, or the tuition should be covered. This is pretty important.

- These are traditionally offered through psychology departments and business schools; I'd be game for either approach.

- I don't mind going out of the US. In fact, I'd be very interested in programs in Scandinavia or most of Europe.

My current list is just Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Princeton, Penn and the University of Helsinki. I feel like there have to be several programs I'm overlooking.

posted by LSK to education (6 answers total)

You should look for the programs which house the professors who are studying what you want to study, perhaps by looking for who writes the articles you're interested in. This will help you in the application process, too, because schools will want to see a fit between you and their faculty.
posted by shivohum at 5:18 PM on November 3, 2011 [3 favorites]

Have you asked people from your lab for suggestions? They should know people/programs from articles and conferences. I also had good luck straight up googling; I found a blog post by someone with similar interests to me, and she had gotten lots of useful advice.
posted by momus_window at 6:00 PM on November 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

You might want to add Duke to your list. Dan Ariely does some interesting behavioral econ stuff.
posted by needled at 6:07 PM on November 3, 2011

You need to narrow way down. Figure out what aspect of decision making you want to look at, read read read, and then contact the scholars as per the first comment.
Go big or go home. A good match can trump GPA. Not top tier schools will have a huge impact on your employability.
posted by k8t at 6:53 PM on November 3, 2011

Nthing suggestions to find professors you're interested in working with. Who has written books or articles that you've found fascinating? Who's giving conference presentations you wish you could visit? When looking for Ph.D. programs to apply to, I actually went through the faculty to about 100 different programs to make sure that there wasn't some awesome faculty member somewhere whose work I had managed to never come across or at a school that I wouldn't have thought to apply to.
posted by naturalog at 5:45 AM on November 4, 2011

Check out the blog roundtable on grad school's topic today, on picking your advisor.

The series is great. I actually linked to it on my university's website on "why do you want to go to grad school" because the first roundtable linked to the 100 reasons NOT to go to grad school blog.

And sometimes, not going is actually the right answer for that individual.
posted by wenat at 11:10 AM on November 4, 2011