Applying to a PhD Program with Sam Stelnicki – 10/12

I attended IA Alum Sam Stelnicki’s event about applying to a Ph.D. Program. Sam was an Economics and Math major who graduated last year from Ohio State and now she is a first-year Economics Ph.D. student at OSU. Her research is focused on studying Experimental Economics which consists of other subsets of economics such as Game Theory and Behavioral Economics, all of which focus on developing and testing Economic theory in a real-world setting.

Sam gave a lot of advice on applying to graduate school and what grad school is like. Like Sam, I also want to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. in Economics, so I found Sam’s advice to be super relevant and helpful. Sam was also my IA mentor last year, so I’m super thankful to IA for helping me build important meaningful connections that will really help me develop my future path!

I learned that to get into a Ph.D. program, I needed to have a good GPA, a good GRE score, research experience, and good recommendation letters. I’m definitely working on the first 2 things and I have also started to get research experience with faculty in the Economics department, but I have no clue if I’m developing good enough relations to get good recommendation letters so hopefully, that will change by the time I apply to graduate school senior year! Sam also discussed her life in graduate school, which is much more difficult than undergrad, as I would expect. She definitely made it seem scary and said that PhDs should only be pursued by those who 100% love their subject and want to get a Ph.D. While I would like to think that I really want to get a Ph.D. in Economics, maybe my mind will change closer to graduation or maybe I will realize that I really do want to get a Ph.D. Anyways, the future is scary and I’d like to think that graduation is far away enough from where I’m at now as a second-year college student in the middle of a pandemic.

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