Speak of the devil, just got official offer! Funded from June 1st to October 1st.

ILM I def benefit from structure and a schedule. The GF has been keeping me to one (she's also in my program) but she's been out of town for half a few days. I struggle soooooo hard to keep my head down and work steadily. I think I'm learning a lot making outline stuff for her and trying to write solutions as lessons.

Congrats Fury! Nice that stuff is working out for you.

/slight offtopic

sry not sure where else to ask.

Is learning LaTeX useful only for those who want to get a PhD, or is that useful for others too? I tried to write couple of essays/papers to school in LaTeX this semester and I dont think it saves that much time (I felt fairly leet though). But its adviced everywhere as superior alternative to word. Also it might look cool in my CV, but idk if that really matters. One of the best young economists in this country said that LaTeX thesis is almost always better looking (in comparison to a thesis written in word), but I dont really see a difference.

thanks

If you do anything with equations, it looks so much better. Trying to fight Equation Editor is a pain since it looks awful most of the time.

Once you learn LaTeX, it becomes pretty simple and it's universal. I write e-mails with the subscript '_'.

I know people who use it just because they like the type setting for letters and stuff (non-math related).

I agree with Cueballmania about most of that stuff. One thing I really liked about LaTeX was the labeling--you can label theorems, equations, figures, graphs and similar things and then refer to them by the label in the document. If you add in another theorem/equation/figure/whatever you just need to re-run LaTeX and everything's automatically renumbered.

BTW, what are you using for input, Krax? Personally I'm using a text editor to manually type everything in and then running LaTeX on that file (WinEdt and MikTeX to be precise), but I think I've heard about a really nice front-end for LaTeX that simplifies things somewhat (but probably reduces your control a little bit)

The only real disadvantage to LaTeX is if most of what you're writing turns out to be papers you're going to publish with someone who uses Word. In that case, it's worth it to suffer through Word rather than keeping two versions of your document in sync during edits.

I use LED on windows and TexMaker on Mac/Linux.

I downloaded miktex, it had originally Texworks, my friend mentioned that he uses that too, so I kept using it. Any better alternative?

I mean, Im prob gonna keep using it, cuz Im a geek and its just...idk, more fun and I feel more in control about output (I also love skipping *.doc stage...once a person reads certain amount of papers in pdf, he gets attached to a format and reading your own text in pdf just feels awesome, whilst reading in *.doc sux).

I asked, because my friend asked me why the hell I use latex and I couldnt really give any decent reason, since its def. still more time consuming than word. Especially given how popular latex is, I'd expect more "rational" answer than the ones I could give.

And while I appreciated direct output from econometrics software into latex/good looking equations, my classmates managed to create decently looking econometrics papers in word too (at least to my eye).

Edit: also, the phd thing. Obv I realize that latex is better for phd students. I was just curious if its useful for "real world" folk as well.
edit2: just reread my posts and sry for my english, its 6am here and I pulled an allnighter

I'm not sure there's much different between various interpreters (miktex and others). I do like WinEdt for editing the text files--I searched around a bit for text editors for tex and programming, and found that to be the best for what I wanted. The reason I use miktex is that it was one of the *almost* built in options for WinEdt. I still had to install miktex separately, but WinEdt seemed to be built with miktex in mind.

If you're just learning LaTeX and not tied to a particular system, a good front end might speed things up--that's why I mentioned them. I don't use one (I learned with a text editor) so I don't have a particular recommendation but you might want to look into it.

LyX is helpful for learning latex since its very word processor-y.

Does anyone know how math grad schools would look at an applicant who took a year off between undergrad and grad school?

I'm not sure about math, but most PhD applicants are a year or more removed from undergrad. Completely standard.

seems normal enough. I know a bunch of people who did, though they were definitely in the minority. I don't think committees look down upon it.

Woot,

I was asked to attend a conference in LA and give a talk. The conference is paying my way. Also I am getting funding for a conference in Iowa in September. Hooray math moneys

Any qualitative people in here by any chance or is everyone math/science?

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with any qual software? I'm trying to see if there are any free/cheap alternatives to nVivo which costs way more then I want to spend on coding data. I've heard of Atlas but don't know anyone that's tried it.

If all you want to do is code text, you could try LexiCoder. I haven't used it, but I know some people who have and they seemed to like it. It is given free to academic researchers

I hadn't heard of it but looks interesting. I don't know a ton about automated coding and how reliable it is (or is considered). I'll have to download and check it out.

I'm not sure what you're asking. You mean degree-wise?

b

Like I said, just wondering if anyone here uses any qualitative research software. Degree itself doesn't really matter, I just assume there are a lot more SPSS and JMP type software users then NVivo in here.

I'm in the social sciences and mostly use R and stata in my research. I am unfamiliar with NVivo, but I will probably be learning more about qualitative methods sooner than later. There are people who think qualitative and quantitative are going to start converging. Gary King (Harvard's resident poli sci stat-god) has gotten into text analysis recently and wrote ReadMe, an R package, to do that. You can get the package and documentation here: http://gking.harvard.edu/readme

Not to derail into a miasma of data spray, but analysis of unstructured data is imo the single best skill to learn going forward, with data mining a close second. SPSS has a text analytics add-on (haven't used it), and IBM has regular "training" sessions (which are really just sales pitches for their products), and they typically push the need to understand how to work with (/importance of) unstructured data.

Unfortunately, I'm too much of an idiot to start picking up these techniques.

Thanks for the posts. I will check that link out. Like I mentioned, I'm pretty unfamiliar with automated coding, but it looks like something I should attempt to at least familiarize myself with.

I have done a little mixed method work myself, but so far I have just shipped my quantitative data to people way smarter about stats then myself.

Hey, I'm trying to find where my interests fall department-wise. Sounds like a stupid question, but here's a little more background:

Have taken

Math: Calc I, II, III, Linear Algebra, ODE's

Econ: Decision Theory, Intro Micro, Intro Macro, Intermediate Micro

Misc: Logic

I really liked decision theory, am taking Real Analysis I now, and have been doing a bunch of reading outside of class. I didn't mind intermediate micro but doesn't sound like econ's the right dept since I don't care at all about macro, never taken metrics but doesn't sound like my thing either.

Fwiw, game theory (especially), optimization/probability stuff seems interesting as well.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks guys,
Mariogs

First thought is you haven't dug deep enough into anything to consider it for a serious graduate program.

Second thought is that if you don't know what you want to go to grad school for, then you shouldn't be considering grad school.

Get a job. Learn some stuff. Figure out where your passion lies.

Sorry for tough love.

Meh, I can appreciate 1) but am exploring over the next couple of semesters. For 2), I think it's entirely possible you'd know your interests but not be sure which department would best suit it. Ex: If I end up really liking game theory (I think there's a high chance of this), I'll be in a pickle because most game theory people are economists...but I'm ambivalent about micro and really don't care about macro/metrics.

Re: getting a job and "figuring out where my passion lies", I can think of few industry jobs (including my last one) that I'd find fulfilling. Last job seems like it fits my interests (inv banking, advising corporates on using derivatives blah blah), but ultimately don't care about the success/failure of companies...

Fwiw, I don't think taking a job for the sake of having a job makes sense for me because 1) I don't *need* a job (have a bunch saved up) and 2) don't think it would get me closer to doing something I like...