2008 Applicant Information - Put your Profile Here!

Damn! You will take one seat away from the rest of us in whichever school you apply to. BTW, where are you applying?

Hmm .. another interesting profile. An Econometrics master having a strong "outside work" side. Where are you applying?

HBS, Wharton, MIT (ideal).
Yale, Cornell, University of Washington (more realistic).

I plan on playing up my somewhat unique work experience as well as the fact the work we did was industry leading/ground breaking, as well as my outside work activities, which include a lot of leadership and focus on community.

Hmm .. I don't know your goals, so maybe this questions doesn't make much sense, but did you consider Chicago GSB?

well, poopidipoop will definitely take a spot in almost any school she applies to, if she does her essays well and get good recs. The rest is already done!

I'm also very curious where you're applying to, poop.

Would love to meet up with you sometime to chat.

mNeo, the good thing is, most schools will have a certain number of women spots, so I don't think we're all competing directly against poop, otherwise we'd be screwed!

I love the fact that she's strictly referred to as "poop" from now on. And I love the quote "I don't think we're all competing directly against poop". Good times.

poop has literally pooped all over us now!
Go poop!!, you need to change your avatar to the poop character of south park.

This is going to sound super wierd but.... I find that really interesting. Can you tell us more about the job, what it was like? I'm actually becoming more and more interested in joining one of these policy think tanks, and energy is an area of interest.

Well, I can describe a couple typical projects I worked on....

We mainly worked in the area of demand response, which are programs set up to help with reliability....basically programs are set in which customers sign up to reduce load when called upon by the ISO (Independent Systems Operator, they run the electric grid in a lot of the US where the markets are deregulated), and the customers get paid to do so. So, for example, in New York (where I worked), if it is a really hot day and the load is approaching capacity, they might invoke one of these programs (there are a few different types with different rules for different customer segments). They might provide a 600MW load reduction in an hour and help "prevent" a brownout or blackout. They are paid the higher of $500/MW or the hourly price.

So anyway, our firm was hired to evaluate these programs in various markets around the country. The first step was to re-create the supply curve, which we did using a fairly complex econometric model with a bunch of shifter variables - price was the dependent variable, the independent variables were things like load, weather, transmission constraints, etc...

By estimating the supply curve, we could then create a program to simulate what the hourly price WOULD have been if not for the load reduction from these programs. Say the actual price was $600/MWh, our model would show that if the program hadn't been activated, the price would have been $927/MWh. This price difference was then used to calculate a variety of market and welfare savings.

A lot of ISO's also have Day-Ahead bidding programs (most markets have a Day-Ahead market and a Spot/Real-Time market) where customers can bid in load reductions at certain price thresholds, and then reduce in Real-Time. It's basically a way to arbitrage the difference in the market prices and help reduce price volatility. Our firm was also responsible for evaluating the effectiveness of these programs.

Another common project was to create simulations to estimate the effects of customers switching from one electric rate to another. For example we worked with the State of Massachussetts because they were thinking of making some of their largest commercial/industrial customers switch to Real-Time Pricing (where they pay 24 hourly prices, which is exactly how the Wholesale market works....unfortunately most retail rates are not reflective of this). Not only do we simulate the change in rates, but we use elasticity estimates to calculate how the customers would adjust usage on the new rates, which then affects the market price.

So that's kind of some of the stuff we did in a nutshell.

Did my micro teacher pay you to post that? Those are about half of the key points from my class so far. Thanks for that post - not the work I want to do, but really interesting.

LOL.

It was definitely interesting, but I never cared about the industry much.

I'm looking to get into finance or marketing in an industry I'm more interested in (entertainment, health/nutrition) and I think a lot of the skills I picked up in that job will definitely help.

regarding encouraging posts... thanks! (but)

I actually had a bout of illness for 10 months (debilitating enough such that I had to close the cafe) and then afterwards the cafe burnt down... not quite sure what to make of that in my application .
That plus I'm getting paid probably half of what everyone else makes right now working an entry-level IT position and I have no idea who to ask to write my rec letters!

So yeah... my life is kind of extreme on both ends... drama.

It seems everyone is busy in the bay area these days... that's too bad. I recently spoke to an admissions consultant and she was rather useless. However, I made the decision to forego consultants due to her lack of insight, which will probably save me a pretty penny.

Where am I applying?

Reach schools: Stanford, Haas, Wharton
Realistic schools: Ross, Darden, Fuqua, Tuck
Quasi backup: UCLA, USC
Backup: Washington U St Louis, UCI

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that 11 schools is going to be very hard to do. You may wanna reconsider that

My respects to the giants here .....let me quickly state my humble credentials and vanish from the stage ......

Indian IT applicant
720 GMAT
Decent acads from a not so famous Univ
5 years of IT experience in a top Indian IT firm

(any guesses so far !!!)

R1 schools : Tepper, Darden, McCombs, ISB
R2 schools : Haas (I wonder why bother !!!)
UCLA
Kelloggs

Good luck to all .

Tata or Infosys

Wipro!

IBM (They have more than 50,000 employees in India)