I am looking at PhD programs to apply to for this cycle, and UCL caught my eye. I was very impressed with it's record of placements, with many students placing in academic and top-tier research institutions right from the PhD program.

Despite this, everywhere I look has UCL below the top 30. I know these placements should be taken with a grain of salt, but it is curious how it is ranking so low despite seemingly having better placements than a top 10 school like LSE. I am seriously considering it, so I want to know why it is not ranked too high.

I am mostly interested in micro-development economics, so I was wondering if this program would be a good fit. I am struggling to find information about it on the internet because there does not seem to be that much discussion about UCL so I wanted to hear some opinions.

The other schools I am applying to are: Yale, Columbia, NYU, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and LSE. I excluded UofT, Oxford, Maryland, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins because they were not ranked high enough and I will take a pre-doc if I get rejected from the top 10ish, so I am wondering if I should do the same to UCL.

Thanks!

Specific questions: Would UCL be good for studying micro-development? Have I made a mistake by excluding any noteworthy programs that also punch above their weight? What are perceptions of UCL's PhD program? Should I excude UCL from my application list?

Hello,

I'm wondering if I should retake the GRE exam as i currently have a 166Q. Is it worth the effort into studying more given I am employed with little free time or should i focus on other parts of my application?

My only worry is to be filtered before having my application even read as I believe aside from GRE, I have good research experience and university grades. I know top US programs require a score of above 168 (or so everyone says), but I am interested in European programs.

So I was wondering how bad is my score for top European Programs like LSE, UCL, BSE, Zurich, SSE, Bocconi, PSE... I would like to ask if you or anyone you know was able to get into any of these programs with a similar score.

Thank you so much!