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asked ago by (160 points)
I'm an aspiring economics graduate student. I have a masters degree in economics from a top 5 institute in India. Our Economics curriculum does not have any math courses other than "Mathematics for Economics" course, which mainly follows Simon and Blume and Chiang's Dynamic Optimization.

I'm curious to know, to get into a top Ph.D. program in the US, whether online math course certificates would help. Will ad comm value them? That's the only possibility in front of students like me.

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answered ago by (1.8k points)
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This is my advice, so as with any advice, take what you think is relevant beneficial for your case. A lot of people in the states up their math at community colleges (a cheap way to get mostly good quality math experience). There is also a rise in pre-doctorates which are a bit different from a master since is mostly research/networking rather than standard coursework, but most give math courses. Now, in your case you already have a good math background so it should be relatively easy to pick up math used by economists. In terms of MOOC, I would focus on programming/data science ones. I was addicted to Coursera for the first couple years of my program and learning those skills have opened a lot of opportunities for research, internships, jobs, and currently for post-docs.

TLDR: Math is math. Look into pre-docs as these are ever increasing. For MOOC, rather than math do programming/data science.
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