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jazzrap

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  • Location
    Midwest
  • Interests
    Comparative politics of institutions and development
  • Application Season
    2014 Fall
  • Program
    Political Science

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  1. Hello! 

    I found your answer to one of the forum questions and you were one of those few people who mentioned methodological aspects when it comes to choosing gradschools. The impression I get from making my research into Political Science PhD programs at major US schools is that it's mostly quantitative. Can you, please, if you know, tell me how the top 25 schools in the US break down when it comes to methodology, quant vs qual? 

    Thank you!

  2. I doubt it. You might need to find someone who works on the Middle East, but getting too specific is a bit unnecessary. CP is about generating and testing general theories. Here is even extreme example: UCSD two years ago admitted a student who works on the Middle East, despite the fact that they have got no one who devotes to the study of this particular geographic area.
  3. In comparative politics, I think anything above Democratization would enhance your chance of getting into a good program. But two things: First, you are not expected to even have an R&R on your CV for PhD admissions. In fact, most admitted students at top programs do not have anything close. Second, even with a solid publication, say you are published at CPS or WP, it is still not guaranteed that you are going to be admitted into your dream school. There is no nuclear weapon in admissions.
  4. Those who flunk out of a Political Science PhD program usually fail for one reason only: they work considerably less than their peers. I don't see you being one of those who don't work hard. This is the last summer you can relax yourself, and you decided to worry about grad school and post it on gradcafe. I don't intend to use "worry" as a good word, because it certainly is not. However, I believe that those who worry a bit about their career and life tend to excel in the near future. The fact that you post here at this particular time means that you have the mentality to work hard in grad school. Sure, you might not have fancy quant skills at this point, but you must have some other skills to make it up. Otherwise, why would UTK professors give you offer in the first place? These folks do not know you as a person as well as you do. However, they know your potential as a political scientist a lot better than you do.
  5. No, I am not. There are programs that I might slightly fit better in terms of research interests. Columbia's program is wonderful, though.
  6. The open house was for newly admitted PhD students, held in mid-March.
  7. It will definitely make your profile a bit stronger. However, I don't think it would do anyone good to just assume to get into a top 5 (it is perceived by a lot of people that there are six "top 5" in the discipline: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, Berkeley, and Yale) even if he/she has a BA from Harvard and MA at Columbia with perfect GPA and perfect GRE and three glowing letters. The admissions process could be a bit idiosyncratic and turn out unexpectedly. And it is also extremely competitive. Try your best to make every single part of your profile outstanding. Get good training at Columbia, leave great impression on those whose letters will matter, read up the frontier literature to write a professionalized SOP that asks interesting cutting-edge questions, score better than you can imagine in the GRE, and then it is up to luck. A top 5 would be good, but a top 10, top 15, or a top 20 would not hurt that much. There are occasionally folks who went to programs below top 25 and still landed great jobs. And apply to as many programs as you can.
  8. When I was at their open house, they introduced us to the quant sequence. It seems to me that at one point there are two courses at the same level and one is more challenging than the other. MA students usually take the less challenging one while PhD students take the more challenging one. A professor goes like this: "4912 is pretty difficult and most PhD students take it. 4911 is usually taken by MA students." I might remember the course code wrong. The point is this: a lot of MA students do not have good inside knowledge about the discipline, and therefore tend to take the easier course as they know well that master GPA will be important. When one is thrown into an environment where most of his/her peers are taking the easier class, then he/she would probably do the same thing, despite having formal access to the better course. MA students usually do not have inside knowledge sufficient to know that methods are that important. Otherwise, they would have applied to PhD directly. Hopefully, the exchange between you and me would help inform the OP about his/her access to the PhD level training in the master program, and OP will indeed take advantage of that.
  9. Well, in my humble opinion, that would be QMSS. OP is considering the political science program. My friend who went to the political science program did not gain decent training in quantitative research. And the experiences of other people I know of suggest the same thing.
  10. OP, Work experience will only help an applicant a lot when it is both quant-heavy and directly relevant to your research interests. Therefore, in your case, it probably won't help a lot as it does not meet the first condition. There are two ways it will help a little bit. First, in your SOP you can write that it is an experience that has helped inform your research interests. In other words, it can make your SOP flow more smoothly. Second, it definitely means that you are a candidate who is quite knowledgeable about the geographic area you intend to study. Note that there is a decreasing rate of return on your regional expertise in admission. Being a Chinese yourself already helps in this regard, so having interned at a provincial-level government think tank will add more credential to it, but not that much in the eyes of a professor who does admissions. More importantly, there are three aspects of the admission you need to consider. First, your GRE scores. The writing score will hurt a lot. It will make you add to the stereotype that Chinese over-perform in the GREs. Professors can be like: "hey, there is another Chinese who got a verbal score that is higher than the actual level of research-level English he has. His writing score says a lot." An American will have less of a problem scoring 3 out of 6 in the writing section than a Chinese who comes from China. But even for an American, 3 out of 6 is still pretty low. Not low enough to shut you out of the door, but it will hurt you in the later stage where professors are debating between two files. In addition, there is still time, so retake your GRE also for the sake of getting even higher scores on verbal. It is important to have a score as high as possible. Trust me, scoring a 335+ will help a lot. People will say things like "I got in Michigan with a not so high GRE score" or "I have seen people with perfect scores who got eliminated by most programs." Just because there are people who die in a car crash with the seat belt on and there are people who survive without the seat belt on does not mean that you should not fasten your seat belt. Those who got into a top 5 with low GRE might have perfect GPA, which you don't have, a letter from Thad Dunning, which you don't have, and a degree in CS and Economics, which you don't have. Oftentimes, professors face a choice between two candidates. One interned in the Federal Reserve for 2 years. The other works as a NGO correspondent in Rwanda. The first person got a letter from Gary King, the other from James Fearon. The first person has a degree from a top 5 US university with a GPA 3.8. The second person has a degree from a top 10 US university with 3.9. Professors are not able to tell whose profile is stronger, but with the GREs, they can. 335+ is better than 328. Case closed. Let's be clear. your current scores in verbal and math are not bad. If it is August, I would not even recommend retaking the test. However, it is June. Second, you need to think more than just China. Nowadays comparative politics has moved completely beyond regional studies and most research produced on a single country must be framed in a way that contributes to mainstream theories that can predict phenomenon cross-nationally. Therefore, don't say out front in your SOP that you want to study Chinese political system. NO. Say this: "I hope to make contributions to the rapidly proliferating literature on authoritarian regimes." Then, don't even mention China until you reach the paragraph where you need to explain your work experience. To begin reading the mainstream theories that China is relevant to, I recommend works by Milan Svolik, Babara Geddes, and Scott Gehlbach. Third, these years applicants from China never succeed in getting into a decent school without training in US or Britain. Many applicants now go with the route of applying to master programs in the US to gain experience before PhD applications. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to PM me. Good luck.
  11. Take Linear Algebra and Calculus 3. Read the frontier literature and try to bring them up to your professors as much as you can. Be like "yea...BTW what do you think of Steph Haggard's new piece in APSR on inequality..." That way, your professors will know that you are really seriously considering becoming a researcher. Letters matter the most. The only way to impress letter writers is to show them that you are already a scholar even before applying. Writing a great thesis will work the best, but discussing frontier scholarship with your letter writers is another good strategy.
  12. Hi sir, Thank you for the paper. Does it control for program size when assessing a program's ability to land people in TT jobs? Or is your DV the number of TT jobs per year over the number of PhDs graduated per year
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