eponine997

Probably because changing it would involve a very considerable amount of effort. This is also the answer to many other "Why does this part of admissions not make sense?" questions.
 
The thing that you need to understand about the admissions bureaucracy is this: however complicated and bureaucratic and messed-up you think it is, it's actually far worse. Academic institutions are nightmarish when it comes to efficiency, infrastructure, and so on. I used to get a file cart full of printed applications to read rolled into my office, which I would have to return so that someone else could read them. That happened as recently as 5 years ago.
 
But it all works. And the main reason it works is that a whole lot of goodhearted people work their asses off to cover up its flaws and fix its problems so that we can do the best job we can. If you visit OSU, for example, you'll meet my grad coordinator, Courtney Sanders. Please bring her flowers. She'll be spending a solid week converting the different parts of your application (letters, statements, application, cv, etc.) into a single document for the committee to read. You might point out that it should be possible to have a computer do that. You'd be absolutely right. But that's not how it's done, and Courtney picks up the slack cheerfully. The people in the Graduate School work their butts off to get everything done on a timetable as well. And so on.
 
Why are things so fundamentally messed up in the first place? I don't have the answer to that. I wish I did.
 
 
Thank you! Much appreciated.

Healthcare.gov haha

I'm going to drift out of my lane for a bit to throw in two cents.
 
I work for an engineering consultancy.  Among our clients are colleges and universities. Many (read: most) of these institutions bench mark themselves against comparable institutions. This academic eyeballing is a way of keeping up with the Joneses although what is being compared doesn't always make sense to outsiders. From this practice, I'm inclined to believe questions like "Where else are you applying?" is a form of marketing research and not a cause for alarm. (For those of you who gain admission to schools that ask such questions, you could let the Powers That Be know the questions freak out applicants.)
 
IRT the specific situation framed by the OP, I ask, why not list the schools alphabetically, either by school name or by city/state?
 
@Loric, you've been in a bit of a tailspin the last week or so. How about giving yourself a break, cooling off for a while, and coming back strong when you've got it together again? (At the very least, stop digging yourself deeper into the holes you've started and stop giving guidance on matters that are beyond your expertise and your experience.)

+1
 
And lol poli sci job rumors...

I'll just point out that I've been accepted to more programs and offered more funding than you have, if you want to pull people's history into things as a means to belittle the advice they're giving. 
 
The goal here is getting in and getting funded, is it not? I offer sound advice for that. It is not presented in a manner to spare your feelings. 

Then my question would be why you're going through with all these applications and why they're on your "final" list in the first place. Schools can tell when you're just applying for the sake of applying. They do not look kindly on it. 

Good luck in applications all! Best advice: don't look at this site again until at least March 1st - it will only drive you crazy. 

LOL this is amazing! I have a friend who's like that too, except in person. We'll be talking, and she'll randomly go, "wow, I look really good today!"

Thank goodness all the comments I make on my own drafts are things like "good point", "fantastic", and "magnificent job".

And by the way: Best of fortune to everyone in the 2013-14 cycle.

Yeah I wish I could get away with that in actual papers.  

http://bit.ly/161UPUj

I think it's best to identify a research interest and a way that you would go about analyzing and solving the puzzles that remain in that interest. Once you're there, you can ask what kind of methods are best.
 
In general, you can make a case for mixed methods in just about any interest area, but it's more convincing in some than in others. Comparative nationalism might employ some surveys that require you to prove statistically that associations between responses were not random, but you'll have to do process tracing and historical analysis to make any sort of convincing case. Voter behavior is maybe the opposite; you can get some leverage from attempting to trace particular influences on a given voter and then generalize, but you can't possibly avoid using large-n surveys or experiments that will have to be justified statistically.
 
Making an argument that you need training in partcular types of methods to solve particular types of puzzles not only communicates your personal methodological bias or interest, it also signals that you understand methods to be the ways that you go about gathering and analyzing data and that there are certain tools for certain jobs.
 
Your own field would appear to have puzzles best solved using a wide variety of tools. If you are interested in the associations between particular types of financial or economic policies and later performance, you'll likely be doing a lot of coding and quant work. If you are interested in explaining the history or comparative internal politics of these institutions, that seems to be more qual. At some point, you may want to tie those questions together, at which point you'll need both.

Are you not teaching this semester or something?

By way of predilections: I am no technician, but my work is probably more technical than average.  My program is one of the more technical ones.  So, this should probably be read with a large handful of salt.  I am also no fan of positivism, which seems to be the issue just as much as technique is.
 
It might not be obvious during the very first semester---where almost all of the focus is on gaining competence with the basic building blocks of technical work---but eventually one gets to a point that the numbers are no longer "meaningless."  This is especially evident when the numbers are the results of a very theoretically-motivated statistical model.  Think about ideal point estimation.  For those that don't know about this just yet, ideal point estimation refers to a class of methods by which one inputs congressional votes (so you have a big matrix of yeas and nays with as many rows as there are congresspeople and as many columns as there are measures voted upon), uses that data in conjunction with some spatial theory of voting, and then outputs estimates of where each congressperson falls in unidimensional ideology space.*  Those estimates mean something, though that meaning is conditioned on how we imbue the model with theory.  Ideal point estimation papers can be quite technical.  The seminal paper by Poole and Rosenthal in the 1980s made such intense computing requirements that, at the time, it wasn't replicable.  Today's bleeding edge stuff is Bayesian and uses markov chain Monte Carlo methods.  Just looking at the papers can be very intimidating, but the process is still simple:  get votes, use theory and stats together, and then interpret results.
 
So where is the science?  Does the fact that something is technical and difficult mean that it's scientific?  Maybe?   Who knows?  Who cares? Despite all the Greek letters in their paper, Poole and Rosenthal didn't really test any hypotheses in their paper:  they just measured political ideology.  Most people would probably call what they did "good science."  It was certainly deductive:  if you buy this spatial model, and if you buy these data, then you should buy the results.  Being deductive is probably a criterion for being "sciencey" for most folks, but it definitely isn't unique to data analysis.  Rawls was a pretty deductive guy.
 
That brings us to another point:  if you don't like math, or functions, or their meaningless, or whatever, then this generalizes to your views of formal theory.  But some of the very best theorists ever did things that were very technical but also very normative:  Arrow's theorem, the work of Amartya Sen and John Harsanyi, the welfare theorems**...these things are deductive and they're technical but they're not in the vein that the OP mentioned.  But when you learn theory, you again start from annoying building blocks that seem not to mean anything:  truth tables, and set theory, and real analysis, and so on.  These are just the technical requirements for being able to engage in higher-level thinking later on.  While your average political philosophy scholar likely has little to say to your average applied empirical political scientist, they might have quite a bit to say to a formal theorist.  Heck, a few years ago we took on a new student that already had a PhD in philosophy but that wanted to do philosophically-motivated political economy.  He's a remarkable guy, but it's good evidence about how these things can work hand in glove.  
 
Note also that the best users of theory also think hard about what the theory means:  Akerlof's diatribes about the real meaning of the Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium "utopia" are really interesting reading.  The same for many of Sen's works.  And again, this isn't just specific to mathematical theory:  Schelling was a theorist that used no theory.  
 
Speaking in a language of models means that the numbers are imbued with meaning from the start.  But most technical classes are about competence, not modeling.  With enough perseverance, you get to use all these boring tools in fun ways, and that's really rewarding.  Whether it adds up to good science from your average positivist is anybody's guess, but who cares what they think, anyway.
 
----------------------
*:  Ideal point estimation is just one kind of data reduction technique, and it's used in political contexts other than the Congress (e.g. the courts).  Most of the statistical machinery comes from psychometrics, where they wanted to estimate, say, intelligence using test answers.
**:  Science envy and economics envy are everywhere, and I just contributed to the problem by focusing on economic theorists.  I could have thrown Riker or Shepsle or McKelvey or Ferejohn or some other really smart theorist from a political tradition in there.  The economic examples are more obviously normative.

At some point we really should just "pin" one of these threads... or someone needs to make a thread called "before asking 'what are my chances!?!?'"  
 
No one, I repeat, no one on this forum can tell you your chances at any school (other than that you have a non-zero probability) unless they are on the ad com at said school or they read you SoP and letters.  Have a look at the "Profiles/Results" threads from 2013 and 2012.  Here you will see that people with similar GPAs to you got into top 10 programs.  You can look at the results board and see people with GPAs and scores higher than yours who were rejected from middle- to low-ranked programs.   

Different programs weigh these factors (scores, GPA, pedigree, etc.) differently.  Some will look more closely at your final two years rather than your overall GPA (and you'll see on the application where they ask for this), some will look at your major GPA, others will look at grades in relevant courses.  Nearly every school will reject an applicant with perfect scores and grades if they cannot clearly express their research interest or their research interest don't fit well with any of the department's graduate faculty.  
 
As for "top 50? top 100? 100+" there is a thread elsewhere on the forum (non-discipline specific) asking people what their regrets were in the application cycle.  An overwhelming number of people said they wished they'd applied to better schools (or not excluded schools because they thought they couldn't get in) because they got in at place they thought were "a reach."  I know smart people with good scores, resumes, and grades who struck out because they only applied to 5 schools, and similarly, people on this forum who applied to 15ish schools and only got one or two acceptances (though I cannot speak to their intellect, credentials, etc.) and there is no way they could have known ahead of time which those would be.  Sometimes you are paying that $100 application fee so you won't be left wondering 'what if...' later on.
 
Find places you REALLY want to go, and don't apply to any place you wouldn't attend if accepted.  Can the place help you achieve you intended outcome?  Consider what you want: do you want to be a professor at an R1? at a small lib arts college? a junior college?  or work at a think tank? or for the government?  Look at recent placements and see if that is a reasonable expectation at schools to which you are considering applying.  Is there someone there who can supervise your research or whose work really interests you who you could to learn from?  If there isn't, then it's probably not a good place to apply.  
"Funding or not?"  Don't go if you are not funded unless you are independently wealthy.  A 5 year PhD program is a lot of debt, and does not lead to an extremely lucrative career that will facilitate paying back that debt very easily as, say, medical school does.  
 
Good luck

At some point we really should just "pin" one of these threads... or someone needs to make a thread called "before asking 'what are my chances!?!?'"  
 
No one, I repeat, no one on this forum can tell you your chances at any school (other than that you have a non-zero probability) unless they are on the ad com at said school or they read you SoP and letters.  Have a look at the "Profiles/Results" threads from 2013 and 2012.  Here you will see that people with similar GPAs to you got into top 10 programs.  You can look at the results board and see people with GPAs and scores higher than yours who were rejected from middle- to low-ranked programs.   

Different programs weigh these factors (scores, GPA, pedigree, etc.) differently.  Some will look more closely at your final two years rather than your overall GPA (and you'll see on the application where they ask for this), some will look at your major GPA, others will look at grades in relevant courses.  Nearly every school will reject an applicant with perfect scores and grades if they cannot clearly express their research interest or their research interest don't fit well with any of the department's graduate faculty.  
 
As for "top 50? top 100? 100+" there is a thread elsewhere on the forum (non-discipline specific) asking people what their regrets were in the application cycle.  An overwhelming number of people said they wished they'd applied to better schools (or not excluded schools because they thought they couldn't get in) because they got in at place they thought were "a reach."  I know smart people with good scores, resumes, and grades who struck out because they only applied to 5 schools, and similarly, people on this forum who applied to 15ish schools and only got one or two acceptances (though I cannot speak to their intellect, credentials, etc.) and there is no way they could have known ahead of time which those would be.  Sometimes you are paying that $100 application fee so you won't be left wondering 'what if...' later on.
 
Find places you REALLY want to go, and don't apply to any place you wouldn't attend if accepted.  Can the place help you achieve you intended outcome?  Consider what you want: do you want to be a professor at an R1? at a small lib arts college? a junior college?  or work at a think tank? or for the government?  Look at recent placements and see if that is a reasonable expectation at schools to which you are considering applying.  Is there someone there who can supervise your research or whose work really interests you who you could to learn from?  If there isn't, then it's probably not a good place to apply.  
"Funding or not?"  Don't go if you are not funded unless you are independently wealthy.  A 5 year PhD program is a lot of debt, and does not lead to an extremely lucrative career that will facilitate paying back that debt very easily as, say, medical school does.  
 
Good luck

At some point we really should just "pin" one of these threads... or someone needs to make a thread called "before asking 'what are my chances!?!?'"  
 
No one, I repeat, no one on this forum can tell you your chances at any school (other than that you have a non-zero probability) unless they are on the ad com at said school or they read you SoP and letters.  Have a look at the "Profiles/Results" threads from 2013 and 2012.  Here you will see that people with similar GPAs to you got into top 10 programs.  You can look at the results board and see people with GPAs and scores higher than yours who were rejected from middle- to low-ranked programs.   

Different programs weigh these factors (scores, GPA, pedigree, etc.) differently.  Some will look more closely at your final two years rather than your overall GPA (and you'll see on the application where they ask for this), some will look at your major GPA, others will look at grades in relevant courses.  Nearly every school will reject an applicant with perfect scores and grades if they cannot clearly express their research interest or their research interest don't fit well with any of the department's graduate faculty.  
 
As for "top 50? top 100? 100+" there is a thread elsewhere on the forum (non-discipline specific) asking people what their regrets were in the application cycle.  An overwhelming number of people said they wished they'd applied to better schools (or not excluded schools because they thought they couldn't get in) because they got in at place they thought were "a reach."  I know smart people with good scores, resumes, and grades who struck out because they only applied to 5 schools, and similarly, people on this forum who applied to 15ish schools and only got one or two acceptances (though I cannot speak to their intellect, credentials, etc.) and there is no way they could have known ahead of time which those would be.  Sometimes you are paying that $100 application fee so you won't be left wondering 'what if...' later on.
 
Find places you REALLY want to go, and don't apply to any place you wouldn't attend if accepted.  Can the place help you achieve you intended outcome?  Consider what you want: do you want to be a professor at an R1? at a small lib arts college? a junior college?  or work at a think tank? or for the government?  Look at recent placements and see if that is a reasonable expectation at schools to which you are considering applying.  Is there someone there who can supervise your research or whose work really interests you who you could to learn from?  If there isn't, then it's probably not a good place to apply.  
"Funding or not?"  Don't go if you are not funded unless you are independently wealthy.  A 5 year PhD program is a lot of debt, and does not lead to an extremely lucrative career that will facilitate paying back that debt very easily as, say, medical school does.  
 
Good luck

Relation with russia is a common trap (at least you can see lots of people quoting "Sino-US relationship" as their research interests).
In my opinion, SoP ought to be more specific, and you should elaborate what tool kits you have to finish the study. Methodology is most crucial, regardless of what regional interests you might have.

Orlien, I was literally in the exact situation you're in. My advice is different from the other three posters here though, so obviously I'm not offering gospel. But it's noteworthy that my stats (both in PoliSci and overall) were far worse than yours: I graduated with a sub-3.0 GPA, got into a Top-30 program, and was offered a university fellowship at a 50-ish program. So it's not impossible, or maybe I was just lucky. 

What I can tell you is that it helped me to include it in my SOP, based on what I gathered from students/faculty at the school I accepted admission from. But I limited my mention of this to a single, tightly worded paragraph. I focused primarily on what I gained from Natural Science courses (e.g. scientific inquiry, research design, intellectual stimulation, work ethic, etc.), and framed it as "while I found myself drawn to the art of scientific inquiry, I learned the hard way that the natural sciences were not an area in which I could excel" (all of which is true!)... I also specifically referenced the grade discrepancy, and made mention of my motivation for taking natural science courses (to address concerns about my commitment to PoliSci). 
 
Again though, this was a single, small part of my SOP. I placed it within my SOP such that it wouldn't interfere with the main thrust of this document: in other words, I didn't harp on it, didn't try to explain it, just pointed it out and gave my brief thoughts on it, and moved on to focus on the rest of my experience/purpose. Basically, be honest, forthright, and concise about what you clearly (and rightfully) feel is an important anomaly to point out.

I did also talk to my LOR writers about including it; I haven't read the recommendations so I don't know what they did, but you can never go wrong with that. Feel free to PM me if you wanted some more specifics.

Regions?  We don't need no regions!  I DON'T HAVE TO SHOW YOU ANY STINKIN' REGIONS!!!

Those are a good start (especially the first two). Other possible titles to ponder:
The Macro Polity
Going Negative
Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America
Anything that VO Key ever wrote

I'm not an Americanist, but my sense is that you can't go wrong with:
 
(1) The American Voter
(2) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
(3) Voice and Equality
 
That's a lot to chew on.

We are all impressed