polisciphd

I would say that you have a decent chance at schools in the 15-30 range (depending on which rankings you look at, the exact schools in this range may vary). The biggest trick is to tailor your statement of purpose to the program, especially how your research interests are best served by being at that specific school. Also, most poli sci phd programs do not have "contingent" masters degrees. If they accept you (and fund you), then they do so because it is their expectation that you will be able to finish the program (although they know that a large portion of those people who are accepted into phd programs do not finish).

Are you talking about Master's programs in International Relations? If so, then you are on the wrong boards. This is for Ph.d. programs in political science.

Your scores are solid, focus energy on other parts of your application.

Umm, Alabama's faculty consists of graduates from Columbia Stanford WashU Wisconsin Texas A&M U Texas-Austin Iowa Vanderbilt [stanford post-doc] SUNY-Stony Brook all of whom rank [or have ranked] higher than 30

We have a first year who went here for their undergrad, so not totally out of the question

Unfortunately, you are going to have a hard time finding anyone in a Political Science department doing this kind of thing, is much more of a "policy" question. The only one I would say that would even be close is MIT (they actually have a security studies subdiscipline).

It seems to me like you may be shooting a little too low in terms of the quality of programs to which you are applying. With your grades and GRE scores, you might want to throw a couple of top 20s in there just for good measure.

I am in a heavily quant oriented dept. and I am using formal theory and social network analysis as the primary methodology in my research. My topic of interest deals with relatively small n's, so quant doesn't relate as well as if I were doing, say, some with the COW dataset. It is important, however, to be able to "speak" quant, so even if you don't want to use it yourself (at least as your primary research method), you need to have some familiarity with a wide range of quant methods.

At most schools public policy is oriented primarily towards US public policy. If you are wanted to do international security, then what you need to look at is doing a security studies degree from one of the APSIA schools, some examples of which are GW's Elliott School (where I did my masters), Georgetown's School of Foreign Service Security Studies Program, SAIS at Johns Hopkins, SIS at American, Fletcher at Tufts, Maxwell at Syracuse, etc.

If the previous poster will notice, I did not include LSE and Oxford in my discussion (I explicitly said programs on the continent, which does not include the UK). Here are the 2009 TRIP Rankings of the best IR programs in the world. Notice that there is not a single school on the European continent (not including the UK) on this list. Overall Rank Ph.D. Program 1 Harvard University 2 Princeton University 3 Stanford University 4 Columbia University 5 Yale University 6 London School of Economics 7 University of Chicago 8 University of California, Berkeley 8 Oxford University 10 University of Michigan 11 University of California, San Diego 12 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 13 Cornell University 14 Aberystwyth University 15 Cambridge University 16 Johns Hopkins University 17 Georgetown University 18 New York University 19 University of California, Los Angeles 20 University of Minnesota 21 Ohio State University 22 University of Rochester 23 Duke University 24 Tufts University 25 Australian National University

Here's the thing, it is going to be nearly impossible to find a decent teaching position in the US with a European degree, especially if you are an American who went overseas to get said degree. The first question I would ask if I was looking at such an application is "why would you go elsewhere when the best political science programs are in the states?" The other issue is the HUGE difference between IR in the states and IR in Europe (especially on the continent). There are both methodological issues and philosophical ones. So, really, I guess I would suggest that you do your homework, research these differences and decide if they are worth factoring into your decision making. Third, if you are serious about this (and from what you have written I think you are), you really need to get into the mindset of applying to schools that !) are going to get you the best training possible 2) provide you with the opportunities that you are after, i.e. research interests, funding, placement records and a very distant 3) are in a location that you could see yourself living for 5-7 years (although some European degrees are much shorter than this).

Would you mind answering the second part of my earlier question (it will help me answer your original question)? Are you intending on teaching in the U.S.?

Before someone says something really snarky, would you mind explaining why you are wanting to get an IR degree outside of the US? Are you intending to come back and teach in the US?

It almost entirely depends on the methods focus of the school.

Add Illinois and Northwestern to that list and I think that you are right. To the OP, this is where you get to show your first bit of competency as a researcher. You need to take your list of schools and go to each of their dept. websites and go through and look at the interests of each of their american faculty. If you can find more than one person in any dept. that is doing the type of research you would be interested in doing, then apply there. If it is just one person, then consider that people do leave and ask yourself if that person did leave, would you still be happy there?

Oh, and if you are dead set on staying in the midwest, just apply to all of them (unless you can absolutely eliminate them based on interests) and let the chips fall where they may...

If you can be more specific about your interests maybe we can try to help. What field are you interested in? What kind of research methods are you interested in studying? And even more helpful, are there any specific faculty that you admire, have similar interests with (this is the best gauge of where you should go to school)?

Two options, first you can buy an intro to stats with calculus book and start reading or if you know what statistical package your school uses buy one that is geared towards that program, like stats for stata or R, second option is to not worry about it, enjoy your summer, and just be prepared to hit it hard when you start in the fall (i went with the latter and I was fine, also at a very heavy stats school)

Don't listen to the "you have to go to a top ten department" crap, people at my school do just fine and are only a meager top twenty five department.

This was something that I searched long and hard for during and after my application process, yet found no such resource. The best ways of discerning what a school is good and bad at is to 1) talk to other people in the field (preferably who know what they are talking about) about the school in question and 2) scour the school's website, try to identify professors who are doing work that may match your interests and make contact with them, let them know of your interest in the program and ask if your research interests would be congruous with theirs.

The "Inside the Ivory Tower" survey is not talking about the Political Science MA at Columbia, it is talking about the MA from SIPA, they are two different programs, and focused on substantially different things.

Just go where you think you can have the best fit for you and don't worry about what anyone else says or thinks.

While this may be the case if you are targeting gs 11 or 12 type jobs where your boss doesn't know anything about poli sci or the academic world, anyone who knows anything about poli sci knows that WUSTL is one of the strongest programs in the world and will look much more favorably on their degree than if you happen to see Barack and company eating at Ben's Chili Bowl. And from your logic, don't get the degree, just camp out in front of the white house or the capitol building and make a list of all of the politicians coming and going, surely that will help in an academic or research job interview.

I think that the big issue here is that you guys are speaking about two very different animals. The schools within the beltway all have both International Affairs schools and political science departments. They share faculty, often share facilities, and very often skirt the line between what is "policy" vs. what is political science. If you want a career in a think tank or in a govt. agency, then you will be fine with a ph.d. from one of these schools, although in many instances you can do as well with a masters degree. (I have an MA from ESIA at GW). The difficulty with these schools is that they often don't translate outside of the beltway, especially for departments that are more reliant on the use of non-qualitative methods. And most of the DC programs focus topically, as opposed to theoretically. That being said, I decided to get out of DC to do my ph.d. because of what I perceived as a severe lack of theoretical or methodological basis for many of the policy decisions made by our fearless leaders. I specifically sought out programs that would allow me to prove what I had been arguing for to those same folks, especially considering I don't have 25 years of govt. experience to back up my opinions.

You are going to have some trouble finding a school where people are doing exactly the kind of work you want to do, but that is not the issue, really. You need to be thinking of the big picture, so instead of looking for an environmental policy/IR program, look for an IR program that has strong faculty doing stuff on international institutions, or transnational issues in general. You may also want to think about schools were you can "skirt" the line between IR and comparative, which is where I perceive your research interests actually lie. Then, once you have two or so years of theory, methods, and specialized courses, you can take all of these "tools" and use them to study your particular interest. This is similar to what I am doing at UIUC, there is not a single person here that does substantive work on East Asia, yet I am in IR and am going to write primarily on that region for my dissertation (granted, the idea can be applied to any sub-global system, I just happen to like east asia). Hope this helps