polisciphd

interesting, I wish that IR was more conducive to this kind of thing, but most places are not.

I am curious as to what you mean by poli sci IR being interdisciplinary...

If you are near a bus line, you can do without a car, especially if you live closer to campus. There is almost no need, therefore, to ever take a cab. I have used zipcar in the past, not in C-U, but found it very convenient, and there is a stop right outside of the union.

This is correct, they are not accepting new grad students. The new rankings are based on surveys that were conducted before Katrina hit.

Here are the 2005 rankings, for comparative purposes 1. Harvard University 2. Stanford University 3. University of Michigan 4. Princeton University 5. University of California Berkeley 5. Yale University 7. University of California

Well, I am happy that UIUC went up a spot, but curious about why Cornell dropped.

Even in the crazy quant oriented world of the big ten, we still emphasize multi-method approaches. One of the cool things that occurs when you do mix methods is to get a model that has good predictive or explanatory strength, yet identifies anomalies or outliers that might be worthy of investigation, qualitatively. Sometimes the outliers turn out to be the most interesting cases (and of the most relevance to policy makers, which is one of the things I look at, bridging the poli sci/policy divide)

You can find much nicer housing elsewhere for the same price, if not less than university housing

Correction, Georgetown was ranked above SAIS last year for top IA schools. (for masters degrees) SAIS is the only one of the DC schools that offers a Ph.D. in International Affairs, mainly because those places are run similar to what you would get with an MBA. I can tell you from talking to people who have gone to SAIS, the Ph.D. program is of secondary importance to the masters, most are like "do you really need a ph.d.?" Also, if you want an academic poli sci career, a SAIS ph.d. is not going to serve you better than a poli sci phd. With a poli sci phd, you can work in international affairs schools or poli sci depts, whereas a IA phd is not going to get you hired by a poli sci dept.

An academic career in political science or policy? If policy, then you should be fine, if poli sci, why not apply to a poli sci program? (I only figured out what my interests were several years after GW)

I went to GWU and got jobs at the Council on Foreign Relations, and NASA, and two of my close friends went to AU are both at the CIA. So it is really on you, you can get good jobs from both places.

Congrats! Welcome to UIUC. If you have any questions about anything, housing etc., don't hesitate to ask.

You can find much nicer places elsewhere for the same price or cheaper than University housing

For housing in C-U, the best place to start is the illini tenant union http://www.tenantunion.uiuc.edu/hb2.html

I completely disagree with the previous poster, the Elliott School is far ahead of Minnesota for all of the international affairs programs, there are three different rankings that place GW in the top five programs in the country, and good luck trying to find Minnesota on any of these lists. The important thing to understand is that you get the Elliott School's connections with your degree, and they have perhaps the strongest career services office of any of the schools in DC. The bottom line is that, if your goal is to work in DC after graduation, go to GW, get an internship while your in school that will get you a security clearance, and you will be golden.

If you want to do what is normally considered "fringe" IR (in the states, at least), there are ways to hedge your bets to make yourself more marketable for employment. The most obvious route is to be prolific, the more you get your name out there, the more likely someone will scoop you up. Second, perhaps it would be a good idea to target non-R1 schools, I would imagine you would be more successful looking at SLACs or smaller private colleges, where their chief concern is teaching, and gear your coursework around preparing to teach a wide range of courses (in addition to doing your research). This way you can write about what you want to and the department will be less concerned with what you say or how you say it, as long as your students are happy.

Georgetown is currently ranked #1 overall for Int. Affairs Masters Degrees, followed by SAIS, Flethcer, GW, WW, and then SIS is like 7th (if memory serves correctly). But, if you feel more comfortable at American, then by all means go there. I have several friends who went there and have been quite successful.

Moderators, please lock this thread. The OP is not even in Poli Sci.

The first place anyone should start when doing apartment hunting in C-U is the Illini Tenant Union, (just google it). It will give you reviews and recommendations on virtually every apartment complex and landlord in the area. Just for a general sense of the place, if you want to be in the middle of things, either go for an apartment on Springfield (main street in Urbana) in either city, or something near downtown Champaign. There are bus lines that go both places. A lot of grad students live in Urbana off of main and vine, there are several apartment complexes over there. My wife and I live in west champaign, is quieter and almost no undergrads, but we are a little older and will probably have kids in the next year or two. Check out the union, and write if you have any specific questions.

I can speak from experience here, having worked in the policy world, both for thinktanks and for the government. If you want to work in D.C., then an MA in security studies from any of the APSIA schools would be fine. Just be aware that there are a lot of people in the district who have the same degree, so the pool of applicants is going to be high. That being said, there are ways to hedge your bets. If you can manage to get an internship while you are in school were you can get a security clearance BEFORE YOU GRADUATE, then you should have no problem finding a job. There are defense budget jobs all over DC (check out the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis). The founder, and my former professor at GW, Gordon Adams, is a specialist on the Defense Budget, is now at American Univ., so you should look there. As far as getting a Ph.D. goes, while many people who work in DC thinktanks have poli sci phds, most of them got them 20+ years ago, when the poli sci field was much different. I think that it was probably easier to make that switch. This is particularly true if you are in a program that is quant oriented, most gov. people in DC could care less about your quantitative model, they just want you to tell them the answer (whether you have scientific proof is a secondary, well more like 10th, concern). Even at MIT, who has an actual security focus, you still have to learn Security Theory, not just its specific application. For a Public Policy Ph.D., you need to be careful and figure out if it is just the US military that you want to focus on, if this is the case, then you should be fine doing a policy Ph.D., especially if you have no interest in teaching. If you want to do more internationally focused work, then SAIS (really good for economically focused wor) or the Fletcher School (their law and diplomacy ph.d.) would be the way to go in my opinion.

There are several current grad students who visit these boards, so if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Again, Illinois should be on that list.

I think that one of your problems might be the fact that studying US-China relations is not considered International Relations in the Political Science community. Traditionally that kind of thing has been the focus of comparativists, or more specifically area specialists. However, you should be aware that at many schools, mine included, area specialists even within Comparative are become obsolete. The two schools that come to mind that still do a lot of research on your issue of interest are UCSD and Univ. of Washington, you might want to check out their comparative programs.

Cal 3 and linear algebra would probably be the most math you would need, not many applications for diff eq and more advanced math in IR. I think there are some people who have done some multivariate stuff that could possibly make use of partials and the like in American (elections, if I remember correctly) but really no utility for things like transformations, etc. UIUC = Illinois