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It might not make sense for everyone, but I applied right out of undergrad and I can't say I regret any part of that. I have been lucky enough to figure out early what I want to spend my life doing. Of course in trying to defend this, I run into the classic problem of social sciences that it is impossible to observe the counterfactual in which I took a few years to work elsewhere. Maybe I would be happier and more knowledgeable having done that, but that's a rabbit hole I'd rather not follow. I have to agree with wokeem that no one takes this choice lightly.

There's no real protocol. Thank them or don't. If you have any questions for them don't be afraid to ask. Really, there's not a whole lot you can do wrong after being accepted. That said, you might be working closely with this person soon and even if you choose to go elsewhere, he or she is still a future colleague. It can't hurt to send off a polite thank you note. Congratulations

Huge congratulations to the Wisconsin admits who have heard so far. I hope to meet a bunch of you when you come up here to the visit weekend. Out of sheer idle curiosity, does anyone want to share which professor contacted you?

This is at best 3rd hand information, so take it with an enormous block of salt, but the rumor is that decisions are made and ~48 people will be getting acceptance letters. I can't stress enough how skeptically you should take this, as I have no direct connection to those making decisions.

That's not superficial at all. You're going to have to live wherever you end up going for a few years and it's important to know you're not going to end up in a lot of debt. That said my experience with the stipend is not the standard. I'm single and childless, I don't own a car, I split a small apartment with a roommate and I have fairly cheap preferences when it comes to entertainment. On top of all that, I'm on a university fellowship this year so my stipend is a fair bit higher than the guaranteed amount. I end up putting about half my stipend into savings each month and still feeling rich. Madison is a fairly cheap place to live, so most people on the stipend seem to make it work. Nominal dollars are definitely not comparable to New York for instance. We also get a really great health plan that helps to supplement the below average stipend. In short, it takes some careful budgeting and forethought, but it can be done. Wherever you end up visiting, it might help to talk to a couple of grad students in similar life circumstances and see how they do it.

Haha, it really is amazing how much I've learned in just one semester. Today might not be the best day to ask about life in Madison. It's -4 degrees and dropping. There's a saying around here that Madison would be the best place to live in the country if it weren't for the weather. On days when you have to blink to keep the surface of your eyes from frosting over, you can see where ideas like that come from ( I hope I'm exaggerating, but I haven't kept my eyes open outside long enough to find out.) Really though, Madison has a lot to like. There's a wonderful microbrew culture if you're into that. The farmers' market in the spring through fall is a big attraction. The capitol building is just a few blocks from campus and there's always some group protesting something with widely varying positions and levels of knowledge outside of it. It's also a very walkable place, with a solid bussing system. I don't own a car and I have no problem getting around or even grocery shopping. Also, people make fun of cheese curds, but if there's a better bar food than a tray of deep fried cheddar curds with some chipotle ranch dipping sauce, I have yet to find it. With the obvious exception of the thermometer (and the wind chill, dear god the wind chill), I really have nothing bad to say about Madison.

I went ahead and plugged a line of code into R to see how weird a cohort of 9 is and it turns out it's pretty weird, but not out of the question for random variation. Assuming that 40 students are accepted each year and 15 of them enroll on average, the cohort size should follow a binomial distribution with size 40 and rate parameter .375. The p-value for a cohort of a size at least as extreme (small or large) as 9 people is .066. Add on some arbitrary amount of uncertainty given that I made all of those parameters up and I think we can claim that nothing more than random chance is needed to justify my cohort size. 2*pbinom(9,40,15/40,lower.tail=T) ^That paragraph will make sense next year if it doesn't already. The gist is, I don't have any specific reason to explain my small cohort, it just sometimes happens that way. Last semester my reading load was about 300-500 pages a week. Figure something like 4-6 articles or a book for each substantive seminar. It should be a bit lower this semester, but supplemented by a healthy amount of game theory and statistics problem sets. Grad school is a lot of work, but don't get too afraid by those numbers. If you budget your time well, there's no reason you can't maintain a decent social life, pursue your own research and keep up with coursework. Maybe I shouldn't say this here, but no one reads every word they are assigned. You quickly learn how to distill the important parts of your weekly reading and focus most of your effort on those pieces that are the most important for your own interests. Ok, I definitely shouldn't have written that here. Read everything.

Finally figured out the quote function. I'd guess on the upper end of that range, but that's pretty fair.

Jazzrap, the simple answer is no I don't. I can tell you the less interesting information that typical enrollment for a year is 12-15, mine is particularly small and the one above me is unusually large. If I had to ballpark a figure I'd say somewhere around 40 acceptances, but don't attach too much weight to that guess.

No problem, it's still syllabus week, so there's only a lot of reading instead of the usual mountain. My first notification came by snail mail, but I got a follow up email two days later from the then-associate dean. The other two schools that accepted me both sent emails first IIRC. Rejections came in a variety of different ways, but most were either email or an online system. It's going on a year now and I still have not received any official response from UVA after being waitlisted. My cohort is 9 people with 3 Americanists, 2 Theorists, 3 Comparitivists and 2 doing IR. That's 10 total, because one person who came in planning on IR as her first field and has since switched to Theory. The cohort above me came in with 21 total. I don't know the breakdown other than that 3 were Americanists. As a note, Wisconsin and probably a number of other programs require that you take prelims in both a first field and a second field. Edit: I'm afraid that my comment about UVA came across badly. I received an email notifying me that they were considering my application and asking where else I was considering attending. The implication seemed to be that they were asking whether or not UVA was my top choice. I responded honestly that I had been accepted into two strong programs and would probably give them more consideration than UVA, but if accepted I would visit and fairly consider all my choices. That was the end of our correspondence. I'm sure that if I pushed I could have gotten a firm answer (presumably a no).

mygrotianmoment, Yes that's right. I won't lie and claim I loved PS800. You're right that it's important and helpful, but at times it felt more like busywork than anything. For instance we had a week for discussion on earning tenure. Obviously tenure is an important piece of academia, but there are a few pretty big steps between now and then. It was helpful as a way to get to know the cohort and learn some of the norms of the discipline and Wisconsin's department in particular, but I'm also glad to be past it.

Absolutely loving it! The first couple of semesters include a good deal of introductory and methodology courses, which help to strike the right balance between diving right into research and getting your feet wet. We have some great teaching faculty here, who take their jobs as educators as seriously as their jobs as researchers and it shows. In my first semester I took two substantive seminars, the first course in the Stats sequence (required) an experimental methods course and the 1-credit welcome to the department course (required). I did not come in with a broad understanding of political science literature, but on the other hand I think I had a better grasp of statistics than a lot of new admits. Neither was an issue. The early coursework brought us all up to speed. I can only give secondhand anecdotal reports about later stages of the program, but later level grad students have similarly positive reports. I think many schools do this, but Wisconsin's workshops and research groups are a major draw. They meet regularly (weekly or monthly depending on the group) to hear a presentation about some current project by visiting faculty and offer comments. Think of them like a really small scale conference. Since a lot of seminar work cetera around the classics, it's a great chance to update yourself on cutting edge research.

Hey all, I'm a first year at Wisconsin and I thought I might stop by. I remember this time last year being really stressful, so if there are any questions I can answer to relieve some of the pressure I'd be happy to. Good luck to everyone.

Turned down GWU with funding earlier today. Good luck to everyone

Hey, I just got into GWU with funding. I'm leaning a couple of other places, but I want to get on campus before making a final decision. I'll be trying to visit the week before their official open house and if I decide not to go, I'll let them know quickly. Just wanted to let anyone waiting for funding or acceptance news know.