polisci12345

Quite a few departments (such as my own) have no TA or RA requirements, but if you don't do either, you won't get paid. If you are funded from something outside (such as the military), you can forgo the department money and not have to spend time doing any TA or RA work.

I would have killed for coach's GPA

If you want to work in a think tank or NGO, work in a think tank or NGO. You don't need a PhD to do that and 5+ years in a PhD program is probably not worth the opportunity cost given your ambitions. My general grad school advice is: grad school is not the time to find yourself. Figure out what you want to do. Its way better to take an extra year or two off and figure it out than to go to finish graduate school and realize you went to the wrong one which is a really expensive mistake to make. If what you want to do requires a graduate degree to do it, then pick the best type of program (this may not be a choice. If you want to be a lawyer, only a JD will do, an M.Arch would be worthless. If you want to work in other fields, you may have a choice between some types of programs).

Your numbers look fine. Don't sweat the GPA. Keep doing research and take as much math/stats/computer science/econometrics/whatever-technical-thing-you-find-the-most-compelling as you can. Whatever you want to do, calculus, linear algebra and probability theory are going to be foundational. American politics is getting pretty methods-heavy. Even the least methodsy Americanists have to at least be fluent enough to know what their colleagues are doing. Your substantive interests are nice and mainstream, so you should have people to work with in almost any top department. Not everywhere is going to have a person working on state legislatures, but you don't need exactly that (though it is obviously not bad to have). Any good congress scholar should be able to advise you with what you want to do.

I'd say advisor is probably more important than prestige of program but they can be hard to disentangle at some point because a program that is rich with well connected advisors who place well will also have a high ranking.

I frequently beat this drum but academic calendars. Stanford is on quarters and is back in session in early January. Harvard has a long interterm and doesn't fire up until the tail end of January. Many faculty use the 6 weeks to do work that requires travel. The month head start pretty much explains the gap. Yale starts middle of the month. It's not a scheme, it's just logistics of committee work that can't start until everyone is there.

I recommend a pair of these to go with the tuxedo t-shirt to show that your groin is just as classy as the rest of you

I recommend a tuxedo t-shirt because it says "I'm taking this seriously and am a classy individual" but it also says "I'm here to party"

This sounds almost identical to my experience. I got off the phone (also with Cindy Kam) and knew I had blown it. A couple of years later, and everything basically worked out as well as it could so its fun(ny) to look back on just how badly I screwed that one up. Comedy = Tragedy + Time. My advice would be mostly similar to B1G's. The one thing I'd add is to spend some time thinking about that program and why you really want to be there. I am pretty sure I got dinged for not being convincing enough on that. I was told about their strong yields and managed not to take the hint that this was in part done by selecting on people who really want to be there.

My guess is that everyone will roll in Wednesday night and there will be a happy hour and a dinner either with the faculty or grad students. The guts of Thursday will be 1-on-1 meetings with faculty you might be interested in working with. They will try to get everyone scheduled for 3 or 4 of those, plus there will be some other things like a campus tour or presentations by different research centers to show off the resources of the department with another dinner with either faculty or grad students (whomever you didn't have dinner with the night before). Friday morning there will be some coffee and bagels and a few final 1-on-1 meetings that couldn't be fit into the previous day and everyone will filter out by lunch. My experience as an admit was that most places tended to have a 2 day program that either ran 2 full days or was spread out as night, full day, morning.

If you want some idea about when you can expect to hear, my first tip would be to check the school's academic calendar. If the semester hasn't started, it is unlikely that committees are meeting. For places with a longer winter break, that is one of the peak times for productivity because of the lack of class and administrative work. I have no special information, but I would be astonished if Columbia was making offers by the end of January. They don't start their spring term until the 21st and and offers come through GSAS which means they have to get from the admissions committee through any sort of department wide approval and a GSAS rubber stamp. I just don't see that happening in 10 days. No idea when the other schools listed above start(ed) but that is a decent place to look when trying to estimate timing for offers.

That looks a lot better. I wouldn't worry too much about 500 being a hard limit, but I also don't mind taking liberties with rules that I think are arbitrary, ymmv. Though I don't know if you've hit your application deadlines yet or not, but if you want to continue to work on it there are still a few loose thoughts I'd think about cleaning up. Much stronger opening. Though I would still change the end a bit. You are talking about studying what goes on in social media, not making a pitch for why you should be participating in it. I would end it with something more like: "...American Politics has always captivated me. Right now I see it being in a transitional period where communications are moving from the broadcast media that defined the second half of the 20th century into the much more participatory forum of social media. While politicians are still struggling to figure out how to make these changes, I want to understand how US citizens are receiving and responding to these messages." Again, much better. This connects your time at the NAACP to your interests. The stuff about fit is fine. I would probably skip the opening line here and just jump right in at "After college, I worked in state level government and had the chance to observe direct interaction between citizens and the government." This could easily just be me, but I don't care for the phrase "true grassroots perspective." It makes me think there is a value judgement being passed that other views are inferior. I also would skip the list of what you wish you could have been doing had things happened in a different way and add to the talking up your perspective. "I believe that my experiences at these agencies uniquely shaped my perspectives and allowed me to see the work of the government in a way that not many people do. The way bureaucracies are actually implemented can diverge from the way they are designed because of on-the-ground circumstances. I can use my experiences with this to make my own research richer." I don't have any ideas (good or otherwise) for the last paragraph for now but I may take a crack at it tomorrow some time if I get the chance.

With the caveat that I am a grad student who has only limited idea of what goes on inside admissions committees, this seems like at best an extremely high variance message to convey in an SOP. The people you are writing this for have made a career out of publishing in political science journals and are looking for the next generation of scholars. Some may read this the way you intend, but a lot will definitely read this and go "She has no idea what academia is about" My biggest problem in general is a lack of specificity about political science. Every time you approached the parts that I was hoping to read more about, you moved on. This has partly been covered, you can certainly save some words here that you may want for later by skipping over the judgements about the large amount of noise on social media. Ok, right here. The honors thesis is kind of free floating (and could possibly even be skipped unless you can tie it to your interests), but the real thing is tell more about the research you are doing on your own. Also, when you have done it may be personally compelling but if I'm reading this to admit you as a student, I want to know more about what you did. What trends were you looking for? How successful were you in identifying them? This where you can show that you know what political science research is and are ready to do more of it. More of what I just said. What theories interested you? Was it because you thought they were right or wrong? Did your work in voter registration change your opinion on these theories? A lot here can be shortened into a sentence or two if you need the space for other things. The bit about the GRE was covered by someone else. The score is low, but at this point it is what it is, drawing extra attention to it in your SOP seems counterproductive. The best way to deal with it is if there is a way to have a letter writer say something about it. Barring that, mentioning the class and having it on your transcript should be sufficient. "Quantitative research within the scope of minority voting patterns" sounds nice, but it is so broad as that it loses some meaning. This is one of those times I was hoping for something more specific. This paragraph was covered well by someone above. I'd skip the first sentence here, but again: show, don't tell. What did you see in state agencies that shaped your perspective? What do you now know about the interaction between bureaucracies and citizens? This is a great chance to show off some keen observation. I appreciate the sentiment here that you want to bring academic insights outside of the ivory tower. I'm not as sure about the delivery of said sentiment. It just feels like it has the chance to rub someone the wrong way. I might try something like "After finishing my doctorate, I want to be able to conduct research on American voter behavior and share my findings both inside the classroom and also beyond the University..." It probably needs a bit more to punch it up and fill out the ending but that seems like something more likely to get a positive response from a reader who has spent their career conducting academic research.

I'll add that once admitted, social policy students are basically indistinguishable from other government students. There are a couple of required classes (taken with the sociology and social policy students) and some minor differences about generals and funding sources but thats pretty much it. The placements have been successful with obvious small sample size caveats http://www.hks.harvard.edu/socialpol/students/alumni.htm

http://bit.ly/161UPUj