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

There is some non-zero probability that you will get into each of the schools on that list. Aside from the faculty members who frequent this forum, there isn't anyone who will be able to tell you just how large or small these probabilities are relative to each other. Applying broadly will maximize your chances of getting in somewhere but at a cost of close to $100/application when you factor in sending GREs, this can get pricey in a hurry. That said, if you follow NBM's advice I'm pretty sure you will narrow it to a smaller number. If I had to go back and apply again, I'd have a pretty darn hard time coming up with more than 8 or 10 schools that I'd really want to attend.

kendra: no one is taking the full sequences, just the particular course or two that they need. by the time they get to needing that particular method, they have the requisite knowledge to take the class. If there are a few topics that are too far...grad school grades don't matter anyways

American isn't as math intensive as as econ, but still requires some amount of math. I don't think more than one or two people had taken any sort of analysis and I would not imagine most would be comfortable with mathematical proofs. While there is some APD work going on in my department, I think most of the Americanists who have taken quals took either methods or formal theory as their secondary field and almost all have gone outside of the department in search of additional methods training (mostly in the econ, stats and CS departments). American politics is generally fairly quant heavy. We know a lot of the fundamentals of how the US government functions so there are a lot of people who spend their time trying to refine that knowledge by building better mousetraps

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 don't know the specifics about the program you are asking about. My own department lets students take a masters in an outside subject. The way it works is that there are other departments that have MA programs that are entirely based on coursework and we can do that instead of getting an MA in political science. Most degree programs permit some number of outside courses to count, so you are able to count some courses from the outside MA to your political science department's requirement and some courses in political science to the MA. Even with this double counting of classes, you will still probably wind up needing to take more courses than the minimum required by your department. In my own department, this often manifests as needing a few courses after quals. This coursework is funded. Even after generals, we are considered full time students until we graduate, which entitles us to take a bunch of courses for free. Most people don't do more than 1 a semester because of the general time commitments of teaching and dissertations.

Professors at top 75 schools have, by and large, received quality training and have a reasonable amount of pride in their work and ability to teach. Without talking to any faculty in such programs, I can guarantee that they do not consider themselves to be a stepping stone to top 50 programs and aren't admitting people with the plan that they will train them up for a year and then ship them up the line to higher ranked programs. There is a very real possibility that you are going to leave a trail of raw feelings in your wake if you transfer because you are worried about placement. In my top 10, the only people I know who transfered in are people who came as part of a package with professors we hired from other departments. We aren't going out trying to fill our incoming classes with people who started somewhere else and wanted to trade up. On the one hand, most people don't try to transfer after a year or two. On the other hand, most people who have finished a year in a top 50 or 75 program have a lot more of a clue about what they are doing than someone with no experience in a PhD program. I have no clue what the probability of acceptance is conditional on being a transfer relative to being not a transfer at most schools but this is something you should probably look into. As coach has said, this is a really personal decision and you are the only person who can say whats right for you, but I'm with him in the warning that its not an easy, risk-free process so you should go in with your eyes open.

Remember that every school produces more graduates than it has job openings and this is going to cascade down. The top 25 cannot possibly absorb all the top 25 graduates so the graduates take the best job they can get. This makes things much tighter for a graduate of a top 75 type school like Houston or American who are hoping to work in a similar place.

From BFB in the faculty perspectives thread:

I'm with coach. Its great that you are excited about grad school. You'll want to remember this feeling and try to fall back on it frequently during the next few years when things feel overwhelming. That said, you are going to grad school to learn these things. Will reading a text book on econometrics change the set of classes you take next year? If it won't lead you to skip the multiple regression/OLS class and jump right into the MLE class, then why? Every OLS class I've seen is designed to start at zero and take you up to about the same point. You are going to learn all of these things within 12 months (or less) no matter what you do this summer. Do something that makes you happy, it may not seem like it, but I promise this will have more downstream and long term benefits. Also, this is going to be your last real break for a while. Your summers after this aren't a break, they are "a great time to do all the research I couldn't do while I was taking classes." This summer, I will be working on projects for two of my advisors and spending the rest of my time getting some other projects started on my own and with other grad students.

If you are looking at top 10-15 programs, then there are only 15 of them at most. You can definitely handle looking into their faculty without outsourcing this task