BFB

That sounds like a big disconnect between the adcomm and the rest of the faculty. If everyone is telling you that you fit best with someone else, yes, that's a bad sign. It doesn't sound like either A or B is excited to take you on in a primary advising role—is that your impression? Or is each excited to have you but of the impression that you're an even better fit with the other? The experience with the other two faculty members sounds bizarre. All in all, unless both A and B are falling all over themselves to advise you, I'd be very wary of accepting. Edited to add: Did A or B have any contact with you (phone, Skype, email) prior to your having been accepted to the program?

Well, predoctoral fellowships are generally for advanced graduate students, so those wouldn't help someone hoping to get into graduate school. As far as RAships are concerned, there are undergraduate RA positions in political science at many universities, but how you sign up for them or advertise your availability varies from one place to the next. Often it's simplest to email professors and describe your relevant experience and availability. I'd ask your department's program coordinator for more details.

This is one of those issues on which reasonable people differ. It's like asking whether the people on the hiring committee prefer coffee or tea -- some prefer one, some prefer the other, and you can't predict which is which. Your best path is to do what you want to do and let the chips fall where they may.

Honestly, the MA will be 90% of the game, I think -- not just for the degree but for the additional professionalization that it implies. I'd perhaps ask your mentors for feedback on your application packet, but other than that, hit the books and do your best in the interim. Also, keep your MA syllabi and apply for transfer credit at your Ph.D.-granting institution, but you didn't hear that from me.

From the admissions side, we generally do consider files with only two letters rather than the required three. YMMV, but it's quite possible that it won't matter in the end. At this point I'd write to the DGS there and ask the same question. I suspect you'll get the same answer, but you deserve the reassurance.

"What will you do to help me produce the best dissertation I can produce in the shortest amount of time possible?" There are others (like "What percentage of your students at any given time are unfunded, and who are they?") but this is, to my mind, the big question that everyone should ask.

You're welcome! 1) If you're hoping for a job at a teaching college, being a TA for longer might improve your chances, I suppose. But research institutions care more about the quality of your dissertation. 2) I'd be very surprised if they didn't allow you to TA for money rather than giving you money for free, but you should ask the DGS to be sure. 3) I doubt it, personally.

Basically impossible to predict. Some adcomm members will latch onto it, others will shrug it off in the larger context of better grades. If macro is a huge part of your statement of purpose, then it gets easier to predict -- it'd be a problem.

It's sort of hard to get that information out of potential advisors, in no small part because we may not be aware of our own flaws :-) But when you visit a campus you'll have a chance to talk to the graduate students there as well. I'd seek out an advisee or three and ask them. I'd also ask grad students in your subfield who the best advisors are.

This is more about job market prospects than graduate admissions, so it's not something that I'm more qualified to opine on than other faculty. In this case, I suspect that your own faculty members can better advise you. My impression here is that the quality of work trumps everything else, so the real question isn't whether it adds a line to your cv -- it's whether it makes your work better.

It's certainly possible. It's not a given, but it's worth a shot.

That's a new one on me. Universities often operate this way, and to my mind it's not unfair. But I've never seen an agreement like that for grad students.

The first thing I'd say is that rankings are really, really noisy, and if your file will get read from one place, it'll get read from the other as well. So when the rankings are reasonably close (I'd say within 10 slots, possibly even more), pretty much ignore ranking and go with the place that will make your work as good as it can be, because that's what matters most. Now, will substantive fit or better methods make your work better? That, I don't know—that's a judgment call that you need to make. But I'd push the faculty at each place to prove that they'd make your work better than the other place would.

It couldn't hurt, and it might help. I suspect the probability that it'd matter is very low, but it's worth at least reaching out.

Before anyone asks, some funding letters are out from OSU and some are not. Long story. Basically, different entities within the U. send their own funding letters. The Department letters should be coming out in a day or two. Until those arrive, don't panic if you don't hear anything.

1. I doubt it, but your track record this year suggests that something's a problem. Doesn't hurt to apply, though. 2. I can only speak for my own state school, but I don't believe foreign students are at a disadvantage. Out-of-state students pay higher tuition at the undergraduate level, but I'm not sure about the graduate level—I seem to recall hearing that they do, but only until they establish residency (1 year). It's moot, though, as virtually none of our students actually pay their own tuition: they get tuition waivers from scholarships, TAing, etc.

It's hard to say. Joseon4th might be on to part of it with the language issue, but I suspect there's something else going on too. It might be that one or more of your advisors isn't conveying the enthusiasm that your record merits, or it might be something about your statement. It's really hard to say. One thing I can say is that it looks you're targeting departments rather than people. It's quite possible that those departments don't specialize in what you do and have concluded that the fit is just bad. I'd think more in terms of finding good people who fit your research agenda. In American politics, doing machine learning, that means people Jake Bowers at Illinois, which I notice isn't on your list. Illinois isn't quite as high-ranked as other departments on your list, but trust me, training by and a letter from Jake will get your file read at the top departments in the country. So on the next go-'round I'd invest some more time in figuring out which specific people are a good fit for you, and try targeting those people.

I can say with some certainty that roughly 10-20% of the people who receive such letters respond.

I can try. 1. My take is that program ranking matters, but not nearly as much as applicants think it does. What I tell our applicants is that our letterhead will get your file read anywhere; given that that's the case, you should choose the place that will give you the best possible file six or so years from now. That's much more a question of fit and advisor than it is of program ranking. 2. US News, pretty clearly. 3. People here who have been through the process probably have a better sense than I do! But my sense is that 5 years of support, typically involving n years of teaching or TAships, is fairly standard.

It really depends. On the plus side, people who are transferring generally have better GRE scores and are more professionalized. Some even have papers in the works, which puts them in good stead. On the minus side, the rank of the existing university can send a signal, and the question of why someone is departing always comes up sooner or later. On balance, being a transfer student can be a plus or a minus, to my mind, depending on these sorts of issues. As to transfer credit, you should be able to apply to the Department for some credit, at least. I doubt any Dept. will let you course out of everything and go straight to comps, because then you haven't really had any exposure to the people you're coming there to work with (and vice-versa), so you'd be in a pretty difficult position when it comes to writing a dissertation ("Hi, you haven't met me and neither of us has really had a chance to get to know how the other thinks, but would you commit to advising me on this book that I'm writing?") So you're likely to lose some credit, but you shouldn't have to lose all of it.

If you're a good fit, I wouldn't pass you up, myself. Research experience and fit matter a lot. But in our system, anyway, it would depend a lot on the preferences of your POI. Some do come back to me with "The quant GRE score is worrisome" in cases like this, and I generally respect their wishes. So it's not an automatic deal-killer, but yes, it's a vulnerability.

Man, you people are on the ball. In this case, no, it doesn't. It means that our Grad Coordinator got an early start on entering acceptances. They're all due by end of day Friday, though I have no idea how long it takes them to get to applicants once they've been posted. (Apparently less than a day....)

I don't know how it's done elsewhere, but we have representatives of all subfields on the committee. I'm not sure how you'd really judge the files, the fit of the candidate, etc. if you didn't, so I'd guess that's how it's generally done, but I don't know for sure. I don't know that personal relationships matter so much. What matters is credibility, and knowing someone personally is one way to gauge credibility. (Note that this can go either way!) Another is to see multiple letters from the same person. I know one professor who writes letters often enough that I can get a pretty good sense of credibility, and a "top 10%" letter from this person means exactly that. In another case, I saw two different letters for two different people from the same professor in the same year, each one stating that this was the best person s/he'd worked with in 30 years of teaching. Major credibility fail. I know both of these people personally as well as professionally, but that's sort of beside the point. Does that make sense?

Here's the thing. Last year I answered this question based on what I thought the Graduate School had said it was going to do, and it ended up taking almost a week longer than I'd thought it would to get admissions news out to applicants. During that week, the quantity of anxious email that I received was quite considerable. So I am very, very reluctant to go on the record promising that news will be out by any particular date certain. But given the deadlines that I've received, late January to early February would be a reasonable expectation. andpleasedon'tblamemeifthat'swrong

No, it doesn't. It either means that you're not in the running or that you are in the running but the person given your file doesn't feel the need to call you. I get some "This person's great, I don't need to call to tell that." I also get some people who simply don't like making calls. It could also mean that the person given the file doesn't have time to call (this year, unfortunately, our call period overlaps the SPSA meeting... in Puerto Rico.) The whole faculty. The committee hands out medium-list files to POIs. Those POIs give us feedback. They're free to call or not to call -- it's up to them. I hope so. And thanks.