BFB

You're welcome! I do think transparency would help, but not the statistics you mention. Posting that information would be really misleading because it doesn't matter that much. We pass up students with GREs in the 90th percentile if (for example) they're a bad fit, or their statement strikes us as not reflecting the quality of mind that we're looking for. We also pursue students with GREs in the 40th percentile, or GPAs in the low 2s, if their advisors swear they walk on water / it's a great statement / the reasons for the bad grades make sense / etc. GREs and GPAs tend to correlate with things that interest us, it's true—but far more loosely than most people believe.

Honestly, I don't recall (and shouldn't say even if I did). But I'm certain it made virtually no difference in our evaluations. People are human.

No worries. Seriously. I've seen sentences cut-and-pasted into the wrong place, I've seen a half-paragraph devoted to telling me why a different department is an ideal fit for a student's interests, I've seen undeleted outlines, I've seen a POI's last name persistently misspelled, I've seen MSWord documents saved as PDF with the review comments included (my favorite was the student whose comment on his or her own last paragraph was "Meh")... and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. It takes quite a bit more than a simple typo or grammatical mistake to put a dent in our overall evaluations.

All conditions? If it's off topic, the committee can still assess quality of mind. If you leave one out, it just raises questions. I really don't see an upside to omitting the sample.

Probably ANU would have more name recognition and would convey more substantive expertise, especially given the extra time spent there. I wouldn't worry about the lack of methods training -- Ph.D. programs all have "start from scratch" options.

I'd send the paper that better reflects what you want to do. That sounds like #1. Your GRE and, to a lesser extent, letters should alleviate concerns about math.

1) Depends on the committee and the paper. If it's one in which you've done most of the work and the professor attests to this in his or her letter, it could count for a lot. The default assumption is that you didn't do the bulk of the work, and if that's not the case you should make it abundantly clear. 2) I would be. I'd reach out to that person and ask why s/he doesn't seem to have many joint papers with graduate students. 3a) Uhh... to some extent? I mean, there's no real formula, unfortunately. 3b) GRE cutoffs are totally idiosyncratic, as far as I know. Ours are imposed by the graduate school; other departments either impose their own or don't. 3c) If it's a graduate FAQ page on a Department's website, then it's probably department-specific. Otherwise, it's probably general.

Congrats on the summa! Really hard to say. I think admissions committees in general keep an eye peeled for improvement over time, though they may be bound by rules (minimum GPA, e.g.) that make it more difficult to admit such students. There might also be individual members who insist that overall GPA means more than trajectory. Basically, like a lot of things, it falls into the category of "responses will be so random that you probably shouldn't worry about it." The later grades and accomplishments will speak for themselves. You might mention GPA improvement in your statement, just briefly, so that it doesn't go unnoticed, but beyond that I wouldn't give it much thought.

In general, you want to show evidence of professionalization. Toward that end, you're probably better off discussing a general area of interest and then a few interesting questions within that area. Interesting questions really stand out. If you haven't already, read Dina Zinnes' ISQ article, "Three Puzzles in Search of a Researcher." Think in terms of puzzles -- what puzzles you? Bringing in childhood events can go either way, I think. Some people find it useful to understand your motivation, which is important for gauging how committed you are. Others blow right past it to the more academic stuff. I don't think it's a big risk unless it takes up a lot of your space. I'd be more inclined to include something if it's really relevant to commitment.

Sorry to have missed Leo's post. My notifications seem to be sporadic, or maybe some are being eaten by my spam filter? Leo, this sounds like straight-up comparative politics to me. And be sure to ask schools about faculty who can advise you. If they don't have someone covering the politics of your region of interest, that's a big minus. Ultraultra, why not put the extra bits online as a web appendix, and include a link to it in your application essay? That gives you the added advantage that you can track which institutions are interested enough to check it out :-) ... though don't drive yourself crazy checking! Sometimes having more information can make anxiety worse rather than better....

Ohio State funding letters are out. On the plus side, this year's applicants to the University's fellowship competition did very well. There are some really good offers going out. On the minus side, there's some unusual mid-year budgetary adjustment going on that has forced me to be more cautious than I'd like. As a result, we have an unusually long wait list this year. I didn't accept anyone that we weren't willing to fund, but I'm going to have to be more careful than I'd hoped to ensure that we end up with a reasonable class size. So, as you've been hearing from others, if you're certain that you're going to accept or decline, an early decision would help people on the wait list.

So, funny story. I just got email from one of our admits, who told me he was excited to have received notification about his financial aid status. I was more than a little surprised, because I'd been told by the Graduate School that those emails weren't going out until next week. In fact, at this point they don't even reflect final financial aid allocations (although they did in this case, fortunately). Our admit was kind enough to forward his email to me. It was from a web tech at the Graduate School. The subject was "Your Subject will go here." The body read, "Hello, Jawed your message body will go here!!" The award letter was attached. First of all, if you received a similar letter, please DM me and let me know. Second, knowing how on-edge all of you are, I should assure you that (1) if you didn't receive such a letter, it means nothing; and (2) if you did receive such a letter, you might get a better offer next week, but you won't get a worse one. Third, knowing how clever all of you are, I must ask you please not to write to the Graduate School in the hopes that you, too, can receive an early financial aid letter by mistake. Thank you.

This absolutely should not be. No program accepts everyone that it would like to accept. None. There are just more good candidates out there than there are slots in good departments. If we don't accept someone, it generally means that they're not among the top 10-15 applicants out of everyone who applied in their subfield. If you think about it, that's an absurdly high bar. There's no shame whatsoever in being #16, but #16 won't get in. Hell, just having the background necessary to send in the application means that you've really done something you can be proud of.

Hi, and thank you for your service. As to your question, well, it won't hurt, that's pretty safe to say. How much it will help is really hard to predict, though. Some of the students applying to our program would bring money with them if they came, but we decline the application because they don't seem like a good fit with our faculty, or because something else in the file doesn't pass muster. So my suspicion is that it would mainly help a little at the margin -- if you're on the medium list, it probably is a little bit easier to get to the short list if you're bringing some money with you.

Hard to say in general -- different adcomms think differently, etc. To my mind, though, two publications and 3 conference papers, if they're all solid, are serious considerations and probably go a long way toward compensating for low GREs. YMMV, of course.

My rule of thumb would be, contact letter writers whenever a response from them would be useful to you. Regardless, though, a final tally would be nice.

Whoops! Missed it entirely. Sorry. Speaking only for myself, I think a JD is of nontrivial value, in that on average it probably indicates that you're better at digging up evidence and making a concrete argument than you otherwise would be. It might also indicate that you're more interested in proving an argument than assessing it in a balanced fashion, but I strongly suspect that we can counteract that tendency if it exists So yes, I'd say a JD is worth noting. Passing the bar, on the other hand, I don't know that I'd consider very much—not sure how much it tells me beyond what the JD already does.

Fatal? No. There may well be departments that aren't strong in those areas that might put your file aside because they don't see a very good fit. The thing is, though, they'd be right to do so—you shouldn't go to a good department if it doesn't have strength in your area. So I'd say forget about emailing or trying to fix the application, but do focus on figuring out which departments have legit POIs for you to work with and which don't so that you can make the right decision in the end. And thanks for the kind words

Wow... I don't really have anything to add to the excellent set of responses to this question. I do think the strategy of having one of your letter-writers mention the issue is a sound one. And I don't think most Departments would let disability be a factor. On more than one occasion, I've turned a disability around when it comes time to apply for funding from the Graduate School: "look what this person has accomplished despite adversity" can be a pretty compelling argument.

You shouldn't be. We want the best people we can get, and those people don't always have the best grades and GREs. (Oh, and—congratulations!)

Yes, absolutely. I've accepted one or two people with files like that, and they've done exceptionally well here. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to GREs, to be honest. But if I'm worried about a low math score, I'm worried about a low math score. Having a high analytical is great, but it measures something different. Or ruled in

More or less, we do—with the understanding that the percentiles don't translate well.

I can't speak for other institutions, but when we look at a file we see both the numerator and the denominator. So if it's a 6.0 on a 10-point scale, we'd see "6 / 10". Some do come through as "5.6 / other," which is really annoying, but we always do the digging to figure out what "other" is.

For what it's worth, most if not all of our phone calls should be done by now. (That said, if you get a phone call from a strange number in the 614 area code, please do pick it up....) I have to say, while the collective angst on this board inspires lots of wild speculation, it can also produce some very sound analysis. Well done, svan. Admissions decisions aren't far off.

In some ways it's a nontrivial issue. Our Graduate School's Fellowship Competition, for example, requires waivers for students with anything less than a 3.6, and they don't take different national baselines into account. This can get completely absurd: if I remember correctly, one of our past applicants had gotten an award for best undergraduate GPA in [country X]—the whole country—and they still required a waiver because, when you converted it to the US system, it was below a 3.6. Anyway. The other way in which I think it matters is that non-US applicants are sometimes socialized differently when it comes to the discipline. That might make applications seem a bit less "professionalized" to people outside of that applicant's subfield—which is one of the reasons that it's wise to pass along applicants' files to their POIs. It's true that letters are different. Letters from the UK tend to be more evenly balanced and accurate, frankly, while US letters tend to be more one-sided and positive. There are individual exceptions, whom one gets to recognize over time. In our case, the impact here probably mostly comes at the stage of financial aid: most of the political scientists are probably familiar with these broad differences and read letters accordingly, but the physicists and chemists and English professors who comprise the University-wide financial aid committee may not be.