BFB

Do lots of very specific homework, get to know relevant faculty's publications, and be as specific as you can when you're telling us who you'd like to work with. At our University, for example, it's very likely that if you name someone, that person will read your file (!!!)—so if you write that you'd love to study terrorism with Smith, but Smith studies American voting behavior, Smith will probably conclude that you're not really all that interested in coming here. That said, don't overstate fit. It's not in your interest to be admitted to a department in which you don't fit, just to be a few notches higher in the rankings. When you get to the job market, most departments that are even roughly similar in rank will get your file read by the same range of schools. What matters much more than an incremental difference in rank is how well you will be trained, and that often depends on whether or not you can find an eager mentor who specializes in an area that genuinely interests you. Interests do change, so it can make sense to hedge a bit. But beyond a certain point, if you're fudging on fit, you probably shouldn't be applying.

Probably because changing it would involve a very considerable amount of effort. This is also the answer to many other "Why does this part of admissions not make sense?" questions. The thing that you need to understand about the admissions bureaucracy is this: however complicated and bureaucratic and messed-up you think it is, it's actually far worse. Academic institutions are nightmarish when it comes to efficiency, infrastructure, and so on. I used to get a file cart full of printed applications to read rolled into my office, which I would have to return so that someone else could read them. That happened as recently as 5 years ago. But it all works. And the main reason it works is that a whole lot of goodhearted people work their asses off to cover up its flaws and fix its problems so that we can do the best job we can. If you visit OSU, for example, you'll meet my grad coordinator, Courtney Sanders. Please bring her flowers. She'll be spending a solid week converting the different parts of your application (letters, statements, application, cv, etc.) into a single document for the committee to read. You might point out that it should be possible to have a computer do that. You'd be absolutely right. But that's not how it's done, and Courtney picks up the slack cheerfully. The people in the Graduate School work their butts off to get everything done on a timetable as well. And so on. Why are things so fundamentally messed up in the first place? I don't have the answer to that. I wish I did. Thank you! Much appreciated.

Most likely. I can't speak for the committee, but it's below mine. Not sure there's a rule. Personally, below a certain level of whitespace annoys the hell out of me because I can't jot notes. So double-spaced with 1" margins works, or single-spaced with wider margins (a la LaTeX).

I wouldn't worry about it. I'm not sure what magical process happens to connect GREs to applications—most likely, my spectacular Grad Coordinator working her butt off, as usual—but it's very effective.

I doubt there's a uniform answer to this. In our case, the recommended length (which I think is 2pp) is well below the committee's tl;dr length, so going over by a bit to include something meaningful would be a good idea.

Yes. Deans get very worried about attrition rates. Frankly, so do applicants.

Ballpark, one waiver for every two applicants. But an applicant can require a waiver either for GREs or for GPA. As to #2, I wish. Actually, I just wish the waiver system would go away. It's the Graduate School's method of quality control, but all applications are evaluated by a faculty committee anyway, so they're both redundant and annoying.

And by the way: Best of fortune to everyone in the 2013-14 cycle.

Agreed on both counts.

1. Correct 2. Naah, I wouldn't worry about it. The real question is, how focused is it? 1100 words isn't too much unless you could've conveyed the same thing in 500 words. 3. Yes; emphasize interest in modeling and if possible discuss how that jibes with your existing strengths. 4. Difficult to predict. My own take would be, I care whether you're using the right method, not how recent it is. If the existing writing sample gives you solid, defensible answers, focus on tailoring. If the answers are flawed, focus on the results. 5. Never hurts.

Absolutely. I actually think that your exposure to the methods (or more accurately, ontologies) that you don't specialize in can be crucial: I've seen a lot of smart people give very narrow talks without having any idea that, from a different ontological perspective, their answers are disastrously bad. That's one of the reasons I like our program so much

I'm confused. Why is this even a question? Our job is to make you the best scholar we can make you. If you should be elsewhere, for funding reasons or intellectual reasons or any reasons at all, the faculty at your institution should support you to the best of their ability. Full stop. (It's only fair to let us try to talk you out of it!, but once you've made your decision, you deserve and should expect our full support.)

I wouldn't sweat it. I've received an application essay that was a PDF of the draft version, complete with strikethroughs, replacements, and comments. All the comments were visible, and many were intensely self-critical.

You never know. Here, the Grad School controls the money, and admitting someone with a <4 score on the analytical section costs us a waiver. We have a limited number of waivers. So we have more leeway to admit people with analyticals above 4. That said, if your file is otherwise really compelling, you'll probably be high on the list for waivers.

Totally depends on how good the research project is If you know you've got a strong project and a strong direction, write about it, and run a draft past at least one professor for feedback. Questions are safer, but they're also (slightly) lower payoff. The main things you want to convey are professionalization and quality of mind. Those trump project vs. question, IMO. Most people don't stick with a project or a question all the way through graduate school anyway—if they did, we wouldn't be doing a very good job.

It's not optimal, I'd say. Absent any explanation, my guess would be that someone who says that's what they want to do either doesn't know what they want to do or is trying to play to my department's strengths. If going this route, I'd include a few sentences explaining what it was that made you See The Light and choose to change directions.

It's hard to weigh one vs. the other, really, but since you've got the option to get multiple letters, I don't see the harm in having the one political scientist in the mix. You want credible signals, which are best if they come from known quantities, and you want signals from people who know you well. Sounds like your political scientist scores high on both dimensions.

Couldn't care less, myself. If you're hitting the job market now, probably the best thing you can do is polish your job talk. Give it often, not just once or twice. Have it look really good, and be ready to give it in your sleep. Then, ideally, spend much of the fall jetting here and there to deliver it. Don't count on getting much work done on your dissertation until, oh, Christmas. At that point, job market drama will be over and you'll be able to focus. There are other variables you can control, of course: quality of dissertation, publications, and so on. But you can't realistically do much at all to change those when you're weeks or days away from application deadlines. Speaking only for myself, the better I know the person and/or his/her work, the more I know how much to weight the letter. But if your out-of-academia recommender is someone I don't know who makes his/her qualifications clear and gives a thoughtful and detailed evaluation of your work, I'm all ears.

As I recall, after I showed up last year someone else pointed out that signature blocks might contain important clues, and a lot of people immediately deleted their acceptance/rejection info. (As if we don't know how to use the Wayback Machine. Sheesh.)

Eww.

Well done. People are generally at least somewhat miserable in graduate school, but if it's not your thing, you're much better off figuring that out sooner rather than later. Good luck!!

Help me out... there have been a lot of pages here. Not sure what "trouble" you might mean?

Ideally, you want one publication at the best journal you can publish in, by the time you go on the market, and possibly some progress on another. I'm of the "don't push a few out just to get them out" school... I'd rather see the best you can do.

Sorry for delays. It's been insanely busy, and at some point I got logged out and had an embarrassing amount of trouble figuring out how to log back in. You shouldn't at all be concerned about conveying that information to other schools. Just let them know that your decision depends on a lot of different things, so funding isn't make-or-break, but at the same time, the increased bids are nontrivial and you'd like to know what, if anything, they can/will do to counter. Numbers up front shouldn't hurt, and some of us are reluctant to ask bc. we figure it's private. Common and appropriate to ask are two different things. It's somewhat common; it is definitely appropriate. Not many schools would say, "You're taken care of, we don't need to fund you." Some might think that there's no way they'll get you so they shouldn't even try; I think that's a great way to end up with a bad program, myself, but opinions differ. It's more likely that they'd be spurred to compete, or at least to move you higher on the list. Hard to say. But I doubt filling them in would be a bad idea. That's a tough situation. The real question is whether or not you want to do research: you say you're not drawn to it, but you also don't have much of a sense of what it's really like. I'd say you need to figure that out, and fairly soon. If you can't get involved in a research project (...and doesn't your MA qualify??), at least talk with your advisors about the experience and what it involves. When you aim for a Ph.D., you should have firmly in mind whether you want to be trained primarily as a teacher or as a researcher: most institutions will assume the latter and are geared up for it, but if what you'd like to do is end up in a teaching college, look some of them up and figure out where the people who teach there came from.

I have a few thoughts. The first is that these scenarios aren't that alarming to me, in part because they strike me as rare, but also in part because I don't see how much harm is done. If you prefer two or three other schools, why does it matter to you that you get into a fourth that you don't care about? Wouldn't you rather that funding go to someone who does want to go to school #4? I also have a hard time imagining what information I might glean here that would be adverse to an applicant's case. Maybe there are photos of applicants swinging naked from chandeliers somewhere in the vast depths of these forums, but if so I haven't found them. Even if I did, I'm after the best students we can get, period. If they also happen to be naked-chandelier-swingers, I don't really care. That leads to my next point: I started posting here, in part, because I thought lurking was a bit underhanded, and not the right way to begin a long-term relationship with future colleagues. The fact that people know, unambiguously, that I'm here means that they can reveal whatever information they want to reveal. I've tried to make the case that openness generally benefits everyone involved, so I'd hope the end result would be more openness, if anything... but who knows. Short answer to the question, though: I don't see how I can unfairly or unethically gain access to information here, or use it to your disadvantage, if you know that I'm here. That, in turn, raises the question of whether lurking is unethical. And here, I have to remind you that you're posting in an open forum. You choose anonymity (or not), you choose what to reveal (or not), with full knowledge that the entire world can read whatever you write. I don't agree with colleagues who read what's written here and choose not to reveal themselves... but I can't call their behavior unethical, either. By the same token, while I don't go snooping around people's Twitter feeds to see whether they've posted anything salacious or incriminating, I don't have much sympathy when they're called on to explain something that they posted for the entire world to see (see, e.g., the recent Steubenville trial). I confess, I do have a significant interest in tracing information back to individual applicants. And yes, I've succeeded in doing so in a few cases in this forum this year. I'd also point out, though, that applicants have a significant interest in giving me information—far more so than most realize. You're concerned about something that you write coming back to haunt you because you think you're playing a strategic game against your schools' DGSes. That's generally not true. It's much more likely that you (collectively) and I are involved in a game against the Graduate School, in which our joint goal is to extract as much money as possible from them and get it into the hands of our admits: more money for you, and less money coming out of our Department budget. That's a game that I hope to be very, very good at, this year and in the future, and the more help I get from you, the more effectively I'm able to do it.