MollyB

Hey now, let's not paint the entirety of "the people in the Middle East" with one brush. Saying everyone in the Middle East "hates" Israelis or Jews is belittling, essentialist, and just plain wrong. It's also totally irrelevant to a conversation about where someone should pursue higher education. It betrays a lack of sophistication about Arabs from someone who claims to have lived in Lebanon for 17 years. As for the comments disagreeing with me about Tel Aviv: that's totally fine, like I said before, I'm just one biased opinion and I did say Tel Aviv was a very modern, cosmopolitan city. That said, I'll add that I'm a dark skinned woman, so it's possible we've experienced different things because of how we look, if you happen to look different from me.

I think, especially if you come from the U.S., you'll be very, very disappointed with the intellectual freedom you'll find in Israel, especially as a liberal. There are of course pockets of liberal, vocal Israelis, but they're becoming a smaller portion of the population, and they're especially becoming marginalized in the country's politics. In the same way that it'd have been wrong in the 2000s to equate all Americans with President Bush's politics, it'd of course be wrong to assume that everyone in Israel agrees with PM Netanyahu. But Israel is a much smaller country and doesn't have the same history of liberal domination of academia that the U.S. does. I can't speak about Tel Aviv University in particular but Tel Aviv, which a modern and very cosmopolitan city in its appearance, is much more religiously conservative than you might think. If you're a woman and not dressed "modestly," you will get harassed on the street. People might not look kindly on an American in their midst criticizing their country, especially if you have no religious, cultural or ethnic connection to the region. Others feel free to disagree with me please but, in my opinion, I think you should avoid getting a degree from Tel Aviv University and/or any other Israeli university if you want the sort of freedom of expression you're used to in American universities and if you want to avoid the perception of bias later on. There are tons of U.S. government-funded programs to learn Arabic, you might look into those. I think getting language skills should be your first priority, then you'll have tons more options for studying in Palestine, Israel, and any other countries in the region that interest you. Once you start learning Arabic as an American, there will not be a shortage of people trying to pay you to get better at it, believe me (just Google it).

I hope the WWS waitlist comes through for you, if that's where you want to be! Personally I wasn't at all interested in WWS or HKS and applied to neither; Chicago Harris was my top choice for its more academic focus and it's the one I'm weighing against CMU. So I have no opinion on comparing CMU to HKS or WWS. For what it's worth, the several HKS alums I know all work in places dominated by Chicago Harris and Michigan Ford grads -- does this mean the HKS brand / alumni network didn't add value to their careers? Does it mean these particular people were lazy or under-achieved by taking these jobs? Who knows! I don't mean to disparage WWS or HKS, I just seem to put less faith in "alumni networks" than others on this board (and maybe I'm the one in the wrong to do this). Out of curiosity, if you don't get off the WWS waitlist and HKS doesn't offer you adequate funding, what's your next choice if not CMU?

The email (copied below) said certain students accepted to the fall 2013 MSPPM were selected for the new program's inaugural year, but I assumed they'd sent it to everyone and just phrased it this way as a behavioral trick to make people feel special-er than they are. Maybe they're sending them out individually and you'll get an email soon? Either way, the classes look no different than the MSPPM ones, so it doesn't look like they're trying to keep people out and I'd assume anyone could enroll into it -- of course email them to ask for sure, I'm merely speculating. I'd assume the only problem would be having the requisite background / interest, but I was also an econ major w/ a high quant GRE, as you seem to be, and I can't think of anything else that might distinguish my background from yours (other than some work experience). The email: I am writing to tell you about a very exciting innovation in the MSPPM program. Heinz College has recently announced the creation of a Policy Analytics track (MSPPM-POLA), beginning in August 2013. The faculty members at Heinz College responsible for the stewardship of the MSPPM-POLA have reviewed your application specifically for this opportunity. Based on their review, we would like to offer you admission to this select track within the MSPPM program. Throughout its history, Heinz College has distinguished itself with its emphasis on analysis. In recent years, “analytics”, “data analytics”, “business intelligence” and “big data” started to gain prominence in industry, government and academia. In response to this increased demand for specialized skills sets by employers, our faculty developed new course offerings to build upon our already existing courses in this field. The MSPPM-POLA will provide a strategic opportunity for students with a distinct background to make an even greater impact on addressing society’s problems. The combination of analytics and social science for the public good is a comparative advantage, perhaps uniquely ours at Heinz College. To learn more about the MSPPM-POLA, please visit our website (http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/school-of-public-policy-management/public-policy-management-msppm/policy-analytics-track/index.aspx). For additional information, we also encourage you to contact either of the MSPPM-POLA faculty members who are listed below: Jon Caulkins: caulkins@andrew.cmu.edu Wil Gorr: wg0g@andrew.cmu.edu If you decide to pursue this opportunity, your scholarship award, length of program and the total number of courses required to graduate will remain the same as the general MSPPM 2-year program. Please feel free to contact me with any questions related those topics.

Have you looked at where alumni have ended up? The opportunity to learn Hebrew or Arabic could be fantastic. But do you know either already? If you don't, I'd think you'd be able to start only on one language if it's a one-year program. Arabic and Hebrew, as I'm sure you know, each have very different scripts and just learning the alphabet will take up a few weeks. I would think that, of the two, Arabic would be a more useful language to learn, but I've also seen job postings at places like Brookings (I don't know your political leanings, of course) that want Hebrew proficiency. But as there are more countries that speak Arabic than Hebrew, I'd still think Arabic would be more useful. If you're studying in Tel Aviv though, presumably you won't have the chance for (as much) Arabic emersion. ETA: As for employability, I think you're right to be concerned. I'd assume that non-partisan and center-right think tanks in the U.S. would highly value your experience, but maybe not places like CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) or similar. I worked for a prominent and somewhat controversial (at least to the public) leftist organization for a while. When I interviewed with banks and consulting groups after, I got a few snide remarks in interviews. I have no idea if it cost me any job offers, but such remarks also helped me quickly realize that I could never abide by the culture of most banks / consulting groups. So consider carefully whether the doors you shut are ones you'd ever care about down the road (and maybe you'll decide you don't care about those doors, in which case, go to Tel Aviv and do awesome and peaceful things!)

Hi all, did you all get the email about Heinz's new Policy Analytics track: http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/school-of-public-policy-management/public-policy-management-msppm/policy-analytics-track/index.aspx I thought I'd had made up my mind against CMU, and now they've gone and created a perfect seeming program that seems like exactly what I want to do post-MPP. Is anyone swayed for / against Heinz after reading today's email (or at least, I got the email about it today)? This is what their website says: You will be educated in structuring data-based approaches to complex public issues; assembling and processing large data sets to make then ready for use in analysis; estimating models that explain behavior of complex social systems to provide the levers for policy making; detecting, predicting, and forecasting important behavioral patterns in massive data sets to aid policy design and resource allocation; and visualizing and communicating the results of analysis to decision makers, stake holders, and the public. Heinz College, with its schools of Public Policy & Management and Information Systems & Management, is uniquely positioned to offer professional graduate education in policy analytics. Few, if any, public policy or administration programs can provide the breadth and depth of coursework in analytics that Heinz College offers. You will learn about data mining methods, machine learning methods, operations research/management science decision models, data warehousing, geographic information systems, probability and statistics, econometric methods, computer programming and statistical computer package programming, database management systems, data visualization, program evaluation, cost benefit analysis, and more. From CMU's perspective, this seems like a great way to differentiate themselves from other MPPs by offering courses in their area of expertise, CS. I just have no idea if, since this is a brand-new program, any employers will know of its value once I graduate. Thoughts?

I'll be at the admitted student days for CMU Heinz in two weeks and Chicago Harris the week after, so I'll report back on those two. If there's anything in particular people who can't make it are looking to find out about Heinz or Harris, let me know!

Just got an email. No money for me, sadly. Ah wells, makes my decision easier, I guess. Good luck to everyone else!

Oh wow, you should've said this in the beginning. In this case, I take back my prior advice about going to GW. You need to forget about a fall 2013 start, turn down your offers, and make a plan for how you're going to retake the GRE. On the bright side, since you didn't study and did fairly abysmally the first time, your quant score has nowhere to go but up! So, take heart, from here on out, it's pure improvement. I get the bitterness. But you should also consider that one four hour test did NOT invalidate 15 years of achievement: You did, after all, get into a program. But you got lucky, good sir. You got lucky and, while so much of success is luck, you also have to show up prepared in case luck is looking for you, as the old timey advice has it. Okay, allow me to talk about myself for a moment to make a point. When talking to one of my letter writers, I whined for about 90 seconds about how unfair and stupid it is that I had to freakin' study for a test that would take all of four hours of my entire life, and where I'd be tested on things like right triangles. "Will I ever have a use for congruent angles in public policy?" I asked my advisor. She wasn't impressed with my lazy butt. Instead, she pointed out that grad school, and any subsequent career, could be successful only if I learned to do the really unpleasant things. You know, the boring and stupid and irrelevant crap like studying geometry for the chance to get a degree in public policy. She pointed out that, if I couldn't get it together enough to do the unpleasant, but totally manageable, task of studying for the GRE, I had no business going to grad school or expecting any success in the future. I'm no booster of the GRE or of the standardized testing industry in general, don't get me wrong. My attitude now is one of benign indifference towards the test itself, but one of annoying and persistent cheerleading of anyone studying for it (like you, random person on the Internet!). I've changed career direction almost half a dozen times in the almost five years I've been out of undergrad. I thought that yeah I probably was mostly sure, I guess, about public policy and getting an MPP. But it wasn't until I bored myself to tears studying for the GRE that I realized that yes, this is really what I wanted to be doing. I could've winged the GRE and done fine, maybe gotten lucky as you have with admissions. But until I proved to myself that I was willing to do the boring (study for the GRE) in order for the chance to study something exciting and work helping people as I've always wanted to do, I would never have confidence in my new career path. Okay, I'm done with the digression about myself. But you should consider what my advisor said and how it might apply in your situation. If you didn't study because you had literally no free moment because you were working every single second to provide for a family, etc., then that's different (and is probably something that would've come up in your application). But if you didn't study because the GRE is boring and irrelevant to life, that's less excusable. Consider grad school. Many parts of it, including homework assignments that mean nothing in the real world and will help no starving child find food or get an education, will be boring. Many parts will suck. If you can't get through one boring test in the GRE, can you really get through two years of constant boring busywork? (Many parts of school will of course be very interesting and useful; that's why we're all going. Many other parts though will suck.) Good luck!

Great idea for a thread! Dear would-be applicants reading this in the future hoping to avoid our collective mistakes: If you're thinking "Should I retake the GRE?", immediately close out of this thread, sign up for a GRE test date six weeks from now, and start hitting the books, hard. Every single person with an advanced degree I talked to when preparing my apps told me to study for the GRE. For the longest time, I was skeptical. I thought "I'm a generally clever person, I've done well on standardized tests before. I bet I can just wing it." And if I had just winged it, I'm sure I'd have done fine, good enough to get accepted to the places I wanted to go (I didn't aim for the Ivies). But I promised two people in particular that I would study for the GRE in order to prove to them that I really wanted this grad school thing, and in return they promised to help me with letters, etc. It was painful. It was boring (nay, really boring). But gosh darn it, I sat my butt down in a library chair and I studied -- only three hours a week, and only for four weeks, but that was more than I otherwise would've put in if I didn't have friends pestering me. And my score was so, so much higher than it had a right to be, given my otherwise average innate intelligence. Which is all to say: study for the GRE. It's not too late. Start now, this very moment. Good luck!

I get the sense that in academe economists use Stata, the rest of the social sciences use SPSS. And b/c most PP professors are economists, they end up teaching Stata. I'm not savvy enough to know why economists prefer it and everyone else likes SPSS though...

You could always put down a deposit at GW, talk to SAIS in June, then make a decision about re-applying after you hear what SAIS has to say. Sure, you'll probably lose your deposit, but what's $500 here when you're talking about a much more expensive education slash the psychic cost of wondering what-if for the rest of your life. And if it is because of your GRE, then you need to study and retake. There are legitimate reasons why some people don't ace the GRE and it has nothing to do with smarts. But (!), the GRE is a particularly coachable test: if you study in the right way, you will raise your score. I've tutored SAT and ACT and I've gotten kids 10 percentile point increases -- this wasn't b/c I'm some magic tutor or b/c they were secretly brilliant, but b/c these tests are predictable and can be gamed. I'm lazy as hell, so I understand not wanting to study for a test that will take 4 hours of your entire life; but, if you don't want to kick yourself every time you walk SAIS, then struggle through GRE studying. Enlist the help of friends / family to pester you and harass you into studying. It can be done. On the other hand, taking GW's offer very likely won't adversely affect your career in the long run, so the cost at this point is mostly psychological. And it's only two years out of a lifetime, so when you're 80 and reflecting back on your awesome kickass career, I bet you won't mind so much that you went to one school instead of another. So you could also get over the rejection (much easier said than done, I know; I've been rejected from plenty of things in my life), and make GW work awesomely for you. Good luck!

No word here...

Thanks everyone for the anecdotes / impressions! It's all very helpful. @ abc_adams Thank you for the breakdown! It's good to know how I should prioritize. I've dabbled in R (but I have undergrad background in STATA and comp sci, so I don't suggest it to total beginners), but I know zero about SAS. In re Python: Admittedly, it would impress (or much less mean anything) to very, very few employers / professors. For anyone curious, it's used a lot by some social scientists to write scripts for data scraping and some data cleaning. I've personally used it occasionally to write very basic scripts to clean data (could also be done in R, etc). I imagine you'd have to be working in a very research heavy place for this to ever come up (obviously I'm not there yet). Btw, UCLA has an awesome guide to learning STATA that many of my friends have sworn by http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/

Hi everyone. Post-MPP I'd like to go into a research associate position at a place like the American Institutes for Research or Mathematica. Has anyone here worked, perhaps as a research assistant, at either of these places (or similar)? If so, can you speak at all about the software commonly used? I've decided to learn at least one stats software this summer, but I don't know which. Assuming I can get student pricing for a several-month license, I think STATA, SPSS and SAS can be relatively inexpensive (or at least not out of my reach). And of course R would be completely free. Anyone have an opinion on which is most commonly used in the real world? Should I bother with Python? I know nothing about databases -- would that be useful? From looking at a few syllabi, it seems like most schools teach at least a little bit of STATA. But if I want an RA position in my first year, even if not the first semester, I need to prove to profs that I have some useful skills. Thoughts or opinions? Anything would be appreciated!