saudiwin

Don't worry about form, but let them know asap.

You don't want to attend a program that can't fund you. It's difficult enough without whatever support they can provide.

They mostly want to know if you're an axe murderer, as it's expensive to admit axe murderers and then deal with all the legal fees. That's a bit tongue in cheek, but essentially they just want to know if you are who you say you are in your application. If you are, and you don't have any axes, you're fine!

Money does matter. Give Duke a hard look - great IPE program if you are into field research (look at the Duke DevLab), and much more reasonable to live there than the big cities.

Michigan is an excellent school, although their specialization is in quantitative work, especially survey research.

This is advisor/professor-specific. Look at the advisor/professor's CV and see if they co-author with students. If so, then they will likely do so with you (if they accept you). Having faculty willing to co-author with you is a huge help, not just because of the CV boost, but because you will learn a lot about the process of publishing and become more confident on your own.

You might be surprised how much time you spend in this career cold emailing people. The worst that will happen to you is that someone doesn't respond.

To be successful in political science, you need to learn how to network. Starting now is a great idea in general regardless who has say in what.

I'd encourage you to reach out to professors if you have a low score but think you are otherwise qualified. The GRE is a very noisy signal of applicant quality and what we really need are students who are willing to take on our grueling stats sequence... and win!

You can't and shouldn't submit a co-authored paper for a graduate school writing sample, as it isn't your work. Also, if the article is already published, then the committee can always look it up and read it if they want to. Don't get tied in knots about the writing sample. They want something clearly written that shows a strong grasp of a political science/social science research topic and also how to explore it using modern social-scientific methods. It doesn't need to be a work of great insight or inspiration. That's the English Dept.

There is some good general wisdom on this thread, but I have to say that no one seems to have cited anything on qualitative methods that has been published in the 21st century. King Keohane and Verba was ground-breaking in the early 1990s, but not anymore. Qualitative methods--as an actual method, not just a culture--is an emerging and developing field in political science with a lot of work going on. It is a small community, but it is vibrant and very interesting. Where it will end up, I don't know, but for a good modern overview, read this recent book on process tracing. The reason that qualitative methods isn't going anywhere is because statistical, or quantitative methods, are going through what has been called the credibility revolution. It's way too complicated to get into here, but suffice it to say that statistical models are being put through a lot more scrutiny than before, and that findings are no longer taken as golden just because the authors did what the econometrics textbook told them to do. I think it's getting to the point where dissertations that rely on cross-national regressions are looked at with a dose of skepticism unless there has been some serious qualitative analysis on the back-end. In addition, I would say that field experiments and qualitative methods are closely linked. It is difficult to pull of a field experiment without doing serious qualitative work. As far as departments goes, as others mentioned, all top departments require a quantitative sequence, and it's generally recommended to go beyond the required courses. But there is wide variation in whether departments have qualitative methodologists or people who are well-known in that field. In particular, I would stay away from Rochester and NYU, as they tend to focus almost exclusively on statistical, experimental and formal methods. Feel free to ping me if you want to discuss where the qualitative methods scholars are. I think my own program (UVA) is pretty good, but I am certainly biased in that regard.

Dear heaven what a patronizing reply, PoliticalOrder. The humanities exist because people care about the questions they pursue. Political science similarly exists around a specific set of questions. Re: al Ghul, the methodological boundaries of political science differ greatly in the US than in Europe, although there are US academics who hew more closely to the European field. American political science is much more about creating rigorous research design than it is about exploring deep questions of truth and meaning. But that is not to say that the humanities are not respected in the US. There is a big difference between the fundraising-oriented goals of university administrators and what people in general appreciate.

Brown has some very well-published faculty, but they are considered to be an "alternative" school in terms of methodology. A good place to be if you are a free spirit.

If you do good work at OU, you should consider transferring to a different school. But if you can't hack it for life reasons, no worries. You can still get a TT job out of OKU, you just have to make the opportunities work for you and plan on being at a smaller college somewhere local. The great thing about having some life experience before grad school is that you know that there isn't a one-size solution and so much of your career are the choices you make. Same thing with grad students. If you work your butt off and become the best grad student you can be, doors will open.

In the last two years I've been a PhD student, I think what I've learned about this whole question is that the PhD is a very individual process. Even placements can be very deceptive because they may differ depending on the field you choose to specialize in. I.e., your program may place some methods grads in great places, but its IR program is sub-par and struggles to do so. In addition, placement depends on the dissertation you choose to undertake. A well-done, relevant research program will probably get you a job even if you are at a lower-ranked school. On the other hand, having crappy research from a top school will still be a tough sell even if you have a name brand degree. Professors aren't idiots; they don't just hire people based on where they went to school. Let's just say there's a high correlation between where you went to school and the quality of research you do. Second, its not just the ranking of the program, its the resources that the program offers. This is where the Ivies and other private schools can really out-do state colleges. Having a good bank of internal funding for research along with other internal opportunities is a huge boon to a grad student because its hard to establish your name in the field without a prior track record. As another poster mentioned, you may well change your ideas concerning what you want to research when you're in the program, but large and well-funded programs tend to have opportunities regardless of the direction you go in. So can you go to a smaller program and still graduate and get a good job? Absolutely. Remember that there is a huge selection bias problem in evaluating graduate programs. The graduates of Harvard self-selected to apply and were further selected on some kind of hopefully meritocratic criteria. You cannot compare the outcomes of Harvard/Stanford/etc. v. lower-ranked schools because the students are not equal across programs. In other words, the reason they do so well is not just because they have more profs in more subfields, its also the training and talent they bring into the program, which is much harder to measure. (C'mon, fellow grad students, this is the basics of the fundamental problem of causal inference...) If you attend a less well-known program but work hard and are willing to teach yourself things that other grad students get in class and from faculty, then yes you can do it. I've met plenty of people who have. But its going to be up to be much more up to you and how you can make opportunities for yourself. If that challenge intimidates you, remember that there are jobs for Poli Sci PhDs outside the academy. You can get a PhD from a lower-ranked school and have a very satisfying career doing really cool things even if you can't crack the tenure track door. Feel free to PM me if you're making choices about "lower-ranked" programs.