irfannooruddin

I think you'd be a very strong candidate. i don't get the list of schools though and would advise you to talk to your UR polisci profs sooner than later about your plans.

Fwiw, if I could change one thing about my undergrad/grad training, I would have taken more political theory, or at any rate have read more of it outside of class. That others might deem it "irrelevant" is, well, "irrelevant." You're preparing yourself for a lifetime of scholarship in a particular discipline. Why one wouldn't want a solid background in the core texts of the field escapes me.

In general, yes, if only because it's an appropriate level of abstraction and provides the fundamentals you need. The more comfortable you are with differentiation and integrals, the easier most of what you see in a standard first-year sequence will be. Of course, the list of math "wants" is long and in a perfect world you'd find time to take a good linear algebra course too. I am old fogey on this point and can't imagine learning anything, let alone math, from an online course. But if it works for you, sure. But if you're serious about learning it, you need to make sure you're solving problems by hand yourself. So, for my money, a good workbook would be far more useful.

Tips: 1) Study calculus. Get as comfortable with derivatives as you can. If you find you have an aptitude for math, push forward to even a basic intro to matrix algebra. All of this will make a standard first year methods sequence easier. 2) Identify some data that you'd want someday to analyze. Methods are much easier to learn when you have an application. 3) Don't every use the phrase "undergrad cherry" again. Congrats on your admission and best of luck.

Know what you are going for. That will allow you to define success precisely. And once you do, let us know so that we can offer our advice more meaningfully.

With all due respect to the collective wisdom represented on these boards, to crowdsource this decision strikes me as crazy. You should be talking to your advisors, and to key faculty at the two excellent programs to which you've been admitted. Then follow recent placements at each and see which place does better placing graduates doing the kind of work you wish to do at the kinds of places you wish to work. Congrats on your admission and best of luck.

1) For good serious students, I write a ton of letters. For the rest, I don't. Only you know which of those two categories you fall into for your letter writers. 2) The econ vs polisci bit is just flat wrong in my experience. If you can articulate an interesting question and display an analytical frame of mind, your background is pretty irrelevant. 3) More recent and research-intensive experience with a student makes the letter stronger. Letters that remember a student as being good in class count for very little. Best of luck.

My point was there are insufficient data points for that to be a basis for your decision. I've served on admissions committees and on more search committees than I care to count. Not once did the candidate's age come up. EVER. That's not to suggest that some committee members didn't factor it into their analysis, but no sensible committee would discuss potential age discrimination openly. And, (most) departments don't admit people based on place-ability, other than as indicated by the quality of ideas. I'm not trying to minimize your concerns. Lots of biased people out there. Fortunately they're countered by lots of pretty well-meaning intellectuals who are much more interested in the quality of one's ideas than anything else.

Don't overthink things. 3 letters from people who know you well, ideally as a researcher, is what you want. But connections do matter, especially if your LOR writers are willing to do some lobbying on your behalf too (i.e., beyond writing the letter).

Seconded. Today's potential professors are tomorrow's search committee members and the day after that's tenure letter writers and so on. Thank them for their attention and the opportunity and keep it short.

Don't get me wrong. As a grad student, I served as steward and on the steering and bargaining committee for one of the best and second-oldest grad unions in the country (the Graduate Employees Organization - GEO - at Michigan). I'm all about grad students getting paid. But negotiation 101 is that you have to have leverage to succeed. And annoying a DGS with demands that are not in her power to grant is not standing up for your right to be paid; it's shooting yourself in the foot. So do your homework, figure out what's important to you, and ask for it. But if you think you can parlay an offer from somewhere else to get them to raise your stipend well above your peers, well, best of luck.

I had several classmates who worked during grad school. I imagine I've had several students who have done so too, though they didn't necessarily tell me. You do what you have to do to pay your bills, but the truth is that a serious PhD program is a very serious time commitment. At times I struggled to fulfill my TA obligations and complete coursework, let alone make progress on a dissertation. Adding an outside job to that mix would have sunk me.

+1

If you can, you should make sure to attend both programs' open houses. And, yes, I think both Masters degrees would be overkill.

Fwiw, I had a good friend get off the waitlist at Harvard on April 14th. He declined their kind, if late, offer to go to Stanford instead. Point of that story is that waitlists do clear and patience is a virtue. Fingers crossed that you get happy news from Michigan. I'm biased, of course, but I can't think of a better place to spend one's graduate years. Go blue.

My two cents is that this is poor advice and a poorer use of your money. If your grades and GRE scores are high, and you have strong letters of rec and a compelling research statement, you should be competitive right away for a place in a good PhD program. And, if not, well, a MA degree is not going to help all that much. Put differently, apply to these programs if there's an intellectual case to be made (e.g., you studied math as an undergrad but now want a poli sci background before going to the PhD), but, as much as these programs might wish you to believe otherwise, these MA degrees aren't a straightforward leap pad to a PhD program.

I second everything @victorydance said above. I'd add only that you shouldn't discount your publication in an undergraduate journal. It will be a good sign to admissions committees that you understand that publishing is what this game is about and that you are capable of following a research project all the way through to publication. Best of luck.

Yes, but easy with the language of "negotiate". Make a polite request. If it's really the case, indicate that this might influence your decision. But understand that faculty will be bemused at the notion of you making a huge life/career decision for what is at most going to be a couple of thousand dollars per year. Granted that's a lot of money to a grad student on a poverty wage, but to negotiate successfully you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes so ask yourself what would make a persuasive case.

Tread carefully. Most departments have very strong norms against differential stipends across a single cohort. Where there can be variation is in things like summer funding, a conference grant, support for ICPSR etc. But the actual stipend amount varies little within a cohort typically. Where there is more flexibility and room to push is in # of guaranteed years of funding and proportion of those years that are on fellowship versus TA/RA. But don't overthink this. I'd go to a better program with a worse funding offer. In fact, I did just that and have no regrets whatsoever.

Well if there's a greater than 0.10 probability of finding the $1k, I pass it by and roll the dice on the big score, esp. if as the poster suggests, the $100 is still likely to be around when I get back.

Bing. But with one caveat: rankings are at best categorical, not ordinal, no matter what the US News & World Report might want us to believe. So there's a difference between a top-tier program and the next rung and so on, but I wouldn't put much stock in the difference between #4 and #6.

You are a student in one of the best poli sci departments in the country. Your advisors are the people who should be answering these questions. Trust them.

As someone already stated, institutional rules will differ on this. More generally, you're going to have to convince an admissions committee what the value added of their program is expected to be so that they don't think you frivolous. But no reason you can't do so.

Who knows, who cares. Too little data to make valid inferences. If you want to study political science, apply for the PhD. A smart department won't care about age. Fwiw, in my cohort at Michigan in the fall of 1996, the median age was closer to 28. There were just 3 of us who had come straight from college. And at least two of us were well into our 30s.

You're welcome. As to your question, absolutely. You can't force a committee member to read more than 3, though, frankly, you can't force them to read even 1. But those of us who do read diligently would welcome every additional data point that permits a better decision. The only caveat would be to be confident that all your LORs are of comparable quality. In a world in which most letters are strong, a weakish letter grabs one's attention and you risk its (negative) signal swamping the positive signal of your other letters. So, for me, 3 strong letters beats 3 strong + 1 weak, but 4 strong would be even better. Does that make sense?