hawkeye78

Agree. My own research is within the larger subcategory of intrastate conflict but looks at ethnic conflict and all the sub topics there as well as non-state actors like terror groups, rebel groups, etc. Every one of those has tons of branches that you can expand each topic in.

We don't have a language requirement here at Iowa. Being smart on math is helpful though.

Seems really shady. Big 10 schools wouldn't do this

Yeah I have the in my Facebook feed as well and read the articles they post on there. Assuming you could get participation, the idea could work but it doesn't work without people buying in and making it work. The online collaborative environment was extremely useful for my research in my past life as an intel guy. It is where I adapted the idea from in the first place. The original site started out as a place to discuss politics in a more rational fashion but after moving more into academia I wanted to shift it to more of what I described above. It is something I'm talking to some folks here at Iowa about collaborating on to redesign.

I was talking to Lemeard about this a few days ago. He and I ran/co-owned a forum that is now in a dormant state that I wanted to transform into something like is described in the OP. When class is over in May, I planned to dust it off and talk to someone about rebuilding it. The idea was to have a blog portion (similar to what the folks do at e-IR http://www.e-ir.info/) and a forum like this where more long running discussions could take place. Theoretically, paper ideas and new co-authors could be found in a collaborative community.

I would personally pick UNT but you know I do conflict stuff. I'm not sure how their judicial folks are at either place. Possibly look at cost of living and other factors if academically they're basically the same.

Agree with this. I'm not on an admissions committee but I've heard them say things just like this and I've also know people who didn't have PS degrees in undergrad.

Glad to help.

The biggest difference is the reading/writing load between grad school and undergrad. The type of critical writing in grad school is usually very different. If it is a pro-seminar on IR, CP, American then the reading load is likely to be even larger. Substantive classes usually have 5-10 articles a week on average. Many seminars will have you write 3-7 critiques/reaction papers which are 1-5 pages in length. Either a research design paper or a full scale research paper is usually required for each class. The standards between those at the grad level and undergrad level is usually pretty significant but of course that depends on the university.

Fred (the guy who teaches our intermediate methods class) mentioned the Kennedy book recently as one we should pick up and add to our collection. It's on my "to buy" list now. Did you come up for our recruitment weekend recently? EDIT: this was the next section of my syllabus after the Woolrdidge book was listed "I also recommend that you take a look at the following supplemental textbook that provides a different perspective on the topic: A Guide to Econometrics, 6th Edition. Peter Kennedy. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 1405182571."

Yeah it was useful for someone that didn't have a big background in stats (me) This is the book for the 2nd semester of Intermediate Methods which is really mostly an OLS class. Introductory Econometrics, A Modern Approach, 4th Edition. Jeffrey Wooldridge. South Western, Cengage Learning. ISBN 0324581629.

Agree. It was assigned here at Iowa in our philosophy of science / research design class and I read it at Ok State in my Trade and Conflict class. I actually used your argument on how we should apply philosophy of science ideas to IR on my midterm last semester. @Lemeard mentioned this place to me recently which is how I ended up here. I'm going to pass it along to Sara and company on the faculty as they're always looking for ways to engage potential students. I'm a big fan of these type of forums when there are enough people to provide information.

The faculty tell us to start early and they're open to co-authoring with us. Within IR, most have at least 1 publication but it varies. One guy has 2 or 3 that is one the market now (I believe one of those is under review though). The advice they give us is treat every seminar paper as a potential publishable paper or a piece of your dissertation. Ethnic conflict is my primary area of research so I try to write as many papers across the subtopics within the ethnic conflict literature as possible. I'm in my first year now and I have at least one paper that I've been told is likely a publishable idea and I'm rewriting it again and updating the methods now that I've learned more stuff. I'm also working on another paper with @Lemeard as well. I can only speak specifically on the IR students publishing but department wide, they do push us to publish and present at conferences.

Gotcha! Those are three that you will use in the first class. They also have it set up where they do a "math review" once a week where you review things like matrix algebra, integral calculus and other fun stuff Yeah Lemeard and I were together at Okie State and he stuck around to teach another year and I came up here to Iowa. As long as you can deal with the weather and the terrible parking downtown, everything else is pretty good. Brian sent an email to the rest of the grad students the other day after you accepted and told us to feel free to contact you. Before I got here the other grad students set up a Facebook group for the new folks to join and ask questions on housing, classes, etc. and I expect we will do that again. I see you also worked with Jim Scott. He was one of my 4 letter writers when I applied here. It is nice that he knows most of the folks here. Feel free to shoot me any questions on here. I didn't get to talk much with group that was here but I'm more than happy to answer questions.

One of these 3? Hagle, Timothy M. 1995. Basic Math for Social Scientists: Concepts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Lindsey, J.K. 2004. Introduction to Applied Statistics: A Modelling Approach (2nd Edition). Oxford University Press. Wonnacott, Thomas H. and Ronald J. Wonnacott. 1990. Introductory Statistics (Fifth Edition). New York: Wiley. They are the three you will use in the intro to stats class taught by Sara unless she decides to change it.