cooperstreet

Here's a question: since you are later in life and are getting a master's at the same place you got your undergrad, presumabely you have roots in your area. Are you willing to move to bumblefuck, nowhere that is located a thousand miles from where you are now? Also, have done extensive coding and quantitative work in your previous career?

Since this statement reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about current political science research, I would say to read tons of articles. If this mindset seeps through into your SOP, you won't have a chance anywhere. Political Science PhD programs want to admit people who will make good political scientists, not good mathematicians or physicists.

Holy fuck dude/dudette take some time off before going to graduate school.

No its not it, and please please whatever you do, don't mistake the limits of your understanding as the limits of everyone elses knowledge. Furthermore, this: "Scholars try to understand what underlying reasons cause wars when in fact there are a group of people who get direct benefits from wars and this is very, very obvious." Doesn't make sense. People who choose to go to wars will benefit, but this is a proximate cause. There are other types of causes and they are worth studying.

Gibson is at WashU. From his bio: James L. Gibson earned his BA in political science from Emory University in 1972 (with highest honors, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa), and his PhD in 1975, from the University of Iowa. After teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and the University of Houston, Gibson became the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis in 1999. He is also professor of African and African American Studies and Director of the Program on Citizenship and Democratic Values at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. In South Africa, he holds the position of Professor Extraordinary in Political Science at Stellenbosch University. Gibson has published well over 100 refereed articles and chapters, in a wide range of national and international social-scientific journals, including all of the leading political science journals. He has also published eight books, including the award-winning Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? In 2009, Cambridge University Press published his Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa. His three South African books – Overcoming Apartheid, Overcoming Historical Injustices, and Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa (co-authored with Amanda Gouws in 2004) – trace the evolution of South Africa’s democracy in the post-apartheid era, and have become known as Gibson’s “overcoming trilogy.” His Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations: Positivity Theory and the Judgments of the American People (co-authored with Gregory A. Caldeira) was published in 2009 by Princeton University Press. Gibson has served as the President of the Midwest Political Science Association and as an officer of the American Political Science Association. His research has been recognized with numerous awards. Gibson’s overall research agenda on democratization received the 2005 Decade of Behavior Research Award, Decade of Behavior 2000 – 2010 (in recognition of his “research on democracy issues [that] has contributed to the use of social and behavioral science knowledge in policy settings and has enhanced public understanding of behavioral and social science principles”). Moreover, his Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion won the Alexander L. George Book Award (for the best book published in the field of political psychology in 2003), 2004, from the International Society of Political Psychology. Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? has received several awards, including the 2006 Award for Conceptual Innovation in Democratic Studies, a tri-annual award from the International Political Science Association Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M), and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Mexico, and the 2004 Best Book Award, Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, American Political Science Association. Papers from his research on historical land injustices in South Africa have also won two awards. .

Ok well there is no one that I know of at Rochester or Columbia where you could do anything close to that. Ditto for Stanford, and probably the same for UCLA and Cornell.

my bigger worry is your interests: political theory and IR? But you want to apply to rochester? You are simply not going to be doing any political theory there. And New School doesn't fully fund people. What do you want to study?

whose work, in political science, do you like?

one, your age doesn't matter. and two, you probably don't. At least, don't tell adcoms that you do. Get your verbal GRE up.

If you want to do formal theory the CalTech PhD in the social sciences is excellent.

" If I get into Georgetown's Arabic Studies MA program, should I specialize in history or political science?" That's up to you. " I am completely ignorant of the job prospects for political scientists." Its also irrelevant, since you aren't in a PhD program. If you want to get a PhD in political science, then that question becomes relevant. Are you asking if you will have better job prospects in the private sector if you focus on history rather than political science? If so, this is not the place for that.

You really shoulnd't pay up to 100k for a MA just to figure out what you want to study.

at UCLA, UCSD, and Berkeley I would be SHOCKED if they didn't fund all their students. They are top programs.

why don't you ask your advisor?

Non quantitative american politics with a focus on media? no, don't get a political science PhD. You will be swamped by other people doing AP with a strong quant background. What about history?

For PhD programs we generally don't care about the reputation of the university, we care about the reputation of the department. University of Washington is a top 30 department. I don't know how they place and I am only familiar with one scholar's work in IR.

I think if you're going to only do exclusively qualitative work you really need to justify why you are doing so and why you dont want to employ the methods that the majority of the discipline uses in their current research. If youre asking different types of questions that can't be answered using quantitative methods, that's fine, but anyone saying "I'm only going to use process tracing, case studies, or interviews" to do research on current topics is severely limiting themselves. Learning how to actually do quantitative analysis isn't that difficult and is more conceptual and concerned with research design rather than math based. If you have a great idea and plenty of evidence from case studies, a larger-N statistical analysis could really strengthen your argument.

"Forgive my ignorance, but if it's a requirement to study through calc II at top programs" its not

Understatement of the year.

International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly. Those are the big 3 in IR

seconding this. many people view political theory as largely irrelevant.

The things you are interested in are more comparative politics than IR.

Colgan did just move from American so while he could leave, it would seem like he's there at brown to stay. If you want to do experiments on monkeys or how people smell bad if you don't like their politics, McDermott's the person to study under.

calculus is more difficult, imo. But the typical 3rd semester of calculus isn't that useful for what you want to do. You'll rarely be asked to integrate something by hand. The concepts are useful, yes, and doing things by hand is a great way to learn them, but its a lot of material you wont use (like trig integration, etc.). I agree with whoever said that linear algebra would be useful. it will be useful for one key reason: so much shit is written in matrix notation and uses, just conceptually, not computationally, linear algebra that if you know the concepts intuitively that will really help you.

I don't see any weaknesses really. I think it shows character that someone attended a CC, did well, transferred to a good school, then did really well. My suggestion for you: do a lot of reading of political science research. Beef up your contextual knowledge, rather than just your technical skills. This will enable you to generate interesting research topics/questions/ideas in your SOP. Your math background is more advanced than much of my cohort.