polsciguy88

This is a very, very, silly assumption. Writing LORs is part of every professor's job, how do you think undergraduates get into top programs? They get letters from top scholars. How do they get them? They take their classes, they do independent studies with them, they get them to advise their senior theses, and they work as RAs for them. Of course good undergraduate students get good letters from top scholars at top programs. As for where you should go, I'm less bullish on this than other people here. It's more about what you do while you're there than which one you go to; they both have fantastic political science programs, with good faculty, and with plenty of undergraduates that end up getting into top PhD programs from both. If it were me? I'd go to Berkeley because it's a better school in the general sense, but I don't think I'd make this decision based strictly on a criteria of political science programs.

I agree with the above, with one caveat: if you say in your SOP that you want to study French politics, and you don't speak French, your application is dead on arrival. That being said, if you are really that interested in teaching; you should just teach highschool. Doing a PhD to teach, in the current climate, is not a strategy for success. With the demographic shifts coming, as well as a global depression, SLACs and LACs either won't be hiring or will go completely under in droves by the time you are finishing your PhD.

There's no 'research' on something like this. Randomly select 10 countries outside of the Anglosphere and Europe, then go through their top 10 universities' political science faculties (if they even have any) and see where they got their PhDs from (if they even have one). You will find that there's very few people with PhDs from US institutions - and in the case that there are, they are very likely natives that went to the US and came back. You may find the odd university or two that is an exception, but not much outside of that.

OK great? The point is that the vast majority of countries outside the Anglosphere and a few European countries do not teach college education in English nor necessarily look to hire people with US doctorates over other types of candidates. Banking on the fact that you have a PhD from a US institution will get you in the door all over the world is, simply put, a losing strategy.

Yes, lol.

I was being facetious.

Looks like they are finally mastering efficiency!

I would strongly, strongly, advise against making the assumption that foreign markets will happily hire candidates from US universities. Many foreign markets are extremely insular and are not necessarily based on 'prestige' structures. It's more common for hiring networks to be based on informal networks, not 'merit.' This is true even in highly developed countries such as Spain and Italy, but even more so in the developing world. Furthermore, the language threshold is extremely high; very difficult to lecture/teach and be a valuable colleague when you are not extremely well versed in a particular language.

My US institution matches the difference between the normal stipend and external funding as long as it meets a certain threshold. You should see if yours does the same.

Yes, same information as the other person earlier in the thread. Looks like they funded 40%ish of the applicants this year, which is a lot.

Yes. Although the email showed up in my junk folder.

Can confirm that I received an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship about 30 minutes ago. Looks like they are still trickling in - which probably doesn't help with anxiety haha. No email, just popped up in the portal.