TheGnome

It's not optimal, I'd say. Absent any explanation, my guess would be that someone who says that's what they want to do either doesn't know what they want to do or is trying to play to my department's strengths. If going this route, I'd include a few sentences explaining what it was that made you See The Light and choose to change directions.

I think many (most?) people who do Civil War stuff tend to identify with the IR camp, though people from both fields produce good work in that area. 
 
 
 
Beware of the wrath of the Coach!!! 

Regions?  We don't need no regions!  I DON'T HAVE TO SHOW YOU ANY STINKIN' REGIONS!!!

Yeah if a school cannot offer you money there is nothing unethical about applying to other programs. There's nothing unethical about applying to other programs even when you are admitted and attending a program.

I don't think what you said about sianover's Q score is necessarily true cooper, unless you have insider knowledge on the admissions process in every one of those schools.
 
Sianover, 158 in Q is not a plus, and you can reasonably expect that to hurt your chances at top programs.There is always the possibility that your file will be weeded out in some places if they have a high GRE cutoff, and if they are very serious about it. However a quick search in the gradcafe forums will reveal that people have been accepted at top institutions with similar GRE scores pretty much every year. If you have a solo peer-reviewed publication, good letters, and a well written SOP, there is no reason why those should not compensate for the low Q score.
 
A last note - Farhad Karzami is an emeritus professor. I am definitely not the authority on this, but I think it is not a great idea to drop an emeritus prof name in your SoP as your primary person of interest. 

It doesn't work that way in political science, not normally anyway. If you think the fit is good, apply. There is no need to contact professors

It doesn't work that way in political science, not normally anyway. If you think the fit is good, apply. There is no need to contact professors

No. Abstracts do not belong on a CV. What you could do is a create a professional web presence for yourself, post the abstracts there, and include the URL with your application materials.

Good point. Obviously you know better.

There are a lot of posts here from the 2011-12 season, but none from the 2012-13 season. So, those of you who started their PhDs in Fall 2013:
 
First, congrats again. I hope everything is going great for you. 
 
Second, if you see this post, please consider sharing your profile, SOP, and advice with the rest of us who are still struggling with that agonizing process you just went through last year. You can't believe how helpful these are for the current applicants. I know that I read every single sentence of every SOP posted here 1203918209 times before writing my own. The deadlines are approaching quickly too, so again, please consider contributing.

Not as helpful as the 2011-12 season.

I am not sure if my experience is an exception, but perhaps I might be of some service. I will briefly discuss my long trip below.

At 18: had one good semester of college at a very good (top of the second tier) public university, then got all Fs the second semester (except for jazz band of course). GPA there: 1.8

At 19: didn't tell the parents about the Fs; faked going to college for a year with forged transcripts and whatnot. GPA: Still 1.8.

From 20-22: worked as an ice cream scooper for a summer and a semester; confessed to flunking out; transferred to a tier 3 midwestern Catholic university. One good semester; one semester with all Fs that were converted to Ws by a very kind dean; one other semester of all Fs converted to Ws due to the really kind dean. GPA: now somewhere in the 2.1 range.

From 22-25: move to the south; after being rejected from the military, I enroll at a directional state university that only recently went to competitive admissions. Try to flunk out again; given reprieve. Finally get my act together and don't get a B after that. Final GPA: 3.3, but from the really bad school.

So, I had no econ background; no math background save for the semester at Georgia Tech; no rigorous poli sci background (hadn't heard of regression or the APSR, AJPS, or JoP until grad school).

GRE: 700 verbal, 800 math. Apply to 10 schools throughout the midwest ranking from as high as 3 to as low as 40 or so. Get into a master's program (unfunded) and a top 25 Big Ten school (though one that was moving down in the rankings).

At 25: start the PhD program at said Big Ten school. Learn only possible advisor is taking an offer at another university. Spend two years preparing to transfer.

At 27: Apply to 14 more places with more geographic mixing but much more targeted to what I want to study. Do OK -- get into about half maybe. Eventually transfer to my current home, Rochester. Very happy here.

The point of the story is: the probabalistic nature of the admissions process can be to your advantage. A well-written SoP can be a saving grace, as can a good quantitative score on the GRE. If you have the option of getting letters from known people, that always helps. Top 10 or even Top 25 might not be probable. I am not talented, nor do I have any pedigree to help me, nor do I have any special skills. I am very, very lucky: somebody on the adcom at the place I got in the first time found something they liked amid all the stuff not to like (and there was plenty of it!). The posters before have every reason to voice cynicism, because the process is probabilistic even for the best applicants. But maybe you'll be lucky too. So apply broadly if you can; something good can come of it.

This section is predominantly for political science PhD applicants - although there are occasionally people who talk about MAs here too. When people do talk about MAs here, they typically refer to either terminal master's programs in political science departments, or MA programs that are more or less designed to feed students into political science PhD programs like Chicago MAPSS or Columbia QMSS. I guess QMSS grads can vary more in terms of their substantive areas of interest, but anyway. Oh and needless to say, academic study of IR is done under political science departments in the US.
 
The kind of master's programs that come to mind when you invoke the keywords"professional / international affairs" are found in places like Gtown SFS, SAIS-JHU, Tufts-Fletcher etc. These are very different from the first group of programs in their focus and training. The expectations for admission can also differ widely between the first and second types. Therefore, if you are interested in Int'l Affairs master's programs you will find a more helpful crowd in the other forum.
 
Best of luck in your apps!

A thread for faculty to post about our perspectives and answer prospective students' questions.
 
Topics covered elsewhere, so far:
 
Fit vs rank () ()
The admissions process: inside the sausage () ()
Being admitted without funding ()
Rejecting students because they wouldn't receive funding? ()
Your place in the overall scheme of things ()
Should I disclose my admissions results to my schools? () ()
How can I fix my application / do better next year? () (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946641) (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946705)
Is visiting schools useful? (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057945706)
Rates of completion (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057945757)
Does a substantive disconnect between college and grad school hurt me? (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057945829) (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057945950)
Do top schools not compete for students they think they'll lose? (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946267) (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946339)
How do faculty read applications? (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946333) (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946611) (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946691) (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/30270-welcome-to-the-2012-2013-cycle/?p=1057946703)

"Should I Avoid T-20 PhD Schools Because UnderGrad GPA?"
 
Absolutely not. If the rest of the application - especially the MA GPA - is as good as you say, you should be competitive anywhere.
 
 
Honestly I don't see how Harvard and Yale is too far out yet Princeton isn't - but then again, I don't think think you should shy away from applying to top programs.
 
That said - while it is important to have a good profile (including a good fit) to get into top schools, a non-trivial part of the process is governed by luck. Therefore it would be a good strategy to spread out your applications.

I think the best advice anyone can give at this point is to improve every part of your application to the extent that you can. Peer reviewed publications should definitely be a plus, but how big a plus that would be depends on so many factors that it is hard to say. However, if you think you can get better GRE scores, I think you'd do yourself a favor by taking it again. 

I'd agree that this seems like a natural one to pin. That's up to the moderators though!

By way of predilections: I am no technician, but my work is probably more technical than average.  My program is one of the more technical ones.  So, this should probably be read with a large handful of salt.  I am also no fan of positivism, which seems to be the issue just as much as technique is.
 
It might not be obvious during the very first semester---where almost all of the focus is on gaining competence with the basic building blocks of technical work---but eventually one gets to a point that the numbers are no longer "meaningless."  This is especially evident when the numbers are the results of a very theoretically-motivated statistical model.  Think about ideal point estimation.  For those that don't know about this just yet, ideal point estimation refers to a class of methods by which one inputs congressional votes (so you have a big matrix of yeas and nays with as many rows as there are congresspeople and as many columns as there are measures voted upon), uses that data in conjunction with some spatial theory of voting, and then outputs estimates of where each congressperson falls in unidimensional ideology space.*  Those estimates mean something, though that meaning is conditioned on how we imbue the model with theory.  Ideal point estimation papers can be quite technical.  The seminal paper by Poole and Rosenthal in the 1980s made such intense computing requirements that, at the time, it wasn't replicable.  Today's bleeding edge stuff is Bayesian and uses markov chain Monte Carlo methods.  Just looking at the papers can be very intimidating, but the process is still simple:  get votes, use theory and stats together, and then interpret results.
 
So where is the science?  Does the fact that something is technical and difficult mean that it's scientific?  Maybe?   Who knows?  Who cares? Despite all the Greek letters in their paper, Poole and Rosenthal didn't really test any hypotheses in their paper:  they just measured political ideology.  Most people would probably call what they did "good science."  It was certainly deductive:  if you buy this spatial model, and if you buy these data, then you should buy the results.  Being deductive is probably a criterion for being "sciencey" for most folks, but it definitely isn't unique to data analysis.  Rawls was a pretty deductive guy.
 
That brings us to another point:  if you don't like math, or functions, or their meaningless, or whatever, then this generalizes to your views of formal theory.  But some of the very best theorists ever did things that were very technical but also very normative:  Arrow's theorem, the work of Amartya Sen and John Harsanyi, the welfare theorems**...these things are deductive and they're technical but they're not in the vein that the OP mentioned.  But when you learn theory, you again start from annoying building blocks that seem not to mean anything:  truth tables, and set theory, and real analysis, and so on.  These are just the technical requirements for being able to engage in higher-level thinking later on.  While your average political philosophy scholar likely has little to say to your average applied empirical political scientist, they might have quite a bit to say to a formal theorist.  Heck, a few years ago we took on a new student that already had a PhD in philosophy but that wanted to do philosophically-motivated political economy.  He's a remarkable guy, but it's good evidence about how these things can work hand in glove.  
 
Note also that the best users of theory also think hard about what the theory means:  Akerlof's diatribes about the real meaning of the Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium "utopia" are really interesting reading.  The same for many of Sen's works.  And again, this isn't just specific to mathematical theory:  Schelling was a theorist that used no theory.  
 
Speaking in a language of models means that the numbers are imbued with meaning from the start.  But most technical classes are about competence, not modeling.  With enough perseverance, you get to use all these boring tools in fun ways, and that's really rewarding.  Whether it adds up to good science from your average positivist is anybody's guess, but who cares what they think, anyway.
 
----------------------
*:  Ideal point estimation is just one kind of data reduction technique, and it's used in political contexts other than the Congress (e.g. the courts).  Most of the statistical machinery comes from psychometrics, where they wanted to estimate, say, intelligence using test answers.
**:  Science envy and economics envy are everywhere, and I just contributed to the problem by focusing on economic theorists.  I could have thrown Riker or Shepsle or McKelvey or Ferejohn or some other really smart theorist from a political tradition in there.  The economic examples are more obviously normative.

I think the best advice anyone can give at this point is to improve every part of your application to the extent that you can. Peer reviewed publications should definitely be a plus, but how big a plus that would be depends on so many factors that it is hard to say. However, if you think you can get better GRE scores, I think you'd do yourself a favor by taking it again. 

As I recall, after I showed up last year someone else pointed out that signature blocks might contain important clues, and a lot of people immediately deleted their acceptance/rejection info. (As if we don't know how to use the Wayback Machine. Sheesh.)