Poli92
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Posts posted by Poli92
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On 12/20/2017 at 11:25 PM, 16381776 said:
The government does not care... what you got your MA in. All you need to do is check off the advanced education box.
@16381776 Great posts, and I think it would be great for anyone thinking about working for the federal government to read them, whether or not they want to go into intelligence. The only caveat I would add is to the comment above. For some specialized positions within the federal government, a minimum number of credit hours may be required in a given subject, such as math, stats, or econ. In that case, it doesn't strictly matter what type of program you did (for undergrad or grad), but it does matter that one of your degrees contains the requisite coursework.
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7 minutes ago, lackey said:
Because the bills are still high or because Congress might withdraw it?
8 minutes ago, Nico Corr said:My understanding is that most positions within anything IR related in public sector don't even qualify for PSLF.
The concern that I have most often heard expressed is that people will do IBR and not cover interest, their loans will balloon while they are anticipating PSLF, and due to either their misunderstanding of their eligibility or to Congress dropping the program they will be saddled with massive debt.
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4 minutes ago, lackey said:
I put myself in a pickle for funding (being without FT work experience will do that). Basically Princeton or bust for substantial $$$$. LOL hopefully I will have your luck.
I actually first did grad school apps straight out of undergrad, got into multiple programs, and got no funding. I opted to wait and work. I really can't overstate how much I gained from working for a couple of years. I think too many people look at passing up offers in order to work as a sign of defeat, but I personally couldn't stomach the debt.
4 minutes ago, Ducky91 said:@Poli92 seconded, that's amazing! Congratulations! SAIS was definitely one of my top choices, but no funding makes the decision a lot harder. Are you in the Bologna program or DC? I'm very torn between the two programs at the moment.
I am doing the DC program. I am already in the area and I like the idea of sticking around.
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@lackey, thanks! I am over the moon about the offer. SAIS has been my top choice program for awhile.
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1 hour ago, Ducky91 said:
Have you all decided on SAIS for sure?
I received a full tuition offer, so I am nearly certain that I will be going to SAIS.
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12 minutes ago, alkalidz said:
Any other impressions you got with SSP open house?
Lot's of people interested in defense and intel work with three letter agencies. It was over a year ago now, so I don't remember a whole lot more than that.
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On 3/10/2018 at 2:56 PM, alkalidz said:
one more qualitative and the other more quantitative
My understanding is that the MSFS is not very quantitative and SSP is not quantitative at all. In fact, I went to an open house for SSP and asked a current student about the quant requirements and/or opportunities. The student looked around cautiously before stating that they do exactly 0 math or stats. He said that if I wanted to do anything quantitative, I should just go to SAIS.
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There is an admitted students Facebook page. The early admits got invites via email shortly after decisions were released - the next day if I'm remembering correctly.
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50 minutes ago, blufferfish said:
Has anyone heard about how funding is determined for year 2? Did anyone receive funding that was guaranteed for both years?
First of all, congrats!! I'm one of the early admits and someone from that group confirmed w/ financial aid that funding offers are renewed for the second year as long as the student remains in good academic standing.
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Looking through previous years' postings like...
- lutherblissett and pumpkinturbo
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4 minutes ago, Prester John said:
Oh k. So tomorrow can be a good bet right?
I would say so, yes.
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4 minutes ago, Prester John said:
9:44 on the 9th?
10th.
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4 minutes ago, Prester John said:
That’s rough! I could see a few admit by email on the 9th and both admits and rejects via email on the 10th on the results page.
Yeah, looking back through everything, I saw the first acceptance notification on last year's thread posted at 9:44 AM EST, and I received my rejection email at 4:19 PM.
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3 minutes ago, Prester John said:
Oh is it? As in emails go before the updates in the portal? My inferences are all only based on the entries in the results page!
So, last year on the 10th (second Friday of the month and the Friday before the official results date) notifications started coming out via email on a flow basis. Double-checking my emails just now I'm seeing that I did get a rejection via email that day, but it was after a period of agonizing waiting.
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17 minutes ago, Prester John said:
And I think the rejected ones get to know first seeing the results page
Not sure if this is true. I seem to recall that last year there was a gutting rolling notification, with admits getting direct emails first and the remainder (myself included) getting
updates via the portal.notified later via email. -
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16 minutes ago, ExponentialDecay said:
I'm not dismissing all rankings (as is evident from my post). I am dismissing policy rankings.
In this case that's a distinction without a difference, as it is still unreasonable to dismiss the exercise of ranking policy programs simply because some rankings will be bad, or because rankings will always be incomplete. It is a necessary reality of decision making that you must make simplifications in order to feasibly evaluate alternatives. I'm simply proposing one means of doing so that may be an improvement on the FP rankings by making clear some of the components that would factor into someone labeling program A as better than program B.
20 minutes ago, ExponentialDecay said:You're making a basic logical error. It may be that middling graduates at top 5 schools are better than top graduates at the next 5, and if you put them into boxes marked A and B for 2 years rather than making them attend classes, you'd still get the same outcome. It may be that the middling graduates of top 5 schools are carried by their top graduates, who attend those schools not to learn anything, but because they want to be carried by the reputation of those that came before.
I believe you've misunderstood or I've poorly communicated my case. I said that, "If middling graduates the top 5 schools still have, on average, better outcomes than those in the next highest five, then you could safely say that the top 5 programs provide better preparation than the other programs." In this case, "those" refers to middling graduates in schools ranked 6-10. Of course there will be those students who would have succeeded regardless of which school they attend, but across all prospective students, these are probably the exception rather than the rule. Because of that, I think, and I'm guessing many would agree, that it is more valuable to compare the central tendencies of different programs rather than the extremes of one to the central tendencies of another.
43 minutes ago, ExponentialDecay said:think rankings based on subjective ideas, whether it be what school a professor thinks is best or whether an alum thinks their school empowered them to pursue their chosen path, are useless. You're not getting a standardized answer, as everybody is interpreting the question differently, and most importantly, you're not getting at the crux of the question: is the degree significant value-added? If you asked me that question, sure my school empowered me to pursue my path. Could I have pursued the same path had I gone somewhere else? Yes I could. I'm also not interested in hearing the evaluations of people who don't work in my field. I don't care if School A prepares you well for campaigning or running an education non profit. I'd be interested to hear how graduates in the aggregate evaluate their experience, but not as a ranking. And I'd be interested to see how schools rank on objective criteria: funding, attrition, debt at graduation, placement, salaries
This may just be an intractable difference in opinion between us, but I would still point out that I did include salaries and debt burden in my recommendation. Additionally, because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, I think it is foolish to only ask those who end up in your field of interest about their experiences. Maybe you went into graduate school knowing exactly what job you wanted and ended up doing exactly that, but in that case you would be somewhat of an exception. An interdisciplinary program should be a time for exploration and ultimately a honing of interests, so it should be of some value to prospective students that alumni have found success in broadly-defined way and in a number of fields, though I would say that it would be valuable to see how these metrics would break down by concentration, dual-degree status, etc. In general, I'm in favor of more data.
33 minutes ago, ExponentialDecay said:I don't think malarkey about whether you feel happy and fulfilled has any place in this decisionmaking process.
This is troublesome. Why would someone enter this field if not to pursue meaningful work? You're probably not getting rich, famous, or powerful in this field, and there are certainly better fields if one of these is your goal, so what is driving you?
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20 hours ago, ExponentialDecay said:
The attempt to rank programs that prepare people for such a variety of professions and skillsets is in itself ridiculous. It makes sense to rank history programs, or economics programs, but to rank history and economics programs together and then try to figure out which one of them is best? Bizarre.
I wouldn't bother with the rankings. In the professional world, nobody knows or cares how these programs rank. They know where they went, they know where their colleagues went (and if their colleague who went to SAIS is a blowhard, guess what), and they know who teaches where in their particular policy field. There is also a tacit understanding (ymmv - I'm in a field where you can't learn everything on the job) that the quality of graduates from some of the mammoth programs (SAIS, SIPA in particular) varies widely - to the extent that a lot of people advise getting a specialized master's rather than an MPA. So if you're graduating from one of those, it matters more who you are than where you went (which, idk, would that defeat the purpose of going there?).
Some of the top midwestern and west coast programs are virtually unknown in DC because of how regional even this market is.
tl;dr These bad rankings don't make all rankings bad.
While I would, and did, say that there is a limit to the value of these rankings as measures of the quality of the programs covered, I think dismissing the notion of rankings altogether is rather flippant. Moreover, I think your post misses the point of a ranking by focusing way too much on the expectation of some workplace social capital afforded to those who go to a higher ranked school, rather than focusing on what people who go to higher ranked schools actually achieve professionally relative to others. If middling graduates the top 5 schools still have, on average, better outcomes than those in the next highest five, then you could safely say that the top 5 programs provide better preparation than the other programs, regardless of whether one's colleagues talk in reverent whispers whenever one's top-tier pedigree is discussed.
These rankings, however, can't be said to measure that very well (probably), because they are merely based on the subjective assessments of scholars in IR. What would be more useful, IMHO, would be rankings based on longitudinal surveys of graduates asking them to reflect on the extent to which they feel they have professional mobility. This could be composed of a battery of questions regarding income, debt burden, the attainment of progressive responsibility/promotions, the opportunity to pursue meaningful work, work/life balance, etc. I think something along these lines would sift through some of the interdisciplinary nature of IR, and the differing personal choices all graduates will make, to implicitly ask what I think is the most important question, "Has your degree empowered you to pursue your chosen path, regardless of what that specific path may be?" Once that question is answered, the major remaining criterion for a prospective student to evaluate is the topical fitness of the program.
I suppose the main point I'm trying to get across is that bad rankings have more to do with poor imagination and design than some fundamental lack of value in the exercise of ranking, and since its something we're all going to do all of the time anyways, we might as well try to make good, formal, transparent ones available. After all, ranks are models, and as George Box tells us, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."
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Also worth checking out are the contending companion articles:
It’s Never Been a Better Time to Study IR by Francis Gavin of SAIS
America’s IR Schools Are Broken by Stephen Walt of HKS
My key reflection on the rankings is to bear in mind that they are compiled from "Responses from 1,541 IR scholars at U.S. colleges and universities." A common thread through both of the accompanying essays is that traditional, academic IR is behind the eight ball to some degree when it comes to understanding and serving the modern requirements of practitioners in the field of IR.
Given that many (most?) on this forum are interested in professional masters programs in IR/PP/PA, to ask allegedly cloistered scholars where one would get the best professional preparation for a career in IR seems a bit self-defeating.
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40 minutes ago, Leka8 said:
Also was admitted. My funding email only referred to 2018/2019 funding. No mention of year 2. Presumably it is not renewable? How bout you guys, any thoughts?
I don't know that the funding level is guaranteed, but anecdotally I think that if the student is in good standing the offer is renewed for the second year.
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Got the funding notification around 3:30 EST
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Admitted. Waiting on aid email.
I received an email to check the portal.
M.A. Government and M.A. Global Security Studies at JHU
in Government Affairs Forum
Posted
Just to add on to my prior post. For people who are less familiar with federal employment practices w/in the GS system specifically, positions are classified into occupational series, as defined by the OPM.
This is also true for pretty much all of the GS jobs you will apply for on USAjobs. Your application will be compared to the OPM criteria for that role, and you either meet them or you don't, end of story. It is good to identify occupational series that interest you and ensure that whatever preparation you intend to undergo meets the OPM guidance at a minimum.