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@Mr. Government wrote a very comprehensive answer. Just to add on to that, I think the value of the program is the people in it. A rigorous program, good professors, research opportunities, and being selective all serve to attract students, which are really the important thing. Not only do they elevate the discussion in your classes and make your experience really rich and worthwhile, they constitute your network after you graduate, and your degree will be worth whatever your fellow alumni can prove themselves to be. So program rankings and all the things that constitute them (whichever way the causation goes) are important insofar as they can attract the type of people you want to spend one or two years with. Placement is also a sensitive topic here. Placement seems to mean different things to different people, and I think that's because placement is ultimately about ending up where you want to be. Plenty of people want to go work for State Dept as an FSO, in the big management consulting firms, or for World Bank, Brookings, Pew, and other NGO think tanks, etc. But what if you want to work in local government? Or in a smallish non-profit? In another country? I ended up doing my internship in a small country in East Asia where no one else had gone, and I was really happy because my career advisors had the network to put me there, and it's been very good for my career because I came back here after graduation. It's not just sour grapes that I didn't end up at Deloitte, which takes 4-5 interns from Sanford every year. It's because I wasn't interested. So think about what kind of placement you want, and see how many people at your program of choice has been ending up in those sorts of sectors. Or if you don't know what kind of placement you want, find a school that has a fair bit of alumni in all three sectors (private, non-profit, and gov't).

Kind of agree with @went_away in terms of concentrations - they don't really matter. They don't always appear on your diploma, and on your resume, you can just as easily mention courses you took in lieu of a specialized "concentration". A lot of times, programs also have requirements about what you NEED to take to declare a concentration officially, and it could be a waste of credits to satisfy all of those. What I think you may be asking about is what kind of classes you should take. Given your interest in being a city manager, evaluation, and social policy, I would suggest taking finance, tax, and budgeting classes (really useful for local government/ non-profit no matter what area of policy you end up going into). The community development concentration will probably be promising too. I know of two schools of thought about MPP/MPA classes: you can focus on skills-based classes, in terms of learning how to do analysis a certain way, quant skills, budgeting, Excel, STATA/ SPSS/ SAS, and the like. Or you can focus on knowledge-based classes, especially if you can learn it from experts or people who have had a lot of professional experience. Most people I knew were in the first camp, being so practical as to eschew any courses where you can "read a book instead", but if you have very knowledgeable professors, the second is a valid choice, and often makes for a fascinating if not practical experience. Given your interest, I would suggest focusing on the skills-based route, but in general, this can be a good framework to help you think about why you should take one class versus another.

Seconding @Nonprofitguy, but taking it broader: networking is important no matter where you want to go, not just if you want to get into some of the big charter school education networks. Go back onto LinkedIn, and see where the alumni of all the schools that you're interested in are currently clustered (cities or industries or even individual firms you're interested in). That LinkedIn search will help you visualize the network you're going to rely on when you graduate (or even while you're a student, for internships and such), so it's a good idea to understand what that looks like right now. Speaking of looking at where alumni are, @LaughingCat, your comments so far seem to reflect more a regional understanding of public policy schools, which is definitely grounded in truth and a pretty common belief, but far from the whole picture. Having graduated from Duke Sanford, I pretty much know only one person that's working in Atlanta, but obviously a boatload in NC government, the second largest contingent in DC, and many people scattered throughout New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, etc. The same goes for schools like Michigan Ford, because the alums don't just all flock to Chicago - the geographic distribution is all over, really, as you'll see from LinkedIn. What you may also find is the same organizations or industries popping up time and time again. For example, Deloitte's federal practice makes it a point to recruit heavily from Sanford because of the alumni network, to the point where I remember five Deloitte networking events throughout the year. Also, not to quibble over details, but often, it's a friend-of-a-friend who might prove the most useful resource to you, so even if there isn't a critical mass of education folks where you end up, you can still really use that network for your own ends. (Theory of weak ties, thanks core sociology.) Though some alumni I met had very different careers and interests from me, they often knew of where I could find someone/ some org that was a good match. That's how on one occasion, I found the org I interned with between my first and second years, and on another occasion, made friends with a much older alumna. You never know where networking might lead you, which in my view makes it well worth the effort of a little small talk.

Look what happens - I leave for a month, and come back to see so many people decided on Duke! That's pretty much the most exciting thing. This fall, please stay active on GradCafé when the application season comes around again! I think the best thing about Sanford is the community there - it is so strong, vivid, tight-knit, and I miss it all the time now that I've graduated. I like to play up the network, the curriculum, the quant focus, even the weather. But what really made it an amazing two years was the people I studied with and argued with and learned from every day. And I think that's the hardest thing for prospective students to glean from all the online stats and rankings. So I hope that if you like what you find at Sanford, or if you have valid critiques about it (I certainly have many), please pass on that information here, and in other places, to help people understand what they're getting themselves into. This is a great resource, and we can all pitch in to keep it that way. Congratulations, and have fun in Durham next year!

The UCLA Extension courses do not require in-person proctors. I took the Microeconomics one several years ago, and it's "proctored online". This was a must for me as I was not in the US while I was taking this course, so if other international students are looking for something, I suggest going with them. You can check it out here: https://www.uclaextension.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=162240

Ahem, I think this survey is somewhat flawed in design... ... but seriously, I think this reflects a common misconception that people who are interested in MPPs/ MPAs must have majored in something related to public policy in undergrad. Many people did something completely unrelated to public policy, and it was only after a few years of work experience that they became interested in grad school for this area. I met so many people in grad school who came from a different undergrad background, and we all felt like we were anomalies, until we talked to each other! That being said, I was a sociology major.

@momo92, you and @dollybird seem to be in the same boat regarding financial aid! I highly suggest you negotiate the offer. You have literally nothing to lose - they can't rescind admissions offers just because you ask for more money. The best thing is to negotiate by telling them that another school gave you a better offer, like a full-ride, but that you would like to attend Sanford if you can have more money, and ask them to match it. Be ready to send them some proof you actually did get a better offer, like the other school's award letter. I suggest only negotiating with your top choices to make the decision easier for yourself. The school will likely get back to you only a few days before the deadline, because the amount of extra aid available depends on how many other people are accepting their offer and their aid, so they'll wait until they hear from more people to know how much money is left in the pool. About assistantships, most people do get one, but I knew some int'l students who had assistantships too. It just depends. There are usually other on-campus work-study opportunities. I got another internship my first year in the fall semester, which was in Raleigh. I hope that helps. Also, please reach out to the Admissions office to be connected with current students with your interests, directly email professors that you want to talk to, message alums you're interested in talking to on LinkedIn, etc. etc. Now that you're admitted students, you're definitely going to get more attention from anyone that you want to talk to at Sanford! And visit if you can. I think Sanford makes a fabulous impression in person, and the weather doesn't hurt either.

Interesting to see the results page up earlier than usual! For people who have happily received results already, this profile makes it convenient for everyone else to understand your candidacy. You can also refer to threads from previous years if you have questions (2016, 2015, 2014). Program Applied To: (MPA, MPP, IR, etc.) Schools Applied To: Schools Admitted To: Schools Rejected From: Still Waiting: Undergraduate institution: Undergraduate GPA: Last 60 hours of Undergraduate GPA (if applicable): Undergraduate Major: GRE Quantitative Score: GRE Verbal Score: GRE AW Score: Years Out of Undergrad (if applicable): Years of Work Experience: Describe Relevant Work Experience: Strength of SOP (be honest, describe the process, etc): Strength of LOR's (be honest, describe the process, etc): Other:

Please apply to Sanford! Though we have a small cohort (60-ish people per class), it's very tight-knit. I can even refer you to a current second-year student who came from a career in finance (seven years as a trader on Wall Street)... =) I know it can be hard to tell from a website or a forum if you're going to fit in at a school or get what you want out of those two years. PM me if you want me to put you in touch with him!!

@ELP14, your overall profile looks strong. I don't have further suggestions for programs to consider, but you should be a strong candidate in general. Two points: First, your undergraduate GPA is perfectly all right, and matters very little since it's been a relatively long time. Adcoms also find low GPAs more worrying if it's in a quantitative field, which yours wasn't. So don't let that be a real concern. Second, make your work experience shine through your SOP - it should be very easy to relate the current work you're doing with programs and with your future aspirations. Finally, put in some extra work over the next few weeks to nail that GRE quant score (doubly important if you're expecting less than an A in intro to micro). Go for 160+.

Your post contains what is really two different questions, so I am addressing those separately. First, you can mention professors in your SOP to show that you have done your research into their program. If you are interested in housing policy, for example, and you are attracted to Michigan Ford (for example) because of their faculty expertise in that area, you can definitely mention you're looking forward to working with that faculty member. This is not a must. It's just one way of showing that you have done your research on what the school offers, which adcoms will see positively. You don't need to have emailed the professors already at all. It doesn't make sense for you to namedrop people you personally know unless it speaks to your interest in attending the school. Secondly, you can email professors if you have questions for them. For example, you can reach out to professors that you admire or are interested in working with, and ask them questions about their work or if you could work for them as a research assistant if you attended. I found this more useful to do after I was accepted at schools, when I wanted to hear from faculty while making a decision on where to attend.

To address your concerns: 1. and 3. I think you're absolutely right: you need to focus on your lack of quantitative experience. To get that GRE quant score up, make sure you try some practice tests from a variety of prep courses so that you can be challenged. Definitely get at least mid-150s. Definitely also enroll in a microeconomics and a statistics course online or at a community college as soon as you can. It's too late to finish a class before you send in your application and show that you can get As in quant classes. But you can include in your app that you are currently taking those classes, and admissions committees will see it as a positive sign that you know your weaknesses/missing competencies and are addressing that. Since you have no quant, they'll probably make those pre-requisites to enrolling anyway, so you get it out of the way earlier. You don't really need macro for the admissions process, so focus first on micro and stats. Macro will be helpful for int'l dev, but you'd be fine taking that class during grad school. Your SOP and work experience do sound very strong, and it's good that you have a clear idea of how those programs can help you get where you want to be. That's the most important part, after all! 2. Your GPA from your master's program seems absolutely fine. A 3.6 is not low by any means, and since it's almost in a completely different field, adcoms will not pay that much attention. If anything, a prior master's is confirmation of the fact that you can successfully complete a graduate course of study.

Generally, you're in a really strong position, which you probably know already. GPA and GRE both look good, as do your job experiences and economics courses (hope you got As =D). One thing I know for Sanford that might apply to the other schools is that you will be asked to take a statistics course before enrolling. If you haven't done so in the past five years, that's the last missing piece. I would make sure to take that class at a community college or online, and get an A so that you can hit the ground running when you get there. At most schools, the public policy/ MPA core will include a more basic statistics course and a slightly more advanced one that will move faster. Having a stats course under your belt will mean you can move into the second one right away.

I would highly suggest whittling down the list of schools you're applying to for a number of reasons. 1) There's a good chance you're not actually interested in all of them. Schools are quite different from each other, not simply geographically or in terms of name and prestige, but in their focuses, faculty specializations, program structure, cohort size, school culture, likely career trajectories, and the sorts of student they attract. If you truly have a good sense of what you want to get out of your graduate education, then you should be able to narrow your list down to the schools that are actually going to offer that to you. 2) If you don't get into any of those schools, you can always wait a year or two, brush up your credentials, and try again. More work experience is a plus when it comes to the fields of graduate education we're interested in, and will give you an even better shot for funding. This is not like applying to undergraduate programs. 3) You're wasting money on application fees not to mention your recommenders' time applying to schools that you are not really interested in. Admissions committees can really tell if you are a good fit, and if you've put in the time to get to know their program. They are looking for people who are passionate about their program, and if you're not, it will come through loud and clear in your application. 4) The worst case scenario: if you add more schools to your list just because you want to make sure you get in somewhere, you might end up wasting a lot more money and 2 years of your life just to attend a school that isn't going to get you where you want to be. Practically speaking, I think a good range is between 3-6 schools. For me, I researched a lot of school sites, emailed professors, and ended up applying to 4, which felt like a bit of a risk, but it made me happy to know I was choosing all four for the right reasons. Finding that sort of confidence in what you're doing is, in my opinion, the perfect antidote for the irrational fear of being denied from all your schools.

A few thoughts. Highly suggest that you figure out what you want out of a program and apply to only a handful at the most. They can vary in prestigiousness/name/difficulty to get into, and you can remain ambitious, but make sure you know what you want. HKS is quite different from Sanford which is quite different from Maxwell. If you got Bs in undergrad quant courses, it makes it even more important to get a good GRE quant score and re-take some of those classes. You want to show them you can really handle those now, and do well. Finally, being a foreign student will definitely change the calculations a little bit. Make sure to tell your SOP especially well, and relate how this school in particular will help you on your way. The private schools will be more likely to give you money, so maybe not as much from Indiana and Bush.

You haven't mentioned anything about the programs you're going for. Assuming that you're going for some sort of int'l affairs degree given your INGO work background. Six years out of undergrad, people will pay relatively little attention to your GPA (3.23 is not low enough to worry). In general, it matters less the further you move away from undergrad. Your GRE becomes much more important, so make sure to study hard for the quant score, and get it up. If you can't manage more than 155, I would bolster your quant credentials by taking a class on microeconomics at a community college or online course and getting an A on it. Doing that anyway reassures schools that you can still cut it in the classroom. Otherwise, your work experience puts you at a relative advantage. Just make sure you come up with some good numbers GRE-wise, and you'll be a very competitive applicant with funding prospects at most schools if not the top ones.

@tyladm, you may be looking for the Psychology forums: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/8-psychology/ This is mostly public policy/ public affairs/ int'l affairs.

I suggest you post in the Am I Competitive thread (http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/23492-the-am-i-competitive-thread-read-me-before-posting/) to give people more information. I know that at the application stage, we are all desperate for some information or some measure of certainty, but asking the GradCafe community if you have a good shot at a program is like shaking a magic-8 ball. What we can do, when presented with a more comprehensive profile, is tell you what might look weak to admissions committees and how you can improve one aspect. Just going by your GRE score, which is neither extraordinary nor deplorable, we can't give you advice.

General feedback: Work experience: Your work experience looks fine. Make an effort to speak directly to professors and adcoms from schools that you're interested in, and I'll bet you'll find that many people have a similar background to you - maybe worked in a non-profit and did something unrelated to policy work, but got plenty of exposure and understood what it was all about. We all got interested in policy school *because* we didn't have an in for policy work. If you could just go ahead and do it, you probably wouldn't need to attend policy school. SOP: So the exact nature of your work experience doesn't matter - what does is how you tell the story of getting interested in policy. Make sure you connect the dots explicitly between what you did and what you want to do (after grad school) and show that their program can help you get there. GRE: If you have the extra time, double down hard on this, and make your quant score the most outstanding it can be. It's one of the parts of the application that can be gamed, albeit with time and effort, and really broadens the amount of schools you can be competitive for. After all, there are a number of better known environmental policy schools out there (see Yale and Duke for starters). One more note: It's hard to judge whether you're competitive for a specific program if it's not one of the more well-known/top ranked ones. If the program isn't big, or doesn't have a lot of alums, or doesn't have a lot of applicants, we just won't have the knowledge in the GradCafe pool to contribute. I would say that looking at the stats that the CMU admissions office puts out would be your best bet, and that you want to end up in the top quartile of people for most numbers. If you're not, beef up on the SOP and letters of rec!

You have a really strong profile: good GPA, a lot of work experience, and the best GRE scores it's humanly possible to get. You're in a great position! What doesn't come across clearly in your summary (and you note a little about this) is what you hope to do when you're done with this degree. I think many adcoms will be happy to accept you even without a super compelling story, but it will certainly supply the missing ingredient in your application. What kind of job do you envision going into afterwards? What kind of organizations do you want to work at? Weave a good story about how exactly you feel restricted by what you're doing now, and what has pushed you to go in other directions. Saying behavioral science and policy evaluation is certainly a good beginning, but the more detail you can add to it, about why you want to get at those, the better. Two other things you mentioned: 1) I think the academic reference is really to testify to your academic experience, but your GPA and GRE scores show that you're a more than able student, so I think it will be okay if the academic rec letter is the weakest of the bunch. 2) It sounds like you may not be a US citizen. I suggest you add Duke and USC and maybe something else as private institutions that typically give generous aid packages. I may be wrong on this, but I don't think public institutions like GSPP will be able to give int'l students as much. Otherwise, your list looks very reasonable.

I definitely understand that graduate school later on in your life could interfere with your personal life - it's a very different challenge to do a degree with a family, for example. But a graduate degree like an MPA/MPP doesn't interfere with your professional life - it is complementary because it can take your professional career further in a certain direction. The two are not at odds, or mutually exclusive. Especially in public policy, it is so important to have solid work experience. I wrote a little about this somewhere else on the forum, and I'd suggest you check this thread out in general:

Your GPA matters less and GRE matters more if you've spent a few years away from undergrad. If you're less than two years out without a lot of job experience, definitely beef up your GRE a lot, and think about delaying things a year or two to get that solid job experience there. It would make you a lot more competitive, and also enrich your experience at grad school. Also, look at more "Am I Competitive" posts to get your bearings about those three metrics.

What I enjoyed about public policy grad school is that I got classmates from every sector, including finance. There are about a million ways we all discover an interest in studying policy and making it better, and what matters most is that you show them how you got here. Admissions committees look for a diverse, interesting pool of people. Focus on telling how your experience doing int'l investment has led to your interest in public policy, and show what you can bring to the people around you. That's your SOP. in a nutshell. Some schools do prize public service more than others, and if you don't want to end up in public service, it probably won't be a good fit. That's why you need to know to some extent where you want to go with this degree, but the exact field you're from shouldn't be a dealbreaker. Last year, I had a classmate who spent seven years as a trader on Wall Street. He brought a dramatically different perspective to several topics in class. It was not combative, or "my way is better than yours". It was informative, and caused me to think about things in a very different way. He was a great addition to our class, and you will be too. Good luck with your applications!

1) It's because work experience is super important to doing public policy well. This field is all about analyzing other fields, like healthcare, education, international development, military affairs, etc, that someone without any experience in those fields is going to be a lot less effective and insightful. Bottom line: if your job is helping to set the rules by which someone else does their job, then you should know how they do their job. 2) It's because MPA/MPP programs don't teach you about what public policy is. They teach you HOW to do it, not WHAT it is. Methods and skills classes take up the bulk of what those programs offer, and especially the core curriculum. Subject matter classes are for later on, and even then, some friends believed that you should never take a graduate class on something if you can read a book about it instead. 3) It's because work experience makes you a better student in grad school. I saw people who had more work experience were bringing more to class discussions and getting more out of our education. I really enjoyed learning directly from friends and colleagues who had been in Iraq and Afghanistan, who had taught deaf children in Kenya, who worked with coffee farmers in Guatemala. Of course, people who came straight from undergraduate were still excellent because they have to be - there's a higher bar set for them by admissions, but why handicap yourself if you don't have to? Go get a few years of work experience: go work in a hospital or get deployed or work on a campaign or join a union or be a journalist or teach maternal health in another country. Then, if you still want an MPA/MPP, come back and contribute your ideas for doing it better.

Princeton's viewbook tells you what percentiles people are generally at: http://wws.princeton.edu/admissions/graduate-admissions-viewbook I'm sure Harvard has something similar if you look around more on their website. Generally, you want a 160 or above, the higher the better.