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I graduated from Duke this May, and worked with many faculty who specialized in poverty, domestic and international. Highly suggest you look into Sanford's program, which is strong in social policy overall. Some names you can look into: Robert Korstad, William Darity, Anna Gassman-Pines, Sunny Ladd (who's retiring), Anirudh Krishna, Carolyn Barnes, Elizabeth Ananat. Closely related would be health policy and education policy, both of which are strengths at Sanford too. Another great social policy program is Brandeis University's Heller School. I was seriously thinking about applying beforehand, and decided not to move back to New England.

Doesn't really matter where you do it, or even if you do it online, so long as it's accredited. Admissions committees don't care, and just want to know that you did it (and hopefully did it well). You should try to make sure they count for credit hours, so you'd get a transcript when you're done.

You have a promising profile, so don't knock yourself! I say so because the practice GRE scores are great (getting above 160 in quant is desirable), and you have what sounds like interesting journalism experience. When it comes to age, you're in the middle of the pack for public policy grad students. Our average age was like 27, and there were more than a few people who were 30 years old in my cohort, so don't worry. Age and experience are real assets when it comes to public policy grad school. For suggestions, I would say: Take care of econ and stats sometime in the next year. Take them through an online course (like UCLA or Berkeley's) or community college. As long as it's an accredited school, and you receive course credits for them, it doesn't matter what institution or name. Get an A to show you can handle the classes, and you'll also go much further during school with them - coursework will be a LOT easier. Your resume could use some sustained full-time work. I suggest you spend at least a year at your next job in DC. Don't feel bad about getting in touch with old professors. Four/five years is nothing. Some people come back after a decade, after all. (I've heard stories!) Maybe attach samples of your work from back then. If you attend your econ/stats classes in person and develop a good relationship, you could even use one of those professors. Once you have a firmer idea of your subject area (maybe through more work experience), you'll get a better sense of what schools are best. Starting by just going through websites for the top 30-40 schools should help you identify which have focuses/ professors I was interested in. I will be frank and say I've never even heard innovation policy, but you may want to look for social entrepreneurship focuses, which may be the closest thing. New programs aren't necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the people involved, and where it is. IMHO, I'd go for a more established program, because what I mainly value about higher ed is the alumni network that it comes with. That's how I've gotten every single job in my career so far. Good luck!

I suggest you look more at the Political Science forums and get advice from them for the academic track, because a PhD in public policy has more in common with other PhDs in polisci, sociology, etc.: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/36-political-science/ 90% of people here are pursuing a master's degree in public policy/public administration, which is usually a terminal degree, so we're hoping to be practitioners rather than academics. The application processes and criteria are very, very different. A side note: I've actually never heard of int'l applicants only being asked for TOEFL instead of GRE. If anything, in my experience, int'l students are usually asked for more qualifications, not less.

@gauravprad, your financial aid office at SIPA is in the best position to help you. They'll know your situation better, and have some suggestions about how to defray your costs (especially living expenses), and potentially be in a good position to find more work-study jobs, something to earn money during the year, etc. I would definitely get their advice, and follow up on every possible lead they can find before you go to any other outside sources. Another option is to do recruiting, and try to land a very lucrative job with consulting firms or other companies sometime this fall. It probably is much harder for international students, but could still happen. If you accept an offer with a position early on in the year, it will make it easy to pay back any loans with high interest that you may have to take out to make ends meet. Good luck!

There's also nothing like direct service experience to whet your appetite for working in policy. For example, tutoring or teaching to get in to education policy, Peace Corps for international development policy, union organizing to get into labor policy, Americorps for a lot of different things, etc. etc. It really depends on what you're interested in, and if you're thinking about pursuing a public policy related degree, be aware that it will be much harder/ seem unintuitive to go into the field after you get your degree. If you do it before grad school, it will be a clarifying experience, and bring a lot of depth to what you learn in the classroom afterwards.

You sound like a really great candidate, with good work experience, language abilities, and good funding, and should have a really good shot at getting into these schools. In that case, taking an intro microeconomics course is less to boost your chances of getting in (which are already high), and more to help yourself acclimate to studying microeconomics. Public policy school throws an incredible amount of things at you in two years, and it will make your first semester much much easier, and you can spend more time taking advantage of other possibilities if you prepare yourself this way. More econ knowledge would've made the difference between spending two hours on problem sets and spending 4-6 hours! For that reason, getting a leg up on stats wouldn't hurt either. =)

I'd like to put in a word about quantitative experience in an MPA/MPP degree. When I started, I found that many people in my cohort, like me, had been scarred by math and hard science in high school and college. Years later, I expected to be bad at econ/stats, but had resigned myself to learning some as a part of the degree. To my surprise, I found that the math was not complicated (mostly algebra, a little calculus), and that it was above all finally relevant to something I was interested in (unlike the misery of trigonometry!). More to the point, because we were doing a graduate degree, most people had not taken econ/stats while we were in college, and were encountering it for what seemed like the first time. We all did fine, and I at least came out with a genuine appreciation for quantitative analysis. I'm now in a job where that understanding is very useful! So lack of experience in quant isn't a bad thing or even a new thing for people looking into an MPA/MPP degree, and certainly, lack of ability can be changed too. Don't count yourself out before you really apply yourself!

Before I started graduate school, I wished that I had established some good life patterns that I could try to hold to during my time in school. It's hard to start doing stuff in grad school at the same time that you're starting so many other things, but if you'd already started it beforehand, it's easier to keep up. For example, shopping/ cooking regularly so you don't buy food all the time, a set time to go to the gym or go running, etc. Honestly, those are the things I wish I had been able to provide for myself more systematically during that time, because school becomes king and a lot of other stuff go out the window. Make a good effort to keep your work-life balance! I would also start looking at what resources exist around school to gain the kind of skills you want, and try to get on some listhosts/ calendars early. I only found out in my second year about these social science research workshops that were being held in a building across the street, and really wished that I'd done it my first year. So the earlier you can get into those sorts of things, the more you'll be able to take advantage of it.

My favorite paragraph. =) I think it's great to be planning this far out, and to have a vision for what you want to end up doing. That being said, mine evolved so many times while I was in undergrad, and even afterwards (and even last year in grad school!) that I have learned to be open-minded to a lot of possibilities that previously seemed impossible.

Many schools pay current students to be admissions ambassadors as a part-time job. These students are the ones responsible for giving you tours when you visit, sitting down to have conversations, etc. Some of them are also tasked with social media outreach and places like Gradcafe. This all seems pretty normal and above-board to me. I also don't find it upsetting because I haven't read any serious misleading or overly optimistic posts on here, because these students aren't being paid to say things they don't mean - they're being paid to spend time on the forum and make sure that people who have questions have somewhere to turn to. (Now I feel like I have to state that for the record, I was never one of those folks. =D)

I will be graduating next month, and we had a loan counseling workshop recently where we heard an earful about what happens when you actually try to go in for loan forgiveness. It's actually a pretty unattractive option, because you may actually not have a lot of loans left after your ten years of work and repayments, and you're paying more interest than you already would. In some cases, the forgiven loans actually count as taxable income, so it means a huge chunk out of your pocket anyway. I highly suggest that you should do more research on exactly how that works before counting on it. Even if it exists for the next ten years, it's no cakewalk.

I think Heinz is probably a great program, but I don't know much about it. I can tell you that you would probably be paying a little less in terms of cost of living in Durham, and I can assure you you'll probably be able to get the OMB/GAO sort of position you're looking for if you come to Duke. Every year, we have two to four interns at GAO, who generally also are extended full-time offers in their second year too. We have a really good DC alumni network, and I know three or four friends who are now at GAO and one who is heading to OMB. We also have two alums that I met this past year in OMB, and got interviews there for summer internships through that connection. I will say of the people I meet who intern or work at GAO or OMB, not all of them decide they want to return for the summer. =) Oh, and we send about 20% of our class to federal consulting firms (Booz Allen, Deloitte, etc.) Whether this is good or bad I cannot tell you, but I can assure you the possibility is very strong. This is mainly due to a huge alum presence at the federal consulting firms, and they do several recruiting events at Sanford over the year, hire 4-5 summer interns, and extend them full-time offers as well as offers to some other folk. Hope that helps.

Glad I could help!

Durham is very affordable. $1,000 per month is how much you may spend if you live entirely on your own, but people can spend as little as $400-500 on rent living with a roommate. I also know a bunch of people who have on-campus jobs or other internships besides the work assistantship included in our financial aid packages. It's not fun to juggle this with graduate school, but it can bring in a few thousand extra. Have you tried negotiating your package yet? If you can leverage a full-tuition package, and you really want to go to Duke, I suggest you get in touch with them right away, send them documentation about your better offer, and ask them to meet it. Don't forget that you'll be doing a summer internship which can earn you a good amount of money if you take a job in the private sector ($6000-7000 for ten weeks in consulting). I went with a non-profit and received ~$4K from the MPP Internship fund. I don't know anything about Virginia and their program, but I think the ranking isn't really the important thing. In my opinion, the curriculum at Duke is very thorough, we also have a tight-knit alumni network, and there's the unquantifiable benefit of going through your graduate years with an excellent cohort of classmates. This degree is worth the money.

International development is a common area of study here. We have the Duke Center for International Development which oversees the Master of International Development Policy program. There's a lot of professors and courses that you'll be interested in, so I suggest you look at the courses on our website. People have done really interesting work on cookstoves in India, or forestry management in Indonesia, water management or healthcare services in India, etc. etc. We have a lot of students who end up doing this work, many who came out of the Peace Corps. If you PM me, I can definitely put you in touch with a few second-year or first-year MPPs concentrating in international development. We even have someone from Pakistan who is a second-year MPP. =) I can't say about the World Bank, but I know we have an alum or two at the Urban Institute, and some people who come from working there to the MPP program. My internship was for a social service agency in a small developed country in Asia. I did a program evaluation, observed the program in action, and wrote up a report, and it was a great experience to work in another language. My two projects at Sanford have actually been for the same client, the state community colleges. It is fairly common to work with a local agency or local/state government for your spring consulting project and your master's project, but I also know people who are working for governmental agencies in China for their MP, and someone else who is doing a project for the World Bank. There's a wide range out there! Please PM me if I can share more about my personal experience.

Second-year MPP at Duke Sanford here. I'll try to give you my perspective, and hope that someone else from Michigan will chime in as well. Academic vs. practical emphases: I agree that Sanford definitely has a fairly practical emphasis. We have quite a few professors of the practice who aren't doctorates in their field, but have decades of experience in North Carolina politics, housing and transit policy, national security, etc. etc. The spring consulting project (first year) and master's project (second year) are both client-based, and you end up doing a lot that has a practical application. I really love it. There are 2-3 MPPs every year who end up going onto the PhD track at Sanford, so it does happen. Many graduates end up in policy analyst positions where they are either creating or translating policy for the mass public/ decision makers, so you often straddle that academic and applied divide. Policy area focus: Your focus is also one of my focuses! I have found Sanford a great place for that. We have several education policy professors (and some cool ones joining us in 2017), as well as a whole center on child and family policy which has gathered many social policy professors. There is definitely a big space for your work, and many fellow students who are doing what you're interested in. Quality of life/ school culture/ town culture: We have a tight-knit cohort of 60-70 students each year, who spend a lot of time with each other outside of doing problem sets and team work together, like for happy hours or parties outside of school. There's a really bustling extracurricular scene. I spend a lot of time on school work, because Sanford is not an easy school, but I think it's the right amount of busy/ hard work, and not punitively so. I don't know if we have a type. Maybe we do, but I don't know about it. As for town culture, Durham is small, but is growing quickly, and Raleigh is half an hour away. Durham is a fascinating place to observe gentrification, as housing prices have been doubled and tripled over the last decade. Downtown is absolutely mushrooming luxury condo developments. It's sad but interesting. The silver lining that we get to enjoy are the hordes of food trucks, craft breweries and cideries, bars, cafés, and restaurants. I was even approached to join a roller derby league when I was at the farmer's market. The public transit is not that great, and you do need a car to get around, but I came from a large city in the midwest, and would not have guessed that I'd like this place as much as I do!

Wow, I'm sorry you have to make that decision. Government red tape can be a !@#$%. The only thing I can think of is to suggest you look at which school offers more aid. Duke is typically pretty generous, but I'm not sure for international students. You should search around on the site for what Columbia's numbers are, or even just ask the schools directly and then choose the school that seems to offer less aid. I think you should still apply to both - don't rule yourself out until they do. There's always a chance one school could be very generous with aid, and basically give you something to a full scholarship. =) Good luck!

Open House is next weekend, Friday, April 1st! Is anyone here coming? Look forward to having you guys on campus. Weather should be much better this year... </reallysubtlebump>

I'm confused as to why you can only choose one school. Is this a scholarship application from your country's government that they will only give you to one institution, regardless of which one eventually accepts you? It doesn't make much sense to me, because usually, you should only be making that choice between one school or another if you're already accepted. If you're just looking to understand more about each of the programs, I suggest you contact each program to ask to speak to a student concentrating in environmental/clean energy policy in the program. They can talk to you about courses, experiences, what the opportunities are like, and help you gain more insight on if that's where you want to be.

Having seen the kind of jobs that my friends have graduated into or are starting to accept these days, I have no regrets whatsoever about choosing an MPP. Getting an MPP/MIA/MPA in no way limits the sector that you enter to just the public sector or government work. People are pretty evenly going to governments, non-profits, and private sector companies (mostly government consulting). Those programs are generally flexible enough that they can be what you want to be, as long as you have an idea. So many people I'm graduating with also have pretty low anxiety about finding a job - they know it's out there. They're just choosy about where and what they want to do. I also can't fathom that MPP debt is on the level of MBA/LD debt. Seriously, people are just not leaving with $100K of debt from MPP programs unless you had no savings AND no funding. Whereas people I know from business school are on average leaving with $100-150K. If you're that debt-averse, you should either be only gunning for fully-funded programs or not going to graduate school at all.

Essentially, if you want to start graduate school this fall no matter what, you need to put down a deposit by the deadline to one of the schools you're accepted in. If Duke takes you off the waitlist, and you still want to come, then you forfeit the deposit at the other school and enroll at Duke. If you don't get off the waitlist at Duke, then you go to the other school, which hopefully you took a good look at it and decided it would be a good choice anyway. If it's Duke or bust for you, then don't accept another spot, wait for Duke, and if you don't get taken off the waitlist, be prepared to apply again next year. Personally, I suggest putting a deposit in at some school as long as you find the offers/ choices acceptable. Grad school is a big and important choice, but I lived with it after I was denied from my dream school, and selected one I thought was still pretty good and had what I was interested in. Nine times out of ten, it'll probably work out... =)

If Duke is one of your top choices, I suggest letting them know that! Then when it's time to look at the waitlist, your name may very well pop out at them. Give them reasons to say yes to you. =)

I just want to throw out there that IU-Bloomington and Syracuse Maxwell are both very good programs that offer a more quantitative approach than most MPAs, with core courses in statistics, economics, and budgeting, and even feature a capstone. Maxwell in particular has a very admirable alumni network, and I've met a few alums in my informational interviews for positions in DC. I don't think there's something about it being a public school and public servants should come from public schools. It's true that neither are in the Ivy League, if that's where your surprise is coming from, but I don't think that necessarily means it shouldn't have a high-quality graduate program. I suggest you check out their websites, which delve into what the curriculum offers.

Your work experience sounds legit, and your GRE scores are pretty good. It's also great that you've taken for-credit courses in the same subjects and done better. I would say the important thing is to talk about in your essays or ask your professors/ LORs to discuss how you're in a different place now. Admissions will want to know that you've learned something from that first experience, or that you're doing something differently for graduate school this time around. Maybe it's even shifted your focus and helped you realize that you want to do X more so than Y. Something like that. They need to see that you've adjusted to it and are in a better frame of mind too. Basically, help them answer the question: why will it be different this time around? And if you can answer that convincingly, this will probably be not be a roadblock, but actually a chance to show you can learn from your experiences!