alphazeta

Is that your undergrad or grad GPA? Does your GPA in the major look any better?

You're more or less correct about the theoretical issue. In practice, everyone always uses standard frequentist tests on data of this form. So, you have some data of the form y = x*beta + epsilon where we'll assume all the standard stuff, including epsilon is normally distributed. You have some observations - either a population or a sample from a population. In the standard presentation, you wish to know whether it is possible that the true value of beta is zero. But what's the true value? In an easy way of interpreting frequentist statistics, the "true" value is the value in the population from which the sample is drawn; thus, if you have a population, no further calculation is required, the value in the population is the number you calculate. If it isn't zero, then the p-value is literally zero. But, let's think about this another way. You're actually interested in a theoretical data generating process. What you want to know is whether or not the theoretical parameter is zero. In this case, the "true" value is something that could never be observed. It's also not relevant whether we're talking about a population or a sample. In either case, we have some observations from an underlying stochastic process. It is an unobservable parameter that we are interested in. In interpretation two, the question of interest from a frequentist perspective can be thought of us as: "If the true value of beta is zero, then what is the probability of observing data with an estimated beta value at least as large as the one I have estimated on the basis of random chance alone?" This ceases to be about populations, and while the "hyper-population" idea helps frame it in terms of the first interpretation, it's not necessary. You can, of course, derive exactly the same formula for calculating the standard errors under this interpretation. You bring up the issue of non-random sampling, which is kind of relevant. Thinking for simplicity purely in terms of OLS, we have an unbiased estimator if epsilon is E(epsilon|x) = E(epsilon); that is we want the xs and the epsilon to be uncorrelated ("exogenous"). Random sampling is not random assignment, so it doesn't do anything magical for us here. However, if the x values are exogenous in the theoretical process, then random sampling ensures that we won't introduce a correlation between x and epsilon through the selection process. Tl:dr: No need to think in terms of hyper-populations if instead you frame inference in terms of stochastic processes.

1) Those GREs are fine. Obviously, a few more points wouldn't hurt, but your file definitely gets a read with those scores. 2) Even if your school isn't well-known, graduating with a true 4.0 is impressive and that gives you a boost. With a perfect GPA, I imagine you'll also have an easy time getting strong letters of recommendation, which is important. 3) Aim higher. The ranking of your graduate program is a huge determinant of your later job prospects. I know the application fees can really add up, but applying to the top programs that fit your interests most closely is a good investment (e.g., Berkeley for religion and politics). The job prospects out of Berkeley are simply in a different league than those for someone coming from UVA. There's a lot of randomness in the process and it's always worth taking a shot - nothing in your profile suggests that you can't get in at a top program.

A retake is definitely in order. In general, the quant score is the one weighted most heavily in admissions, and the 52nd percentile is likely to be disqualifying.

You're competitive anywhere with that profile. The GPA is a little low, but not a "bummer" but it matters what's dragging that down. You have a 3.9 in major, which is great. If you had some low grades freshman-sophomore year in core classes or something, then that's not a big deal. If the lower grades are more recent that could be less good. Worst case scenario if you come out of a university known for high grade inflation in political science and the lower grades are in more "rigorous" (less grade inflated) departments. Six months in the Middle East on a Boren fellowship is huge. That's your headline. Double down by investing as much time in perfecting your Arabic over the next year as you can. Middle Eastern politics is not a heavily quantitative area, so I don't think that a lack of qualifications in quantitative work will be a big problem. Although, if my "did poorly in my mandatory math class" you mean something below a B, that could raise eyebrows. In the spring semester, I'd take another stats class if I were you. That will also be good preparation for next year. As for where to look, part of this depends on substantive interests. You're looking at a different set of places if you want to do terrorism vs. authoritarian politics vs. oil vs. etc. As a general rule, it's more far important to go to a department that is strong for your topic than for your region. A number of very successful people have written dissertations on regions under advisors who have never done work on those regions, but very few have successfully written dissertations on topics where their advisors have no expertise. As always, the advice is to go to a top-10 if one accepts you. Stanford is probably best for Middle East. Outside those, Georgetown, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania come to mind entirely off the top of my head. Also, just about every public policy/IR school out there has at least two or three people working on the Middle East, so provided that the political science department has faculty that align with your topical/substantive interests, anywhere with a good policy school will have some Middle East scholars for you to work with.

There's huge variance in what a policy PhD is and what they want for admissions. Many "policy" programs are more heavily influenced by economics - e.g., you'll be expected to go through an econometrics sequence similar to one in an econ PhD program and possibly a microeconomics sequence. The bare minimum to do this would be linear algebra and multivariable calculus (with some programs stating additional requirements). On the other side of the spectrum, somewhere like Tufts offers a "policy" PhD with lower math expectations than your average political science PhD program. So, you really do have to look up the specifics.

That all looks great to me. There's certainly nothing problematic about a German undergraduate degree (departments often have reservations about students with degrees from countries known for less rigorous systems, but Germany isn't one of those). A) People who will eventually be strong researchers in political science (sorry if that's stupidly obvious, but it's ultimately the only real criterion). B ) I think this is actually quite valuable (not so much the journalism experience as the fact that it involved 4 years in India). Many comparativists struggle to build up the language skills and connections needed for good field work. It's definitely a selling point that you should be able to hit the ground running with those skills. "Stressing" the experience too much may convey the impression that you're not entirely clear on what political science involves, but this is a selling point. You want to be sure that anyone who reads your file will know that you have language skills and extensive experience in the country where you want to do research. C) See point B. It gives you language skills, cultural knowledge, and (hopefully) useful connections and access to networks. D) Sure. Definitely bring it up. Don't overstress but this is also something that probably gave you relevant methodological skills and knowledge. In some sense, political scientists lie between two extremes: economists (very theoretical/mathematical, limited real-world knowledge, almost never have language skills) and journalists (atheoretical, too focused on contextual knowledge and skills). Thus, the two aspects of your profile balance each other out and bring you into the (desirable) middle. E) Not sure what you mean here. F) Really doesn't matter at all. The German system is known to be rigorous and not to raise the same red flags as certain Asia degrees, for example. This may raise concerns about your English language skills, but judging by your post, that's not a problem for you.

This is probably obvious, but the reasons matter. What was wrong with the paper? If it was simply underdeveloped or has easily fixable problems, then I think it would actually work quite well to fix those problems, show the new draft to your former advisors and send it out as a writing sample. One thing about the low marks is that whatever flaws were involved will likely find their way into your letters of recommendation, so fixing the paper will kill two birds. Ideally, the LORs would then say something about the fact that the first draft had flaws but you fixed them.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "national security system" but I think you're saying that you want to study US, or possibly comparative, foreign policy with an emphasis on security issues? The right decision about where to look will depend heavily on just how much you want to do foreign policy as it applies to international security as opposed to international security as it applies to foreign policy. That made sound like a pointless distinction, but it isn't. This is actually an interest that I imagine could be accommodated nearly anywhere, depending on your theoretical and methodological orientation. Within the top 10, focus on fit on those dimensions. A policy school is also a plus as that always brings in US foreign policy expertise. Outside the top 10, I'd draw particular attention to Ohio State (Richard Herrmann, Chris Gelpi, Bear Braumoeller, Randall Schweller - who, in combination, cover most of the theoretical approaches) and Penn (Michael Horowitz, Philip Tetlock, Edward Mansfield to some extent).

Under typical grad school grade inflation, a 3.5 is pretty bad. Given that you've been in grad schools, letters from faculty who know you as a grad student will be crucial (and much more important than letters from faculty who knew you as an undergrad were the first time around). You need to find a faculty member, whether your advisor or not, who can vouch for you. The ideal letter says something along the lines of "jeffninja is smart, hard-working, and insightful but his research agenda in XYZ does not fit with our department's strengths." Get that letter and you can do quite well. Worst case, you want a letter that says "jeffninja has not succeeded in our department but this is because his research interests do not correspond to our strengths." In the absence of evidence to the contrary, committees are likely to assume that you left your previous department under unfavorable circumstances (e.g., failed or knew you were going to fail comprehensive exams, were told by faculty not to continue, etc.) No decent program, much less a top program, wants to take a student under those circumstances, so explaining why you're leaving and getting someone to back it up is crucial. The signals about what you did in your two years of grad school overwhelm everything else. Additionally, the SOP will get much more weight this time. If you were continuing into your third year at your current program, you'd be preparing a prospectus - and your SOP ought to reflect the focus and precision of someone at that stage. You don't want to look like after two years of grad school, you're no better at discussing this stuff than someone heading into senior year of college.

I would not worry in the slightest about the lack of scholars of Canadian politics per se at the programs you're considering. There are a handful of countries where you need to work with a "Country X" (e.g., China, Russia), but in general comparativists organize by region (and theme) rather than by country. The relevant cleavages are, say, Africanists and Latin Americanists, rather than scholars of Namibia vs. scholars of Mozambique. Your interest in developed democracies (UK, Canada, your thesis is on the US) really points you towards a research community that will be dominated by Europe scholars. "Parties and elections" in advanced democracies is a well-developed area of inquiry (though not one that's hot right now). You should think about your interests in this way, and present them in this way. You should not lead with your interests in UK/Canada but rather these thematic interests, perhaps later bringing in the UK/Canada. Indicate an openness to studying other systems that may be relevant. If you have language skills that would help, bring them up. Your best strategy as of now is to write really good SOPs (beyond getting up that quant score). I would advise first thinking clearly about the theoretical questions that interest you, then seeing how those fit with various faculty and how to communicate effectively about them.

It's certainly possible, and actually not that hard. It's just not very sensible for most students. Those who are being externally funded by government generally have a maximum of 4 years, for example, and most of them do it. The reason it's not a good idea is that applications for academic jobs come in the fall of your terminal year, and thus reflect the work you've done up through the early summer of your penultimate year. That is, people who will be looking for jobs this fall need to be finishing the projects on which they'll base their applications now (roughly 15 months before the job would actually start). Given that course work takes 2 years, this leaves a student on the four year plan with only one year of dedicated research work, and it's hard to crank out enough in that time to get hired. The reason that government-funded students (e.g., from the military) can do everything so much faster is that 1) they already have a job and just need to produce a minimally-satisfactory product to receive the PhD and 2) they have the full duration of their employment to do it. For academic job seekers, a far more than minimally-satisfactory product is required and the last year is not usable.

This has turned into a rather nasty back and forth, but perhaps the following will be helpful. 1) Different people use different research methods. Take a look at the TRIP data (https://trip.wm.edu/reports/2014/rp_2014/index.php) and you'll notice that in the United States only about a quarter of scholars use quantitative methods as their primary approach. It's certainly not true that American IR is overrun by number crunchers, although it's certainly true that far more than a quarter of younger scholars and scholars at top departments use statistical analysis heavily. If, on the other hand, you find that what you wish to do is totally divorced from the work you see occurring in American political science departments, then you might rethink whether or not you actually want to be in a field where, in your own estimate, your approach is unwelcome. It's another story if you would like to live and work in the UK/Canada/Australia for the rest of your career, but be forewarned that the American job market is much larger, so deciding that you would like to spend a career overseas is risky. 2) While quantitative methods are not hegemonic, you'll certainly find that ignorance about them in not acceptable in the field. Students are expected to go through a year or two of training to learn the approach. The early years of graduate school involve broadening your horizons before you narrow down into something specific, and frankly undergraduates are rarely in a position to judge what parts of this will prove useful (or not). 3) If you try to pick where to go to school on the basis of methodology, you're doing it wrong. People who succeed in this field are interested in questions, and find the tool that let's them answer the interesting questions. That's why it's so important to have many tools in your toolbox and not to enter the process overwhelmed with preconceptions. Look for programs where there are scholars working on the kinds of questions that you interest you and developing answer to them that you find compelling (or at least interesting). If you end up not ever using quantitative methods, it won't put you outside the mainstream and it won't kill you if you spent some unpleasant hours in graduate school on problem sets.

No, it won't. Experience in, say, intelligence would generally be a (smallish) point in your favor, but experience in special forces won't be. Admissions committees are looking for one thing only: your ability to conduct research in political science. Real world experience that involved, in a fairly direct way, the analysis of political phenomena helps (e.g., working in the foreign service, as an intelligence analyst, as a political reporter, or on a Congressional staff), but other experience is generally treated as irrelevant. While service in special forces certainly indicates that you're determined, hard-working, etc., special forces soldiers are neither selected nor trained as political analysts, so admissions committees will ignore it. Edit: Although, as above, if the military is paying your tuition that's an enormous plus. When someone else pays your tuition, the bar for admission changes dramatically. It's no longer a question of whether or not you're one of the best applicants and simply a question of whether or not you seem promising enough that you're reasonably likely to be able to write and defend an adequate dissertation.

I assume that you want to do a PhD in order to pursue an academic career? In this case, you will eventually be getting a job as someone who studies "international security" not someone who studies "the implications of energy policies". It sounds like the more generic version of what you want to do involves the intersection of domestic political economic considerations (energy being a subspecies here) and international security, so look specifically at places where people are doing strong work around that general nexus. Your work will also spill over into IPE, so look for places with strengths there. Studying energy is fairly common, so at most places you'll be able to pull in an energy expert of some kind if you want - whether from a policy school, economics department, or another area of political science (e.g., a comparativist who works on the resource curse or some such). Specific advice on departments is difficult without some insight into your preferences on method and approach, but I'd recommend a hard look at NYU, Stanford, Columbia, UCSD, Wisconsin, and Chicago off the top of my head.

1) If you eventually want a job in the US, then you want an American PhD. It's very challenging for PhDs from Europe or Australia to compete on the American job market for a variety of reasons. 2) You don't need an advisor who studies the same country as you. For some of the most heavily studied countries, there are considerable country-specific literatures/debates and networks (e.g., China), but for most countries, including Myanmar you'll be trying to plug into broader questions in comparative politics. It's probably not even necessary to have a Southeast Asia expert on your committee, although it would certainly be nice to have one. "Program rep" or general quality is much more important than having someone who studies "your" country (and of course many people change their interests in grad school). Similarly, having some language courses available at your university is convenient, but there are other ways to learn.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned USC yet. They have tons of money and a willingness to spend it. Some of their hires so far have been misses, but they're clearly on the way up.

On the bottom of your posts, there are two buttons for "quote" and "multiquote", to the left of the multiquote ones, there is a link you can click to edit. There's a time limit, though, you can't edit a post more than, I think, an hour after you submit it, so the edit function is really only useful for going back to fix a typo you notice more or less immediately.

There is really very little difference between the IRPS PhD and the poli sci PhD - so if you're really concerned, just apply in poli sci. If you were referring to masters degree, disregard.

I know there are a fair number of such programs, but I'm not aware of an exhaustive list. The main funded MAs that come to mind are Marquette and Virginia Tech. As a basic tactic, look for schools that offer an MA in political science but do not offer a PhD.

To be blunt, Emeritus means retired. An emeritus professor may teach a course or two and hang around from time to time, but he or she is not an active member of the department (and someone who has reached the emeritus stage might decide to move down to Florida any day). You can't have an emeritus prof as your advisor, which is where faculty fit matters most directly, and many universities won't even let them on your committee. It would be a tremendously boneheaded move to go somewhere hoping to work with an emeritus professor, and ad coms know it. If you put down an emeritus, they will assume you have either done too little research to know that person is no longer active or assume that you just have no idea what you're doing. Either one of those is a very bad thing. Saying you want to work with an adjunct is similarly bad - it's probably more like that an adjunct will be gone in 5 years than that they will still be around. Furthermore (with rare exceptions), most people who are adjuncting are not accomplished scholars who would be in a good position to mentor and train you. Scholars from other parts of the university are an entirely different animal. There's no problem with wanting to work with someone who teaches in a policy school, generally speaking. At many universities, the distinction between political scientists in the policy school and political scientists in the department of political science/government is purely administrative and has no meaning on the ground. In such cases, those policy faculty routinely interact with PhDs and serve on committees, etc. There are other schools, however, where the distinction is meaningful, so it's something good to feel out. This is where emailing someone can be helpful or where you might want to ask around about whether the political science department plays nice with the policy school. If you really, desperately want to note an emeritus person in your SOP, it would be best to show you know what that entails explicitly (e.g., note that the deparment has a long history of doing work that interests you, such as that done by Prof. X and that you understand he will be teaching a seminar next year that you would enjoy)

American institutions? Comparative institutions? International institutions?

GW underperforms the quality of its faculty substantially for several reasons. Number one is money; they do a terrible job at funding graduate students and thus have trouble attracting good ones. Number two is a powerful orientation towards policy as opposed to theory. Number three is a certain path dependence - because GW hasn't produced many students who are successful on the job market, it's not very highly regarded, which has a negative impact on students from there. Its a fantastic school if you have an employer paying for a PhD and plan to work in policy, but students hoping for a more traditional experience followed by a TT job have trouble.

Generally, there's no such thing as a transfer per se. You just apply like every other applicant to the schools that interest you. If you get in, they may or may not accept some of the coursework you've completed for credit, depending on their own policies. Of the schools you've named, Rice is substantially more competitive than the others, IMHO.

^ Doesn't that answer your question, then? MPP and PhD are very different degrees. The MPP is designed to prepare you for a policy career; the PhD is designed to prepare you for an academic career.