curufinwe

I don't mean to be mean, but being a specific country expert is like being a journalist in my eyes, not very academic So, you are saying that, to be a proper democratization professor, I need to learn Farsi, several dialects of Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese etc? I better start today

So, people born on the wrong side of the world, without the chances of going to a brand name school or without the chance of taking the classes of the awesome professors that everyone knows, will need really good luck to get in ah, fate...

So, all this talk about "fit", it is not hard to find a fit school, unless you study a really niche topic. I mean, how off can you be when all you need to say is, say, "comparative politics, party systems" if you have done the tiniest research about the school?? I did apply for a proper topic, without getting into details, and all my schools were good fit because there were a good number of faculty that studied it. What else can cause rejections then? Do you think it goes like "hmm this student had 3.87 but the other one has 3.89. Let's choose the other one"? I am starting to get a funny feeling about my future chances because I have NO IDEA what they look for in a student!!

Haha don't worry. I have my dissertation topic already. But I couldn't even get accepted to anywhere yet. And the chances are, I will only get into my safety school. So, you can always find a topic when you are studying there.

Did you guys state your interests in the SOP with details? Or did you just state the general area? -I am interested in comparative politics, with a focus on regime changes and democratizations. (this is what I did) -I am interested in democratizations and I plan to focus on the impacts of Islamic culture on the civic culture of the Middle East and its impact on democratization movements in the region. Which one is more healthy?

I have a question, especially for people learning languages for the regions you study. Is it really essential to speak the language? I mean, when I need to convince myself that I don't need to learn a new language, I just think how I can learn about that country via articles and the English internet sources. And about doing field research, do you plan to go to that country and administer the surveys by yourself, one by one? Is it how it works? Is it expensive to hire someone local to do it? Or is it expensive to subsidize it to survey firms? Because I know they are hot these days I'd love to learn more about how these things work.

10 minutes?? I check my inbox every minute! The thin line between suicide and grad school. *sigh*

Heard back how? E-mail? And what is your subfield?

Here's to hoping for results from UT-Austin today. And hopefully positive ones.

Congratz to all UCSD people. Though it is starting to get depressing, with no acceptances and 2 rejections so far, reading all these awesome people getting into awesome schools. Drinking helps

I like to think that, once the acceptances appear on the results page, if i dont get any emails... i am rejected.So far, nothing has proven me wrong and I hate false hopes. Besides, with the competition of this year, I assume my degrees from nobody-cares-from-some-country-I-dont-know-where eliminated me already.

thats great, man, congrats. I'm glad you proved me wrong. Though I am still right about the "not being hopeful" thing since I didn't get one

Who is claiming the Northwestern acceptance that was posted right now?

Undergrad: Bilkent University (Business Admin.), GPA 3.93 (valedictorian) Grad: Sabanci University (MA in Polisci), GPA 3.71 (both pretty good schools in Turkey, but then again, who cares about'em when there are tons of ivy league graduates? ) Full scholarships for both universities. GRE: 690V, 800Q, AW: 5 TOEFL iBT: 117/120 LORs: 1 from a good professor, others will do. SOP: I feel like it was rather dull, nothing striking or dazzling. (damn you 500 words limit) No proper research experience other than my class papers. Writing Sample: a paper for my comparative politics class. Good approach, but since it was a paper for a class, it wasn't as thorough as I wanted it to be. Method: got intense maths and statistics classes and a formal modeling class (received A for all). Applied to, Rejected, Accepted... follow my signature.

Great, seems like NYU sent acceptances as a mass mail, and I didn't get anything. 2 rejections, no acceptances... awesome!

The problem with the optimistic school of thought here (lol) is that they only see the success stories. "There are people who did not come from one of the top 25 schools but achieved good things" is the example of one professor who did it. Yes, it shows that it is possible. But what is the probability? How many of those below-top-25 graduates can do it? One should admit that it is a low enough number to make one worried. I had a computer geek friend who would be inspired by success stories. "Did you know that people who found Google started out in their garage???" My answer was usually "Did you know that thousands of people in the US are right now in their garages, have been there programming and writing softwares for years and are still poor with really really low chances of being 'Google'?"

I did not get any notification whatsoever. When I saw the acceptances come in one after the other on the results page, it was an obvious "no" for me I mean, from last years results, I did not even see three acceptances on the same day. and when these acceptances came not only on the same day but at the same 10 minutes, I am guessing they finalized everything at once. Some assumed it'd be only theory people that they were accepting this week and maybe CP or AP would be next week... A friend of mine who is also a comparativist and applied to Northwestern called Will Reno, who is the grad coordinator, to ask about his results and learned that he got rejected. I called but he wasnt in his office. And last word, at this point, one should not hope. It is more likely to hurt you But then again, that's me.

Since Columbia was at the top of my list, I designed my SOP according to them, meaning at most 500 words. So when I needed to tailor it to other schools, I did not even check what their limit was, I just did what SuddenlyParanoid did. I realized I could delve a bit more into certain issues in it and make it maybe 600-700 words, but I felt like it was already concise and clear and did not waste readers' time. So I left it at 500 words

Most probably UT Austin and maybe NYU.

Exactly! what happens to those people as well? All these 482-496 "I heart academia" people give up and go for a marketing position in procter and gamble?

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1212 post hoc fallacy vs. post doc fallacy

So, just to clarify the issue, say 10 people enter the X university which is not in top 25. 5 of those are able to finish the phd and among the 5 that finishes, 4 or so are unemployed? What happens to the 9 that failed on the way??

"That" being the US News ranking? GWU is 40th and Georgetown is 41st in US News but in Chingos article, they are 66th and 70th.

So basically, if our top choices do not work out, it means we are not found fit for even having a shot at a tenure track job. And we need to learn the language of each place we would like to study. We need to go live there a year every time we want to discover something. Nice. This was as painful, and sadly true, as PhD comics

With the articles I read on this forum regarding the validity of US News rankings, I started to doubt how accurate this could be. I always thought Tufts would be high for their IR. I'm not saying this list is completely off the target, but some schools tend to get ignored due to their lack of 'brand name'and some are higher mainly due to their brand name. Exactly.