justpassingby

Congratulations, you have a wonderful choice ahead of you. My own opinion is that, if your ultimate ambition is to get a job in a political science department, Harvard would be the better choice. Not only will you receive a Harvard theory education (which is great even if you don't end up working with Mansfield, as someone mentioned above), you'll also be able to make use of all the other resources in the department when completing your degree requirements (like the minor). If you're at Harvard you'll have access to IR/comparative/american/methods scholars of the very highest caliber. This should ensure that you'll get a top notch all-round training in political science, which is essential for landing a good job in a politics department.* Don't underestimate how important this is! When you finally get to the job market you'll need to be able to convince hiring committees that you can talk knowledgeably to non-theory political scientists about things like quantitative analysis, formal modelling, game theory etc., since these methods have such a grip on the discipline of political science as a whole (if you're interviewing at a small school, your hiring committee may itself contain one or more non-theorists!). A poster above made some cryptic comments about polisci departments hiring from philosophy departments or from the UK. I don't think this is widely the case at all. Perhaps Ammar could say more about what he means, and provide some examples. The Committee on Social Thought is indeed (in)famous, and I'm sure it's a fabulous program for the right sort of candidate, or if you are undecided about what sort of department you want to teach in. But it is very unusual, it's notoriously lengthy and difficult to complete, and I can't think of many (if any) well known political theorists that have come from there recently. Best of luck. * PS I'm not saying you couldn't get a rigorous political science training at Chicago. Obviously, their own political science department is as good as (and for some particular subjects, better than) Harvard's. I just don't know how much access you'll have to it as a CST student. Perhaps you could email some current students at Chicago to find out?

As I mentioned in another thread, I have some knowledge of the government department at Georgetown. It is a good program, with ambitions to be a top one in the near future. They have made some strong faculty hires lately and their PhD placement is vastly improved as compared with 5-10 years ago (according to their website, recent grads across the subfields have gone to UW-Madison, Cornell, UC-Riverside, UT-Austin and Oklahoma, and post-docs at a bunch of other decent places). Grad student funding is clearly an issue, with only 2-3 per subfield fully funded in each incoming cohort. But this has lot to do with funding priorities decided upon at the university-wide level, and it's not necessarily the department's fault. It is true that Georgetown is a prestigious private school, but its endowment is quite low in comparison to peer institutions. Consequently, it has tended to be dependent on the tuition paid by the undergraduate student body to keep it running healthily. Moreover, the graduate school is relatively small, because Georgetown has traditionally been an "undergraduate-focused" research university. So graduate student funding has suffered. I hear that things are greatly improving. The school's endowment has recently passed the $1 billion mark for the first time, and there are promising signs that more money will be used to shore up the grad programs.

I wonder where he/she attended in the end, and whether they were happy with their choice.

I have some limited knowledge of the department at Georgetown. It is an unusual place, to be sure, but with some definite strengths, several interesting faculty members and a much improved placement record of late. This isn't really reflected in most of the sources that prospective applicants consult (faculty at their undergrad institution, US News etc) simply because, as most of these improvements have occurred very rapidly in the last 5 years, there is a reputational lag. The funding question is still a thorny issue. As the figures linked to above show, the department only tends to offer full funding to a third of the incoming PhDs (my source claims that this is due, in part, to decisions about funding priorities made by Georgetown's graduate school, and it is something the department is continually striving to resolve). This will definitely have an impact on the popularity of the department amongst prospective applicants, as well as on the decisions of those who actually receive offers. But I hear that there are sources of funding that become available to students on an ad hoc basis once they arrive. The funding figures are probably also skewed, in comparison to peer schools, because every year a small number of people accept an unfunded offer on the basis that they'll still be working in DC whilst studying.