smallworld

Friends: as the season for submitting applications draws near, I want to offer to answer any questions I can about the political science PhD program at Northwestern. If you intend to apply to Northwestern and have any questions, feel free to message me. Best of luck to you all. You all deserve it. 

I don't think it is particularly selective.
The big question I would ask, if you are thinking about getting a PhD there, is what do you hope to get out of it? What do you want to do with the degree? The academic job market is super competitive-and there isn't a ton that you can do with a poli sci PhD outside of academia-and the few interesting jobs for PhDs that don't go into academia are likely to go to people from top schools. Fwiw, they don't even have a section detailing job placement after completion, which is standard at pretty much every school. Not saying you shouldn't do a PhD, or shouldn't do one at Kent State....just something to be aware of and think about.

I think if you're going to only do exclusively qualitative work you really need to justify why you are doing so and why you dont want to employ the methods that the majority of the discipline uses in their current research. If youre asking different types of questions that can't be answered using quantitative methods, that's fine, but anyone saying "I'm only going to use process tracing, case studies, or interviews" to do research on current topics is severely limiting themselves.
 
Learning how to actually do quantitative analysis isn't that difficult and is more conceptual and concerned with research design rather than math based. If you have a great idea and plenty of evidence from case studies, a larger-N statistical analysis could really strengthen your argument.

At least we're avoiding rampant racism/sexism

guys my nintendo just published a paper in the APSR. can you belive it.

Hopefully this is not the general idea you are taking from this line of concerns and criticisms.
 
Poli sci is an incredibly difficult field to get into as a career, even for those whose interests and skills are in line with the direction this field is taking--which is increasingly quantitative, based on statistics and big data analysis.  You are going to face significant difficulty at every step of the way if you are not in line with those trends: you will find it more difficult to write a SoP which fits the strengths of top schools (read: schools from which you can get a job), you will find it harder to find an advisor once admitted who is interested in your work, you will find it harder to find a job as a junior faculty member when you aren't researching or prepared to teach in areas the department actually expects to be specializing in decades down the road, and you will find it hard to get tenure for the same reasons.
 
I applied to poli sci programs as a qualitative-based theorist with absolutely no formal training in political science even at the undergraduate survey level.  I still received a couple of offers from elite programs, presumably because I was able to place my research interests within a coherent framework that can build from and contribute to where the field seems to be going.  Even if you aren't a math person, you probably need to be able to do the same--or find a different field to earn a doctorate in.

It's not about like. Political science is a quantitative field and you seem upset that this discipline is not what you thought it is. Poly sci without stats is a humanity, which one depends on what your research questions are. My husband is applying for poli sci PhDs this cycle, while I apply to history programs. We talk a lot about the differences and approaches of our disciplines, because we have many overlapping interest areas. However, we generate questions and interrogate them extremely differently. One of the large differences in the fields are qual/quant. And frankly, as a historian, I can also tell you that quant analysis is very prevalent in history right now, too. Big data is a trend that everyone is interested in because it creates new research questions and new lines of inquiry. It's a tool, and a very valuable one, in academia right now, in just about every discipline that has things you can count, measure, map or extrapolate from. 
 
Take a giant step backward and re-evaluate where you are at. Start, first of all, by looking at recent issues of the big journals. What's being published in journals is where the research in the field is moving. Even better, try going to a conference, or at least finding CFPs for conferences in the discipline. See what's getting accepted. You'll find that it's likely to be mostly quant-heavy.
 
Second, take your faculty's advice seriously. If they don't want to supervise your work, that signals a big problem, either with the work itself or with you. If they won't supervise you, chances are they won't feel comfortable writing for you, nor will they write good letters even if they do.
 
Third, realize that departments are set up in specific ways, and those ways are slow to change. You've noted that programs that don't have quant-heavy training are few and far between. That means that those faculty positions are fewer and further between.
 
Fourth, the job market in academic political science is not much better than that for history. We're all slightly crazy to be pursuing this as a field, because we are all smart enough to find easier to get and better paying jobs. Think why you want to do this, and if you really need a PhD to achieve your goals. For the government-based jobs, you likely don't. But also bear in mind that many of those jobs are analytic jobs, and not theory jobs.
 
Fifth, you're very, very early in your career to have such strong opinions about the discipline. How much theory and methods have you read? Professors and application readers are going to be very put off by someone at your level dismissing 80%+ of the work done in the field. It shows, among other things, a lack of understanding about the state of the discipline. It also probably relates very much to the second problem above. Academia is a hierarchy and it's often a very traditional one. You don't usually have a lot of flexibility in the training done at whatever institution you attend. You take the classes you need to take, in the sequence you need to take them in. You then write a dissertation that gets approved by a committee both as a proposal and as a finished work. If being told how to approach your education is a problem for you, a PhD may not be an enjoyable experience, no matter which discipline you choose to pursue.

'You don't like what I like, therefore you are stupid'.  Great advice, I'll keep that in mind. 

probably shouldn't use gendered insults here or in academia.

Keep your heads held high, friends. This is the roughest period of the entire cycle. It will get better. :-*

Most successful political scientists do sustained work on one or a few related topics over their careers.  You listing a lot of weakly related topics is just setting off a lot of alarm bells, since most successful graduate students and faculty members do not and cannot sustain research in such a wide range of areas.
 
It's hard to say whether you should get a PhD and where you should do it without a particular area of current research in mind.  Political Psychology and Political Theory are both huge research areas, and schools will have many people doing different strands of work in those areas.  The other topics are also areas of research in their own right, though it's unlikely that any program would be able to serve you well in all of them.  
 
I'd suggest picking out some research in the areas you're interested in recent top journals (APSR, AJPS, JOP, WP, IO) or top university presses and seeing who wrote them and who they're responding to.  That'll help give you some guidance on who's working on those subjects.
 
If you are a plausible candidate for a top-6 school, you should also look through their faculties and pick out 3 people that you'd be happy working with at each place.  If you can't find 3 such people, don't bother applying to those places and go looking further down the list.  In general, you want to go to a top program or the place where you'd have the best advisor.  Start from the top and work your way down the list.

No this is not what is happening. People aren't viewing you as someone who doesn't know what political science research is like because of your JD. Its that your research interests are overly broad as to be vacuous. Its that you are unsure what subfield you want to study. Anyway, American Quant said it better than me and with much more grace, so do what they say.

Keep your heads up everyone! We are all rooting for all of you. :-) 
 
http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2hme63OCl1rto2weo1_r1_500.gif

Do your own homework.

I gather that Q is on the low side, especially as IPE can be pretty quant heavy. Boulder, Washington and UT-Austin have average GRE scores hidden away on their websites, so have a look there. Suffice to say if you think you can improve your scores without impinging on prep for other areas of your applications then do it. 

Its June. Retake the GRE

I don't understand why you guys are calling it paradoxes. All of those are good schools with lots of very qualified applicants. Somewhere you're picked, somewhere you're not; it seems to be an absolutely normal part of the process.
 
Implying that it's impossible to be rejected from Northwestern (why, because it is a lower ranked school?) after being accepted to MIT doesn't seem right to me.

I certainly wouldn't. Most of the top-tier think tanks in Washington require a Ph.D. for full research positions. And many of the top political appointees (especially in IR) are coming from those think tanks and have PhDs. Don't do a MPP unless you want to be a bureaucrat. 
 
To answer the OP, I think it's somewhat taboo to admit, which is why nobody here is going to speak up. But on one of my visits to a T-5 program last week, this notion was openly discussed and there was a sense that working at a think tank would put your PhD to good use.
 
Not sure what else you're looking for in an answer here. 

I like the parts where, like, somebody says "hey, I got into Harvard!" and then everybody else is like "oh, man, that's great that you got into Harvard!"  Or, like, the parts where somebody hasn't gotten in anywhere and has been depressed but then they get in somewhere and they're like "hey, I hadn't gotten in anywhere and had been depressed but now I got in somewhere!" and then everybody else is like "oh, man, that's great that you got in somewhere!"  Or, like, the parts where somebody is like "Hey, should I mention my mother's pasta e fagioli in my SoP?" and then somebody else is like "YMMV, but I mentioned my mom's pasta e fagioli in my SoP last year and didn't get in anywhere, but this year I didn't mention pasta e fagioli and got in places, so by Mill's method...."  Or like, I like the parts where people are like "Hey what books should I be reading next year?" and then other people are like "oh, you should probably be reading this book and that book" but then I'm like "you should probably be getting drunk with your old friends before you make new grad student friends that are bad drinkers." 
 
I really like this new thing where people are like "Don't be a jerk!"  And they're all like "hey, one reason to not be a jerk is that coach said not to be a jerk!"  As if they were going to be jerks if I hadn't said anything.  I get to be a treatment in a Rubin model.  It is very flattering, even if it is just pretend-mattering.  Hey, that rhymed.
 
Apparently I also like typing with the comedic timing of Mitch Hedberg.
 
I do not like the heavy.  This is probably related to the fact that I also am kind of sad that I won't get to be a dumb grad student next year; even though I will no more intelligent or accomplished or well-paid than I am now (which is nil on all dimensions), I will have to kind of pretend to be a grown up.  It's kind of making me sad.  I hope you guys will take advantage of getting to be dumb grad students.  You won't have to iron or tuck in your shirts.  You'll get to sit around and brainstorm and woodshop and spitball and mix it up and make it happen and stir the pot and take the time to really learn the deep, substantive meaning of the Lagrangian multiplier and reading Rousseau and saying "hey it would be cool to model the Lawgiver" because that's a fun idea that you get to have when you're a dumb grad student and maybe you'll even think you did something really novel and interesting only to find out that Abraham Wald did it a kajillion years ago or that Daron Acemoglu had six working papers on the topic when he was 12 and all of them turned into Econometricas and you don't know if that should make you feel good or bad or scared on a dimension so much deeper and more existential than regular fear that "scared" probably isn't the right word and next thing you know you'll be worried about your diction even though it is the least important part of any of this.  I will be working on not swearing and not making jokes about Father O'Malley or "the old bestiality days."  No longer will be I able to teach students about exogenous shocks by describing punching a guy in the stomach so hard that he poops himself.  Allofasudden, I will have to be the good cop, and all of you guys will get to be the bad cops, skillfully trained in breaking down every argument, every research design, every set of assumptions, every data set.  I already miss being a grad student.
 
It is also sad that the NIT games tonight were so bad that I found myself saying "hot damn!  I wonder if Property Brothers is on."  It was.
 
Not too many of you have met me, though I've been on here a long time.  I suspect I will continue to come on even though I am old and grizzled and constantly crippled and lacking in hair.  Some of the talk today was heavy and I didn't like it because I like thinking about rainbows and sunshine and whether the composition of an arbitrary set of correspondences is upper hemi-continuous.  But one thing did kind of make me sad for other reasons.  Those few of you that have met me could probably surmise that I think loyalty is cool or at least that I think effort put into my friends and colleagues and the department itself is not effort wasted.  It's cool with your friends and with your colleagues and with your professors and with the younger grad students and even with the Pleges [sik] and with the secretaries and with the janitor lady that really gets glad when you take the time to ask how she's doing and even with the undergrads that try so hard on a daily basis to suck your brain from your skull and your soul from your heart.  This is not a business that rewards loyalty, which is kind of a bummer.  I am not trying to say that it is such a business, or even that such a business exists.  It probably doesn't.  You must be your own advocate, from supporting your own ideas in contentious advising meetings to writing in a clear, confident prose to choosing the best situation for yourself to being willing to negotiate politely and humbly and unjerkily.  But in the course of your career you will make many decisions, and some will be good and some will be bad and some will not be entirely clear and I would like to think that some sense of community matters.
 
I should note that this ramble was written with an intentional style and was influenced only by the impeccable fixing-up skills of the aforementioned Property Brothers and perhaps also to the squawking of Mingus albums playing in the background.  To the best of my knowledge all of the numerous subject-verb dyads above feature correct conjugations which should serve as an indicator of sobriety and attention to detail and craftsmanship.  The aim here was to reduce the heavy, which to my eye has been done competently though inelegantly and self-indulgently.  You all seem like good enough people to be willing to take on those costs in the name of humoring an old man finding himself being put onto an iceberg floating away to the icy sea.  Did I say self-indulgently?  I meant megalomaniacally.

As it happens, I've been looking into this. If you measure Ph.D. placements per faculty member in political science (to control for size of dept.), a few departments do stand out, but mostly you see a big bulge in the top 25. Data are here.

I HAVE SOME IDEAS FOR EXAMPLE MAYBE WE COULD *test* ARROW'S THEOREM OR ALSO I WAS KIND OF THINKING THAT, LIKE, VOTING DECISIONS ARE INFLUENCED BY WHAT PARTY YOUR IN

Slowest day ever........

That's more or less ideal. If you just fill out the online form, it could be days or weeks until the DGS finds out. As a bonus, most DGSes will at least drop you a quick note saying nice things about you, telling you how much they'll miss having you there, etc.

I don't think that's stupid! I think that, if you haven't had any contact with someone at the school, you can go ahead and fill out the form and leave it at that (unless you feel especially compelled to write to the DGS). If you have been talking to anyone in particular one-on-one, fill out the form and write a brief and gracious email thanking them for the offer and all their time/help, but you will be accepting an offer at [the school you are attending]. I don't think you even necessarily have to tell them where you're going to go, but that's the way I'd go about it.