qeta

First of all, I wanted to thank all the faculty members that have answered questions in this forum - it has been illuminating to the extreme! I was wondering if I could ask about how to weight my choices going forward. My end goal is to complete a PhD at top 20 US institution in comparative politics. I am a Canadian citizen who will be completing an undergraduate degree in history and poli. sci. in April. My GPA is excellent (3.96/4), but my current institution is not in the top tier of Canadian universities. I spent a semester doing research in Chicago, which resulted in a co-authored paper that is currently under review and a manuscript in progress. Neither of these works is strictly political science-related - they are both related to social science however. I spent last summer doing a research internship in India, where I worked on a large-scale survey project spearheaded by a top US political scientist, although I mostly worked with him indirectly. I am also currently set to take an undergraduate summer course at Berkeley with a well-known professor of comparative politics. My options in the fall would be to either complete a Master's at McGill or to take some grad-level classes at Berkeley as a non-degree student. I have felt that my rejections in this cycle have been primarily due to my low GRE scores (V 166/Q 154/AW 4), something which I have no doubt I can improve over the summer. It probably didn't help that my letters of recommendation, while excellent, did not come from political scientists and two of them were from Canadian faculty who had not sent students to the US before. With all of that background out of the way, would you recommend that I complete a Master's at McGill or choose the non-degree option at Berkeley? I know that everyone says that excellent letters from lesser-known faculty are better than lukewarm letters from more established sources, but I have a feeling that this answer would change for international students. Would it be better for me get letters from US faculty who don't know me very well than getting very strong recommendations from professors at my home university who have known me for 3-4 years? Thank you for any feedback you can provide.

I was also part of the Berkeley massacre, as predicted. First I lose my hat and mittens and then this - today's been a rough day. I was much more surprised about the loss of winter accessories than the Berkeley decision. I wanted to thank everyone here for the awesome community - I definitely feel way more confident about a second cycle and wish I'd frequented this forum earlier in order to put forth a stronger application.

And yet McGill is one of the better places to study South Asia in Canada - that's how understudied and underrepresented South Asian politics is.

Except Kuhonta works on South-East Asia. I'm interested in him because of his work on political economy and development. According to the results posted on this site, McGill contacts most PhD applicants in late February/early March and Master's applicants by early April. That doesn't seem that late by Canadian standards.

Yup! Lovely person and, it seems, super-efficient at answering emails. How did you know it was him?

My McGill notification recently changed to "In Review" from "Submitted." I am applying for the Master's program, but I contacted two potential supervisors. They were both engaging: both provided some links to McGill research centres that might be of interest to me and replied back super-fast.

I sent you a PM.

Congrats to all the admits! It's really cool to see people getting in and being elated. Is anybody else's Gmail not working/giving a temporary error? Even though my schools are not sending out decisions for another month, of course this service disruption is bothering me way more than it should. What if a POI emails me?!

Congrats! You got the email that most of us have been refreshing our browsers like mad to get for months.

I have a fantastic job offer at a think tank where I interned last summer. I will get to do a lot of fieldwork, grassroots mobilizing, and policy work. They are big on collaboration with US universities on research projects, so I will get to network a bit as well. You would think this should make me less anxious and happier about my future, but it seems to have done the opposite? Grad school application process is a strange, confidence-crushing beast.

They still haven't connected mine, but when I emailed them in late December, the staff confirmed that they have it. They were super-nice people, but I get the feeling that grad admissions department at Berkeley is fairly understaffed.