Ella Simmons

Couldn't agree more. You'll never know if you don't give it a shot!

That's great! Shows you the importance of being persistent.

Study something you love and do well!

Try the NOVA GRE Prep Course. Great for Math!

Don't forget Kmart!

At some point soon, you might find yourself with offers at Yale and some other set of schools, and then a bunch of non-Yale people will say, "Don't go to Yale" (especially if you are in American politics), and you will need to balance their words against the enticing siren song of Yale. If your next-best offer is Wisconsin or Cornell or something, then perhaps you should go to Yale. But if you are looking at a Michigan or Berkeley or MIT, then you probably shouldn't, and here's a reason why that no one else will mention. Forget for the moment all the concerns about faculty exodus (though for what it's worth, a fellow prospective student said he met with Alan Gerber and Gerber said, "don't count on me being around in a couple years"). The administrative side of things is a disaster. The head administrative assistant doesn't answer her emails or phone (or sometimes responds six weeks after an email). The flyout visit itself was a mess, where she was nowhere to be seen and poor Greg Huber seemed to be trying to hold the whole PhD program together himself. It took ten weeks to get my expense reimbursement check--with the city misspelled and the ZIP code wrong--which was a lot of money at over $500 because I shared a rental car with a couple other prospective students. (Other programs--check in hand two and a half weeks after forms sent in, all of them). Then, after I deposited the check, I got another check a week later that was lower by $7.50. Mystified, I set it aside, but then this morning my bank called to say that Yale actually stopped payment on the first check and that the bank had to charge a $10 returned check fee! No warning from Yale that they had made a mistake with the first check and were stopping payment. If this sounds petty and irrelevant, keep this in mind. Yale Political Science doesn't have its own placement officer. The position was eliminated due to budget cutbacks. The same administrators who put together the visit and process reimbursements are the ones who will handle your job applications when you are on the market. So if you don't mind them going out seven weeks late and with errors, go to Yale.

These tiers are way out of whack. All the cool kids are going to Berkeley and avoiding Yale.

Okay.... Where are you going?

Nope! You need to go to the Government Affairs forum.

I am!

I am definitely giving Michigan full consideration and am going to the flyout, but it seemed to have the lowest concentration of POIs for me--maybe I need to look at the faculty again. Perhaps when I visit we can have a lively chat about the program! And, I will say, this is exactly the kind of thing that I would hope to get out of this thread and forum--information I hadn't considered, lists of professors I somehow missed. Thanks very much for your reply!

This is a good idea. I am pretty torn between Berkeley and Yale. I know the econ people at Urch do "Where should I go?" threads but that didn't seem to be a thing here, so I appreciate a transition on this forum from "Where will I get in?/Where am I getting in?" to "Where should I go?"

Ah, okay. I was searching on "political science." Very odd indeed. Perhaps a disgruntled former MAPSS student.

There is only one person on the results board who talks about a master's offer from Chicago. Notice there is one from NYU as well. I haven't heard from them either and am baffled at what they could possibly be doing at this point, but suffice it to say, I would definitely not accept a consolation master's offer.

There was another thread somewhere where someone wrote out a long list of suggested questions for visit days, but I can't seem to find it. Does anyone else know where it is? Thanks! Edit: Found it! The rest of the thread is good too.