ExponentialDecay

Mills often found his arguments in the minority, so he thought, what the hell, I'm gonna become an influential philosopher and write an article that will make all those assholes sorry. That's what he told me was his justification, anyway.

http://wgi-lounge-2009.livejournal.com/10017.html ah, the magic of google

It's definitely an order of magnitude less influential in PhD admissions than in undergrad or professional school admissions. Doctoral programs care about your potential as a researcher and your ability to be slave labor for the department in the form of a TA or RA, and everything else is highly marginal.

Grad school in the humanities and social sciences is never a good idea, but the good news is, no discipline is significantly worse than another. 1) you didn't say what kind of degree you will be getting and what your career aspirations are (which tells me you haven't researched this enough to be asking pointed questions). if you want to be a professor of middle eastern studies, yeah, probably not. but if you gain some marketable skills, like Arabic proficiency, and concentrate in an area of interest to governments and NGOs, you can cut yourself a moneyed niche. 2) nobody pays for grad school, bro (unless you're getting an MA, but why are you getting an MA instead of taking the (few) requirements you conceivably don't have at a state university or cc and applying for the PhD...)

I love being eeyore, so I will remind the panel that these benefits of being an international student are highly overstated, and it is not useful to forget this. Additional to your unique strengths (which you may or may not have), you definitely bring the unique non-citizen weakness of not being eligible for most funding opportunities, especially at public universities. That means that the department has to fund you, at a greater expense for itself (see, for example, the UC system, which must pay a surcharge of tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for international students their entire time in the program, since they can't get CA residency). That restricts the number of departments you can expect funding from, and makes you a more expensive candidate at most others, meaning you have to make up for that difference in academic brilliance. Academic brilliance has to be communicated not only to departments, but to detestable administrative vermin like adcomms and deans, and those people understand a) pressure from superiors and b ) dumb quantitative metrics like GPA and GRE. OP can't do anything about their situation at this point, and indeed there is no reason to suspect that a bad lit score will be an insurmountable hurdle, but equally, the hypothesis that a weakness in the application of an international student entails the same thing as that same weakness would in the application of a domestic student is dangerously and profoundly wrong.

I would caution against being heartfelt with your professional relationships. Unless you know that that person responds well to that kind of thing. Secondly, it's a real bummer that your opportunity to do relevant work fell through and other opportunities are scarce. My department was closed last year, so I'm kind of in your predicament, with the added bonus of possibly not being able to complete my degree. However, you still need LORs. As far as I understand, you are in a generic MA, so you take classes with these professors and write papers for them. So you have something to say on a subject both of you are interested in, or at least knowledgeable about. The purpose of cultivating a relationship with a professor is so that they can associate your face with your brilliant analytical work. It's more important to have direction coming out of postgrad than out of undergrad, but ultimately, the fact that a professor can attest to your potential as a researcher per se is 90% what it's about.

I'm just a lowly undergrad, but I wouldn't think it's fair to infer from the statement that there is pushback happening against the national literature paradigm the notion that Comp Lit degrees and departments become more valuable. Maybe marginally it has become more valuable for scholars to be able to conduct research under the interdisciplinary auspices of a Comp Lit program, at some places no less because it reduces the red tape of interdepartmental collaboration as because of the collaboration per se, but according to my observations, Comp Lit is still very much in the shitter. 1. Academia likes (and is historically built around) divisions, specializations, specifics, and other orderings. The trump card of the national lit department will always be that it has "ownership" of its literature in the sense that it determines its canon as it is taught to students and discussed in the profession and introduces itself as a purveyor of that literature. Like, most people who have questions about the Fed will go to an economist, even if a political scientist or sociologist may be more able to answer the particular question asked, simply because the Fed deals with money and we associate money with economics; similarly, people who have questions about TS Eliot would turn to an Eng Lit person if going by degree alone, rather than a comparatist, even if TS Eliot is internationally intertextual. In Comp Lit you also study a canon, but you have infinite choice over what canon you study, and that engenders doubt over what, how, and with whom you study it. 2. Administratively, Comp Lit is where they dump a) courses that are too general or too theoretic to be in a nat lit dept, and professors of literatures whose depts aren't represented and other randoms that need a home. I suspect it's largely a funding issue: if you look around, you find that most professors in Comp Lit have double appointments with a national lit or other department, and that's no accident. People understand the value of interdisciplinary work, but they still prefer to work from a certain framework, and to work with people who are also working from a framework which is different from theirs, but still institutionalized. Plus, there's a -studies department for practically any old thing out there nowadays, and we're not gonna see massive closings until those guys start retiring. Comp Lit is like a self-designed major. You have to know, much more than your national literature peers, what your research interests are, exactly where you lean in terms of methods, whom you want to work with (because finding a person who will be the first reader on your dissertation comparing French and Swahili texts is daunting), and exactly where you want to end up afterwards. Prestige of the program, too, matters more, because you can't rely on knowing everything about, say, Druidic myth, and being known by everyone in your exclusive 10-person national literature community. People will have a rather amoebous idea of what your degree actually means, so you will have to sell your degree, even where your Yale Harold Bloom-advised degree sells itself.

I'm not a professor, but I am in Comp Lit. Your knowledge of languages and the fact that you plan to work cross-culturally makes you a strong candidate for Comp Lit programs. Although I don't necessarily agree that you would not be able to do the kind of comparative work you want to do within a national language department, I do think that a) you would enjoy Comp Lit more, and b ) working within a national literature would entail you concentrating on that literature with occasional forays into the other, whereas it seems to me that you want to concentrate on both equally. It is true that you will need to know your languages quite well, and the reading will be in the original languages, but you'll be writing your essays in English and perhaps the western half of your concentration will be in English. The bulk of the criticism will be in English (is anybody still forced to read the post-structuralists in the original nowadays?). Take a look at the degree requirements. Most degrees require that you are very strong in one language, and demonstrate proficiency in another 2-3 by the time your comps roll around. Most of my professors absolutely use a dictionary and compare translations when reading original texts (which is useful in order to acquaint yourself with existing scholarship, not just to look up the meaning of words). I think you can do it. I need to have an extensive knowledge of the literary histories (so in my case my M.A. in English is not quite sufficient, as they will want to see a degree in Slavic studies) As in, if you want to do a Comp Lit degree with a concentration in Slavic languages, that you will need to have read the major Russian writers and maybe Milan Kundera? Well, one hopes that you have a nodding acquaintance with Tolstoy, but we don't need to go as far as Chernishevsky (whom I recommend to you if you want to do anything Soviet or post-Soviet, especially in relation to Western liberalism). The thing with extensive knowledge of the literary histories (what does that even mean?) is that you don't need a degree to have one. This comes down to the intricacies of applying: if you have professors who can vouch for you, a relevant writing sample, and demonstrated knowledge of the language you will need for your studies, you emphatically don't need a degree in Slavic studies. Once again, this is my experience, which comes from one school and a few people who are not me. It's all very situational - but I don't want you to give up on yourself. and that most PhDs end up in national language (rather than literature) departments. That's because it's better to end up in a national language department from an employment perspective. When you have, say, a PhD in Russian Literature, people immediately understand what you are: you are a Slavist. When you have a Comp Lit PhD, nobody actually knows what you do. It's much harder to get hired with an interdisciplinary degree like Comp Lit because, although you purport to do a lot of things, the impression is that you can't properly do anything. A vast scope and diverse background is great for research, but most literary scholars are hired to teach languages to undergrads. There is an assumption that a person with a national literature degree does, if anything, have a working knowledge of their language. Comparative Literature began in 1946 in the University of Istanbul, where Erich Auerbach published Mimesis. Auerbach was a German Jew on the run from the Nazis, and, ironically, a Western purist. In Istanbul he taught a graduate seminar for scholars who, like him, loved Western values but were marginalized by Western society. Basically, it was a bunch of Turks writing about French literature. Comparative Literature started out as an attempt to unite all Western literatures under one flag. A bunch of these guys immigrated to the States in the 50s and 60s and popularized post-structuralism, cultural studies, all that continental stuff. At this point, everybody's still mostly concerned with the Western tradition (which people like Harold Bloom try to consolidate, sometimes successfully), but "area studies" and "cultural studies" concentrations start to emerge, as distinct from national literatures and Comparative Literature both. The next big breakthrough was Said's Culture and Imperialism, when Western academia was suddenly made aware that non-Western literatures relate to Western literatures through colonialism, and holy shit we can analyse them together and get more grants from the government! This generates more interest in Comparative Literature because, in order to do this kind of comparative work, you need to have equally strong grounding in both, say, the English and Hindu traditions. However, the better scholars still get bought out by national language departments simply because they're older, bigger, and have more money. Nowadays, the big languages in CompLit are Arabic and Mandarin, and the big research areas are translation theory, or anything that can use any kind of natural science at all (linguistics and neuro being the obvious choices, though I myself think that pushing economics could result in some mad profits). If we're talking course catalogs, Comparative Literature is the dumping ground for courses that are too general to be a specific literature, or use too many foreign-language readings, etc. That's why you get a lot of theory or structural courses in Comparative Literature, and why the discipline in general is more theoretical than your average literature degree, even though comparatists read roughly the same theory as everyone else. The English department is very open to interdisciplinary work with philosophy, psychology, gender studies. The cachet is whether you want to do all your work on English literature. Generally speaking, if you want to do your research on English-language literature, you should be in an English department, if you want to do research on film, you should be in a film department, and if you want to do research on the similarities between Ukraine and -wherever-, you should be in a Comp Lit department. Overall, it's as useless as any literature degree, so go for it. tl;dr if this is what you want to do, and you think you can do it, you should apply. We're not the admissions committee and we can't tell you if you'll get in.

this may surprise you, but it is a widely promulgated opinion in academic and professional circles in the West that people from the third world live in mud huts, ride -insert national fauna- to work, get good grades by sleeping with their professors, and in general can buy a PhD diploma from the number 1 university in their country for 30 camels and an electric stove. but seriously, higher education in many third world countries is plagued by corruption, lack of funding, and outdated or ideological methods and practices, and diplomas from these universities do not count as a university education in the West. one would have to submit one's diploma for evaluation to get a document that says it is equivalent to a BA/MA/PhD in the States (or any other developed country), pay money for that, and still employers will be like, what is this shit? I'm sure you've heard of people with UK degrees struggling to find employment or admission in the US. and this guy is Kuwaiti. can you even find Kuwait on a map? How is is possible for someone who isn't at least a Ph.D. student or have a Ph.D. to get two papers and two books published? different education system, different standards. there are people and universities and governments and entire social systems that exist outside of america, you know, and they do things however they want to do things.

The really troubling thing is that I meet social science students all the time, even students in economics, who are like, I'll just learn the formula and copypaste it into Stata and it will give me TEH NUMBERS and my advisor will be like, glee. It's like, people have never enjoyed or understood mathematics, and now they're being forced to do it because real! science! needs! numbers!, and it's now a systemic problem in the social sciences.

For any international students that don't get it: the TOEFL is a basic language comprehension test. It measures the likelihood of you being able to 1) order in a restaurant 2) ask for the bathroom 3) explain yourself to doctors and policemen in English. Maybe do a job interview if they give you a quantitative problem. Being able to score in the 9000% percentile on the TOEFL or IELTS does not mean you can do graduate-level work in English. To the OP: yes, the GRE is a stupid test. But so is the TOEFL. Why do you think it would be logical for universities to cancel one stupid test that you did poorly in, but give you admission based on another stupid test that you did well in?

Generally speaking, yes, in a capitalist economy, if you can pay money for something, you are more likely to be able to obtain it. Factors are: how much money? where is this money from? what is this money going to pay for? what are the strings attached to this money? what will be the real impact on the receiving party?

I'm working at an NGO outfit that is not your field, but for what it's worth: most of the people here got in through contacts or lengthy unpaid internships. This NGO has branches outside the States, and a viable alternative is to start work there and later get transferred to the States or use the work experience to get another job, including in an international organization. The UN has citizenship quotas for everything, which makes it difficult to get in if you're a citizen of an overrepresented nation, but if you are a citizen of an underrepresented one, that's like being black and applying to Harvard. NGOs also don't compete for H1B quotas, by the way. But yeah, this industry is very difficult to get into if all you have to go on is your own ingenuity.

UCL is definitely considered more prestigious than KCL, especially for the social sciences.

Whoever told you that Russia has a good education system and is inexpensive to live in is an idiot and I am surprised you believed them. The leading Russian university's ranking oscillates in the 100s-200s worldwide, largely due to its strong programs in mathematics and physics. Moscow is the 4th most expensive city in the world. I learned all this by using Google (www.google.com), which I was taught how to do in about 3rd grade or so.

What, in the States? Of course, I know a few people getting MAs in the humanities, but they're doing it because they're not sure about going PhD or because they get to live in London or some shit.

Have you tried getting a scholarship from the university? I've never heard of any international student studying in Europe on loans.

yo dawg, best of luck

Admission from abroad is a little nuanced, so you are best suited to ask people at your university who have studied at econ programs in the US (their advice will get progressively useless if their degree is 10+ years old, though) or to email professors and admin committees in the states. Your cGPA is cool, but your grades in economics and math courses are more important. It's good that you did a thesis; it would be even better had you had research experience with a professor and your name on an article. One obvious thing is you're missing a chunk of math background. You're more of a shoe-in for high-ranked soc or poli sci than econ, but from the information here, I can't tell you anything more specific. One other thing: European econ programs are more varied than this monolithic neoclassical bullshit we encounter in the US, so it might be wise to look at a couple of those in conjunction with.

Hmmm, without knowing the SO's personality, it's difficult to make a definitive statement like this. When my boyfriend says he doesn't know, he literally doesn't know. As in, he understands his options but he's having trouble choosing between them. And, judging by the OP, who too is unsure of whether an LTR will work for her, can we really judge her boyfriend so harshly yet let her get off scot free?

Your persistence is very inspiring. Perhaps I'm too pessimistic, but the competition for admission to a T20 will make anyone suicidal. 1. You need to push for 170. Some programs will slash GREs during the first round, and anything under 165 will keep you out. 2. That research sounds fascinating, actually. You might want to talk to your PI about your options. He might have good advice and hook you up with the right people. 3. So, as far as I understand, you intend to do the intermediates, linear algebra and calc III concurrently with applying? As in, you will not have these subjects when you send your transcript to admission committees? This is very, very, highly unlikely to work. Econ MAs expect you to have calc III and linear algebra. Econ PhDs expect you to have more math, up to complex analysis and topology. You definitely need proof that you can work with multivariate functions in order to gain admission to an Econ PhD. I have heard of people who have gone on to a PhD with stellar grades in an economics undergrad (there was no mention of the math component) and experience in front office finance, but I don't personally know them, so I won't amend that to my advice. 4. Sure, you can get an econ PhD in order to enter finance or consulting, but if that's your goal, you're better off getting a T20 MBA. I haven't researched the MBA as thoroughly, but it seems to me that, with your background, you might be a better fit for a competitive MBA program rather than a competitive PhD program. Econ PhDs in finance are mostly hired as freelance consultants or in leadership roles - in which case your thesis has to be related to the business of the firm. I don't think you know enough about this path to follow it; I equally don't think it's wise to become an economist because Cool Dude is an economist. You can do valuable work in public policy and socioeconomic research with a sociology, polisci, public policy, anthropology, cultural studies, or similar degree. At that point, it matters how well you do your work and how much your colleagues value you rather than what degree you got and what college you went to. Obviously, I'm not the final authority on anything. If you already know what you want to do and where you are going to apply, it's best to talk to the admissions committee at the school or email the professor whose research interests you and ask them directly. In the end, the decision will be theirs anyway.

Dawg, idk, I've only driven through Germany, but in my European country, the English-language programs are definitely cash cows and definitely worse than the native programs.

How do you think it would sound if I said that I want to become a high energy physicist because I've read A Brief History of Time? Don't ever mention this to anybody outside of the context of a joke. You will be laughed at, behind your back and maybe to your face. Honestly, your career ambition sounds a little like me wanting to be Superman when I was 5 years old, but since we're talking admission to an econ MA, the fact that you have stellar grades in stats and calculus means more than any of this. Generally, the requirements for a straight up Econ MA are: Calc III Linear Algebra Statistics with regression analysis (Econometrics) - not always required/mostly recommended People with technical backgrounds transition into economics all the time. I think it's still possible for a person with a math, physics, or engineering background to go straight into the PhD without any econ courses (but typically with research experience). So, read admissions requirements of the schools you are looking at carefully, email the person on the contacts list, and may The Wealth of Nations be with you. P.S. it's not a bad idea to read some serious works in the field of economics - The Wealth of Nations is not a bad start.

A simple Google search gives me this: http://qz.com/116081/the-complete-guide-to-getting-into-an-economics-phd-program/ http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/why-aspiring-economists-need-math.html the conversation about economics PhDs tends to be more lively at urch.com I've been a student of economics for 5 years now and I've looked at the PhD myself, so I'll share my musings. 1. It's great that you have research experience, but what is it in? It's good to have RA experience period, and if it's in an issue related to your research interests, that's even better, but if it's not in economics or does not use quantitative data in a significant way, then it's not so useful. 2. It's good you have work experience relating to your research interests, but again, this is quite tangential to a research PhD in economics. 3. The quant score, even 160, could be an obstacle to your admission to an economics program. There are three main issues with your plan, as it appears to me: 1. You don't appear to have actually done any economics. Of course, what people do in undergraduate economics courses is hardly research or even industry economics, but at least it acquaints them with what it's like to think like an economist and how to construct arguments in an economic way. Work in economics is extremely dry: it's all drawing graphs and crunching huge data sets and trying to figure out how to program a variable so that it represents what you want it to represent whilst minimizing the influence of tangential variables in its value. My mother went into public policy (World Bank and shit) with her Economics PhD, but that was 30 years ago, when the field was a little more lenient, and even then, when you do public policy research, you focus on a very narrow interpretation of a very narrow indicator, or you manage employees who are doing the same. Deviating from this methodology tends to get people shunned in the community. Excellent writing and speaking skills are absolutely a huge differentiator among economists, but only on top of what you can do as an economist - namely, crunch numbers and draw graphs. That's why so few economists have these skills, and those who get to use them, like Larry Summers or Milton Friedman or Ben Bernanke, all come from prestigious universities and are few. 2. How much math have you got? All the stuff you learn before calculus should be called numeracy skills rather than math. The math you will see in the PhD will involve a shit ton of proofs and not-nice functions. That said, it's good that you're gonna attempt the sequence (though it's better if you have at least a couple of math grades to show in your application - in fact, I'd say it's imperative), but inevitably a PhD in economics is either gonna use a lot of analysis or a lot of statistics. Pick which one you like, but know that both of them are fairly difficult to do non-trivially. 3. Have you thought about how useful this degree will be to you in your career? Have you spoken to people who hire/are employed in the positions you want? Although everybody is like, wooooow, whenever they see an econ PhD, it's not practically very useful unless the industry you are joining is specifically asking for an Econ PhD. Polisci and soc fields are getting increasingly mathematisized now, and from my research, a PhD in that is enough for most policy jobs that require a PhD. Obviously, your employment prospects in general are improved by an econ PhD, but that's because, you know, it's a booming academic field all over the world and a lot of your would-be colleagues are hired to program huge data sets in finance and consulting firms. Finally, it's useful to remember that economics has become a very popular, and as a result, increasingly competitive degree, which is attractive not only to Americans, but to international students, most of which come with better stats than the average US student. Judging by the particulars you give, I don't see you getting into a PhD program without doing a master's first. Unless you have an in with the admin committee - in which case, all the more power to you. You could also look at universities like George Mason or UToronto, which are more heterodox and therefore more literary, but that comes at the price of skepticism from the community. It would be easier to give you advice if you gave particulars on what math and econ classes you took and your grades, what your research was in, what your GRE was, etc. Economics is a fascinating field, and I wish you luck! P.S. programming is becoming increasingly important for research in economics, so if you can pick up a programming course or two on the way, that could differentiate you from fellow applicants.