ARealDowner

No luck for Duke for me either. It was one of my weakest fits, but a great program. Damn.

Okay, yeah, I've seen that...the only thing is, that's from 2007, and it seems to me that significant movement can happen over 8 years. It might be worth checking if they have an updated dataset, but considering the topic, I'd be a bit surprised.

Are you referring to this: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2303567 by Robert Oprisko? I stumbled upon it the other day and added it to a spreadsheet I have that aggregates USNWR and NRC rankings as well, in order to get as complete a picture of where the schools I applied to line up. Also, as far as Vanderbilt goes, I asked after my interview when decisions were going to be made, and I was led to believe it would be sometime next week. They did say funding information would come out at the same time too.

I find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone admitted to a top 25 program is a "dumb cookie", or that anyone teaching at such a facility has trouble getting their works into top journals. Furthermore, given the inherently stochastic nature of the admissions process and people's decision making on where to attend, I'm not even sure how much I buy into the idea that school ranking correlates strongly with graduate students intellectual ability. Maybe as you go further and further down, but to me the idea that a school with a ranking like Wisconsin is attracting appreciably less qualified students than anyone just doesn't seem realistic.

Judging from the last three years of results, the amount of dispersion around UNC's median admission announcement is FAR greater than most programs. They seem to trickle in over a period of a few weeks. At least, that's my attempt to be empirical about it. Hopefully it's not just me trying to convince myself all the admitted have been contacted and I've been left out!

Princeton released theirs mid-February last year, but end of February the two years before. Combine that with the fact that their website gives a stated deadline of early March, I'd say we've got a while.

If that's for real, California really coordinated their admissions decisions....

I'm finishing up my Bachelor's...actually been able to remain surprisingly focused this semester this far despite all the grad school suspense.

I on the other hand, while a quantitative oriented Americanist, am not quite a fan (despite what the username might lead you to believe!) Tough a bit dated, have you read Pathologies of Rational Choice by Green and Shapiro, Darth? One of the books that really opened me up to the potential downfalls of an excessively formal theoretic approach to political science.

My plan B was a year long fellowship as an Illinois legislative researche aid, which would've paid 30k+ and benefits and been the perfect amount of time to let me try again for the cycle next year (I almost thought about taking a gap year and just doing this as a plan A and strengthening my file, but for more personal reasons I just wanted to jump into grad school without taking a break). I have a lot of respect for all you people who have been out for a while going back into schooling mode, it must be an adjustment.

Yeah, I've gotten four emails from UWMadison faculty thus far. Again, flattering, but a little strange (though they have hammered home some of the reasons it would be a good fit for me, above and beyond things I already knew, which is nice). As to when to tell you letter of Rec writers, I've just been doing it on an informal basis this far, whenever I run into them, giving them the update. Maybe I'm a bad example, because I go to a small LAC - I have an independent study with one of my recommenders this semester, and I work as a lab assistant for another. I'm planning on doing a formal thank you card/small gift when I've actually selected the school.

I have too much faith in the people of this forum/reporting on the results page to believe that not a single one who got accepted would post somewhere on this site. I might be a bit too optimistic, but nothing appears to have slipped by thus far.

I couldn't imagine waiting until March...quite glad I didn't apply to Harvard. Had to be prodded to apply to Princeton, but there are a couple of people there who I would really enjoy working with on the off-chance I get in.

Same for me as well. I wish Princeton wasn't one of the last schools to report...at least last year they announced mid-February, the previous two years it was closer to the end of the month.

I have that as well...does anyone who's applied to UW not have it? Or is it just a poorly worded generic message relaying that your file is still being considered?

Also, your signature line reminded me - if the past two years are any indication, UW Madison should be announcing their acceptances sometime early next week. That's another early school I'm hoping to hear good news from.

Good to know a fellow Americanist from the board got in! There are so many IR and Comparativists on the board here, I'm glad to know there are some still interested in old-fashioned American politics.

And I'm in at Ohio State as well! What a relief just having a single acceptance. Congratulations everyone who got accepted, hopefully we'll start hearing from other schools soon as well.

I like the username, Duvergerian! I'm going to hazard a guess and say you're a comparativist?

Odd question - what does an interview request look like? If a POI sends an email, will it explicitly ask for an interview? Or is it more of an informal thing, just reaching out with some comments on your application and interests with the expectation that you send something intelligent-sounding back?

I know from the results pages that of my schools, Ohio State and Vanderbilt have had interviews in recent years.

Also, I've got a Google doc made with all of my school's acceptance notification dates for the last three cycles. If anyone would be interested in getting a group version going, PM me and I'll share the doc with you, and everyone can add their schools to make a master list. I'd rather not post it for everyone to see for privacy reasons, but for anyone who's been around here, I'd be more than happy to share it with you.

Oh wow, sorry to hear that AuldReekie. I can't believe that came so soon - so I'm assuming Emory does interview requests then? I ended up applying to 8 programs as well. Duke, Indiana, Ohio State, Princeton, UW, UNC, Vanderbilt and WashU.

Hello letsgo2015! I hope some more of the lurkers come out of hiding, I always see a few guests reading the forum; The waiting/commiserating/celebrating's going to be better if we have more people involved. Then again, the guests could always just be the adcoms trying to match the files with the users!

I was going to be nerdy and put together a spreadsheet for my schools results timing, looking at the past three years. Perhaps I can do that as a Google spreadsheet, and share it with anyone who would be interested/want to contribute some schools of their own. Make it more of a communal effort rather than make everyone who was going to do something along those lines do it separately.