realist

I think that the first part of this sentence is true, but that the second part is very dangerous advice. At the non-top-25 institution where I teach (and I make this distinction simply because too many of you seem to believe that I'm an elitist), the first thing that we tell our incoming PhD students is that they need to be worrying about placement from the very beginning of graduate school. Too many of our students arrive and believe that placement will "take care of itself," and that they can treat graduate school like college, just concentrating on passing their classes and quals. My colleagues and I cannot disagree more. From the very beginning of graduate school, students should be thinking about how best to make themselves attractive on the job market. (1) Are they competent in methods but highly versed in substantive research? (2) How does their research fit into broader intellectual debates in political science? (3) How is their research relevant for the real world? (In other words, can they communicate their research to non-political scientists?) (4) Do they have good preparation for classroom teaching? (5) Has their classwork prepared them to teach a broad range of classes to undergraduates? Remember, at my institution, we are not competing to produce tenure track scholars at Harvard and Stanford, we are trying to produce graduates who can get *any* teaching job at a regional liberal arts college or directional state university. If you don't want a teaching job, this advice probably doesn't apply to you. But we don't have any students who do not want to be professors some day. And someone in a PhD program in political science who does not want to be a professor...honestly, I don't know why someone would choose a PhD program otherwise.

Well, that certainly is a positive attitude. I think about this issue much the same way that I think about the NBA. If you go to my home town, you'll find that every kid thinks that he's going to be a pro basketball player. I think it's great for kids to have dreams, but the fact of the matter is that chances are, the NBA isn't the ticket out for most of these kids. What they need to do is plan for the possibility that they won't turn pro as a basketball player. Failure to do so leaves kids with no options when they grow up. It's fine to dream to be Wade or Melo, but it would be a disaster to plan on it.

MIT is the obvious choice here.

In my experience, transferring "up the ladder" does not happen very frequently. In the 5 years that I was in residence in my PhD program, only one student transferred "in" from a lower-ranked school, and this lower-ranked school was overseas. This is just my experience at one school. I have no idea how representative this is. I do know that people from one program can be "in residence" at another program for an extended period of time. Gary King at Harvard, for example, frequently takes on students from other lesser-ranked programs. But this isn't a transfer, this is a visiting position. Students can also, on occasion, change departments when their adviser leaves--when Chris Achen moved to Princeton from Michigan, some of his students came too. (Apparently, my examples today are coming from big-name methodologists.) I have one friend who started his PhD at a lower-ranked school and transferred to a great department, but his story is entirely different from the scenarios that I have seen on this blog (i.e. "I'll just try to transfer.") He started a lower ranked school and was prepared to be happy there, but after a couple of weeks one of his advisers sat him down and told him that he was a future star and needed to transfer. This adviser then pulled the strings to make it happen. So keep this in mind. He didn't start out looking to transfer, he was identified by the faculty as someone who should. So my advice? Don't count on transferring. This isn't college. PhD programs invest substantial resources in their students, and expect them to stay. Plus, imagine how this would work. Are you going to ask the faculty at your current school, "you know, I think I'm better than this program, so can you write me a letter that says so?" For those of you who are looking to transfer because you're unhappy with your current placement, I wish you the best of luck, but do not count on this happening. In general, I think it is a terrible idea to start a PhD program that you have no desire to finish. It's a waste of your time and money, and theirs as well.

I won't lie to you, UCLA is considered a very hot school these days. But Northwestern has placed quite well lately, and you will get a good education there. Neither school is known for combining Asia and IR with theory--UCLA products are all rat choice and heavy stats people, whereas Northwestern's problem is that the methodological battles are still being fought there. Northwestern does have some fantastic IR theorists, though. I say, for your interests, Northwestern is a better fit. Plus, I can't imagine how expensive it would be to live in LA while paying for grad school.

Suspicion is always prudent when people speak anonymously, but I can assure you that I have no ulterior motive here. I do not work for any of the top programs, and I am not involved in graduate student recruitment this year (on leave this semester). If anything, I'm shooting myself in the foot by encouraging people to think twice about a PhD at a program that (1) doesn't guarantee funding or (2) isn't one of the very best. Naming names about programs? You'll note I specifically didn't do this, but then got repeated requests to do just that, so I gave a simple list of the best programs with repeated caveats about how hard it is to rank them and how many smart people are at other programs. I have never ranked programs in specific areas, but it's clearly true that Berkeley produces some of the best Latin Americanists, while the quantal response people overwhelmingly come from CalTech, Rochester, and WashU. But really, think about this. What's more realistic? --That the job market is easy, or that it's hard? --That faculty advisers in PhD programs are always attentive to the demands of every single graduate student, or that they have their own lives, demands, and incentives? --That the quality and reputation of a school matter for placement, or that they do not? --That the top schools--who have the top scholars--produce a better overall environment for PhD training, or that there's no difference between the top schools and the rest?

Fair question. I have no information about how it works at small schools, but I can tell you what it's like at a large PhD granting institution. We sit down with somewhere between 80 and 120 files for every position. Each file includes a cover letter, CV, between 1 and 3 representative publications or papers, 3-4 letters of recommendations, a transcript, a teaching statement, a research statement, and occasionally additional material. All of this together runs between 100 and 200 pages per applicant. Our goal is to take this mass of information and weed out 2 or 3 candidates to interview. To have a fair shot at even being considered, you need to have three very positive letters from three well-known scholars. Even then, that's not enough. You need to have evidence that you are able to produce: a forthcoming or at least "R+R" paper, a CV that includes multiple APSA presentations, and a vibrant, creative, and interesting research trajectory. Plus, you have to fit with the needs of the department. And there's no doubt that pedigree counts. We need evidence that you have been trained at the highest level, and are familiar with the most cutting-edge theories and methods. This information is, by and large, unobservable. The best way to find this out, though, is to look at where the candidate received his or her PhD. If we want someone who truly understands quantal response models, we'll be more likely to look at a Rochester, CalTech, or WashU PhD than a Berkeley PhD. If we want someone who truly understand Latin America, we'll be more likely to look at Berkeley. Of course, if you are a star, it doesn't matter where you got your PhD. For this reason, pedigree really doesn't matter at all for senior hires. But at the junior level, pedigree is one measure--albeit imperfect--of the quality of a candidate's graduate training. Not many people are stars in graduate school. A positive letter from a famous scholar is necessary, but by no means sufficient. Nearly every job candidate has a positive letter from a top scholar. Everyone can name 5-6 recent PhDs who worked with all the right people and had all the right letters, but who still had a very tough time on the market. Thus my claim: don't count on a letter from your adviser--even a glowing one--getting you that job you've always wanted.

I must admit that the response to my advice has been disheartening. Rest assured that I think that our system of PhD education in political science has deep flaws (I described certain aspects of it as "repugnant"), so I'm not sure what is elitist about this. Regardless of whether or not you like my advice, I hope that you all have come to accept three things. (1) Tenure-track jobs are extremely hard to get. If you think applying for PhD admissions is disheartening, just wait. (2) Some schools place better than others. There is a big discontinuity after about 20-25 in the rankings. This is simply a fact. Ignoring it does not make it go away, nor does complaining about elitism make you look smart. (3) Faculty have different incentives than graduate students, and great advisers (Przeworski, Linz, D. Collier, R. Smith) are much less common than mediocre and disinterested ones. Do not count on your adviser to get you a job by writing you a great letter. (From having sat on numerous faculty hiring committees, I can tell you that this is not how it works.) I wish you all the best luck. My hope is that you are all going into this process with your eyes wide open.

I wish you the best of luck. Illinois has produced several very good scholars, and has some outstanding faculty.

*Sigh* The reason why I say unambiguous is because people disagree about lower ranked schools. Like you are right now. In the Hix rankings, for example, place UNC at 35 and Minnesota at 59, one behind NYU and 7 behind Duke. They put Irvine at 7 and Indiana at 8. This in no way ranks the general consensus about these schools' graduate programs. I'm not really here to tell you what schools are the best. There is no real ranking system that does what you want; it's a combination of recent placement history (per capita), reputation, faculty reputation, school reputation, and what I understand from having been a graduate student for 5 years, a tenure track prof at a R1 school for 4, and knowing what my colleagues think. There is no way to summarize this information in a single ordinal scale. There are no hard and fast rules. Feel free to disagree with me, and then search for a ranking system out there that puts your school in the top 25. What I attempt to do is describe what appears to be a natural cutoff point between schools that are "widely considered" to be top 25 schools. It's not based on anything other than my imperfect reading of the discipline. If you want to consider Emory to be worse than Minnesota, you should feel free to do so. I can tell you for a fact, though, that whenever we look at job applicants, Minnesota is not given nearly the attention that Emory is. We even have a very active UMinn PhD (from the 1970s) on our committees. I guess that our faculty don't read the US News. It's sad that so many of you focus on the silly rankings that I've come up with (with what I admitted was nothing close to a perfect system), rather than my advice about what to consider when looking at graduate school and how to be a good political scientist.

You have a wonderful choice in front of you. Either will be fine. Harvard is ranked higher, but only marginally. In this case, you should choose based on what your interests are (if APD or experiments, Yale; if African politics or matching, Harvard). Here's something most of you might not think to consider: Harvard's Government department is huge and anonymous, and many (but certainly not all) faculty have little to do with students there. There's very little sense of community there, either in the graduate school or in the Gov department. Yale's department is big, but it's all in one place and the graduate students there are very close with one another, both within the department and across departments. I have colleagues who went to both. You might be surprised, but the people who went to Yale seem to have liked it more. But if you're the type of person who won't be happy in a city without a subway or a Chinatown, you should choose Harvard. Do not let people dissuade you from New Haven based on the fact that "people don't like it." Many of those people are just closet racists. I've visited New Haven once or twice, and it's not nearly the pit that people make it out to be.

Northwestern is a tough case. Consider it top 25. I was probably wrong not do so. Aside from this one school, though, you'll find very few big exceptions over many years.

It concerns me that so many of you are worried about "top 25" or not, and are apparently unaware of what is unambiguously a top 25 department. Here's the best that I can tell of unambiguously top 25 political science PhD programs. These will show up in any list of top programs. Some rankings rank based on faculty productivity, which is not what you're looking for here: you want strength or "reputation" of department, a rather amorphous concept. Notice there are fewer than 25. That's because in any list, numbers 20-25 are really up for dispute. I've grouped them by "type" of school. These are in no way ranked, and I may have forgotten one or two. IVY Harvard Yale Princeton Columbia Cornell IVY-LIKE PRIVATE (these schools, curiously, are often very technical) Stanford Chicago MIT Duke NYU Rochester Emory WashU CALIFORNIA Berkeley UCLA UCSD BIG STATE Michigan Ohio State Wisconsin Are there very very good schools that I've left off, places like Northwestern, UNC, Binghamton, Brown, Rice, Stony Brook, Irvine, Indiana, Georgetown, Iowa, A+M, FSU, etc.? Absolutely. These schools sometimes do place students in good jobs. But it's rare, and you should understand this. I don't think that you should choose such lower ranked schools over any of unambiguous top 25s above. And I'm sure that you should not pay to go to graduate school in these other departments. I hope this helps.

polisciapp, yoon7724 The top 25 question is difficult, so use the rule of thumb that I told you. If you are not sure, it's not. Do not pay attention to subfield. Do not try to find one list where your school is 20 and pick that list as your basis for comparison. If there's even a question as to whether your department is in the top 25, it's not.

No. Essex or Oxford, perhaps, in some fields, for rare individuals, are comparable to a school in the 15-25 range. In general, British (and other European) schools are nowhere near top US schools.

Advice from an actual PhD I am a tenure-track assistant prof in political science at a large state university. I was just informed of this forum by one of my students who has been active on it. In reading through the threads, I couldn't help but think about all the things that I wish that I had known before entering my PhD program. So with that, I thought that I'd give you some advice. While some of this may be hard to read, I offer it as-is, with only the thought that more knowledge is better than less knowledge. CHOOSING GRADUATE SCHOOL Your graduate school choice is probably the most important choice that you'll make in your career. Do not take this lightly. There are many reasons, but they boil down to some uncomfortable truths. 1. Only the best schools place students in academic jobs. While there are thousands of universities in the United States, there are many many many thousand more political science PhDs. 5-7 years is a very long time to spend in a low-paying job (which is what graduate school is) only to realize that you have chance for promotion. Even at top 10 institution, a good half of entering students do not end up with a PhD and a tenure track job. Is it fair that this is the case? No. Are there very smart graduate students that are not at top departments? Absolutely, there are literally thousands of them. But this is how the world works. And you have no chance to change it from "the inside" unless you are already at a top department. 2. Advisers are fickle beings. Especially outside of the top institutions, they are busy and pressed for time, and they cannot offer you the type of guidance and support that you may believe that you are going to get. I had a very close relationship with a very influential adviser, and saw him for about 10 minutes once every two or three weeks. This is the norm. Do not think that you will have a different experience. Moreover, good scholars are often terrible advisers. I think that one of the worst aspects of our profession is that at middle-range departments, top scholars often will not even acknowledge graduate students. 3. Graduate school is an unequal partnership between students, who receive very little and give very much, and faculty, who have many other things to do but rely on students to do things that are in the university's best interests. Graduate students are (1) essentially powerless and (2) extremely cheap labor. Universities have an incentive to keep a lot of graduate students around to fill instructor slots and TAships. This means that they will keep on a lot of graduate students who will never have a chance at a tenure-ladder job. This is a pathological system of incentives, and I find it repugnant, but this is the reality. So what sort of advice does this lead me to give? First off, above and beyond almost anything, you need to go to the best possible graduate school. It doesn't matter if you don't like Ann Arbor as much as Athens or Austin, graduate school matters tremendously for your future ability to get a job. At nearly every university or college, a PhD from Michigan will get your file looked at when applying for jobs. I know that this sounds harsh, but for most jobs, a job file from a school out of the top 25 won't even be considered. It will just go on the trash. Let this sink in. As a corollary, you need to think long and hard about graduate school if you do not have the opportunity to go to a top one. You should understand that you may not have a good chance of landing a tenure track job. The one's available to you, moreover, will likely be at "directional institutions" (think Northern X State) or small, low-ranked liberal arts colleges in the middle of nowhere. Even there, you will be competing with Harvard and Berkeley PhDs for a job. It's hard. It's not as hard as English or History, but nevertheless it's really hard. You should know this and plan accordingly. Do not choose graduate school based on who you "want to work with." Graduate students very seldom "work with" an adviser. If they do, this is *at best* as a second author, and even this is rare, and almost never enough to get you a job. This also assumes that your research interests don't change (RARE) and that your adviser is a nice and approachable person (OCCASIONAL). Remember, they are approachable during recruitment because you provide them with an unlimited supply of discount labor. They have their own worries and incentives, and these rarely align with yours. Likewise, funding matters. My general advice is that outside of a top 25 institution, you should not go to graduate school unless you have a full ride and a stipend large enough to live on. Without these, graduate school is a long and expensive process with little reward. There is a constant demand for doctors, so doctors can pay for medical school and still come out ahead. $200,000 in debt and only qualified for a very low paying job is a terrible situation that many PhDs find themselves in. It is tempting to think that a potential advisor's kind words mean that you are special. You are special, but so are many many others. Wherever you are, you will likely not even be the smartest or most successful member of your cohort. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are the one who will buck the trends that I have described. It's just not likely. Finally, I have made a big point about top 25 schools. We all know that Stanford is and Purdue isn't, but what's the definitive list? Simply put, if you have to ask, your school is not in the top 25. YOUR CAREER If you decide to go to graduate school, congratulations. I mean this sincerely. You are embarking on the most intellectually rewarding period of your life. (Of course, intellectually and financially rewarding are not the same, as I mentioned previously.) Here are some brief tips. The best political scientists are the following five things: smart, creative, diligent, honest, and nice. Smart is obvious. The rest are not. The best political scientists are creative. They look at old problems in new ways, or they find new problems to look at. A good way to land a middling job (or no job) is to find a marginal improvement on an existing estimator, or take lessons from Paraguay and apply them to Uruguay. The best political scientists show us how our estimators are incorrect, or better yet, find new things to estimate. The best political scientists are diligent. They think about problems for years and years, they rewrite their draft papers repeatedly, they collect giant datasets from scratch, and they go into the field, learn the language, and stay there until they have learned something. There are no quick research trips, there are no obvious philosophical points, and there are no datasets that you can download with results you can write up in a week. The best political scientists are honest. There are many points at which you might fudge your work: creating a new dataset from scratch, during fieldwork, in writing up your results. You will be astounded at how frequent this is in our profession. Don't do it, for it always hurts you in the end. Being wrong and honest about it is OK. Being wrong and hiding it never works. Finally, the best political scientists are nice. It is tempting to be prickly to make yourself seem smart or to protect your ego. But the same person you criticize today might be in a position to give you a job tomorrow. As they say, make your words soft and sweet, for you never know when you may have to eat them. ************ I hope this helps you all. I wish you the very best of luck with your careers.