Penelope Higgins

LOTS of options here, since lots of work is being done on these - it depends on what approach you want to take. I would start with the following schools/advisors: Princeton (Beissinger) Harvard (Levitsky/Colton) NYU (Tucker) Yale (Darden) Wisconsin (Herrera/Gelbach) If Canada is an option for you, working with Lucan Way at Toronto would also be a possibility. As always, the way to pick schools is to find faculty who are doing the kind of work you find interesting.

Assuming that you have the money for application fees to take a chance at some top programs, don't sell yourself short. Success in graduate work goes a long way toward making up for poor undergraduate performance, especially if you have strong letters from prominent faculty at your "well known terminal MA program" and a clear sense of your intellectual agenda.

I didn't mean to attack anyone. My apologies. Now let's return to the original subject of the thread.

Name a single political scientist with a PhD from a Canadian university who has gotten a job at a top-10 US political science department in the last 10 years. I'll be surprised if you can come up with any; shocked if there are more than a handful. Are you sure that your data are specific to the political science discipline? And where is my information from? Years of search committee work where I see files from Canadian PhDs that are not competitive with those from top American schools.

Sorry to burst your bubble but this post is not true. You are not "set" for working in the US with a PhD from a top Canadian school. Maybe you should be, but the reality is that those who get PhDs from Canadian universities don't do well on the US job market.

Everything you said is right one except this: some of us are on admissions committees. But I'm hoping to avoid doing it again any time soon!

Bellin is great, both as an advisor and as a person. You are in very good hands - enjoy!

31 is not old enough to pose a disadvantage. In some programs, that will fall firmly in the middle of the age distribution of first year students. The law degree (with GPA and LSAT scores) won't help you a huge amount, but it is far from a detriment to your application. Have you thought about getting letters from law school profs?

Ah, I didn't catch that part. Then my advice is irrelevant. My apologies. The department has been honest with you about its situation, and about the prospects for the job market based on the performance of past students. You have to ask yourself whether you would be happy with a job at one of the places listed in your post above. The only alternative, as you stated, is to take a different career path than academia. We can't advise you on how to make that choice, but you have all the information from IU that you need in order to make it on your own. The only thing I would say is that if the schools you list are really a reflection of the department's placement record, that is a much better list than you characterized it: UIUC is a very strong research department, Colorado State and Denver also have PhD program, and Grinnell has great students and gives faculty real opportunities for research. That is, especially if those are theory placements as you suggest, a pretty strong record. So I think you're seeing the glass as a bit emptier than it really is.

Go to Indiana, do really well for your MA, and then consider your options. You can choose to apply to transfer at that point, and can get letters from faculty who can talk about your performance as a grad student. Yes, you will have to repeat some classes after the transfer, and potentially re-take comps, but since you have funding at IU and will presumably have funding wherever you end up, you are not losing any money. At my program, we regularly see students leave for higher-ranked places, and regularly accept students from elsewhere. Outside the top 15 departments or so, this is a more than reasonable approach.

Read the Chicago posts here: http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/topic.php?id=21635&page=3 and do the math...

I have heard that Kalyvas may not be at NSSR too much longer. So I would be wary about going there to work with him.

Several facts to straighten out here: 1. recent hires at Madison who do work relevant to the poster's interests (like Herrera) are not quants. 2. Ethan BDM is at the Harris School at Chicago and has nothing to do with the poli sci department in terms of teaching or advising. Few of the comparativists at Chicago do quant work (Simpser will not be around after next year) 3. comparative at Yale is not fully quant - it is split: Kalyvas, Darden, and Wood do mostly qualitative work, while Scheve, Dunning, etc. are quants. Most importantly, you should NOT make this decision based on methodological preferences: you should go to the school where the faculty work on topics of interest to you. I don't know who the Russia/post-Soviet person is at Chicago, so it seems to me like your choice is between Gelbach and Herrera at Madison and Darden at the MA at Yale. I'd choose Madison, but that's just me.

Just to point out that the couple of sentences below are not quite right: the thesis can demonstrate that you have command of a small piece of the political science literature. But the broader literature that you study for comps - and in which you will be teaching and mentoring students - is not touched in the thesis because the focus of that process is so narrow. The thesis and comps are two separate bars to cross, and they evaluate distinct kinds of knowledge.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you're going to have trouble finding a department that will let you do this. Departments require everyone to take comps in their institution to make sure that they have an opportunity to evaluate your breadth of knowledge using their own criteria and approach to the discipline. The fact that time has elapsed since you passed your comps will be a red flag, since new literature that has appeared since you took your exams has changed the field. My department (which is far from alone in this) requires anyone who takes more than a certain number of years between comps and dissertation defense to re-take comps to qualify for the defense.

Didn't see your post qazwerty, but I withdraw the word 'majority'... the point I was trying to make is that this is far from an uncommon situation. Apologies for the imprecision.

As a graduate student at a top 5 department, and during my brief stint as a faculty member at one, I learned that the majority of our admitted grad students were accepted to nearly all of the top 10 programs to which they applied. 7 out of 10, for example, was a fairly routine outcome for many of our accepted students. So I am not surprised by SP's results, though I have no personal knowledge of his situation. I am sure that several applicants with similar decisions to make are not posting on this board. While this thread started out quite entertaining, it has gone to some pretty ugly places. Let's all take a deep breath and focus on our own situations.

Two quick responses, which represent my two cents about how I look at files: First, research and writing for intelligence analysis is not the same as academic research and writing. They require different set of skills, and the ability to do the former tells me little about the ability to do the latter. And I say this as someone who has taught at times in my career some of my courses to graduate students in public policy. Second, if your writing is on a subject not written on previously, it still must be relevant to the questions currently studied in political science. You might be applying an existing theory to a new set of issues, for example, or showing how existing theories can't explain a particular outcome or set of outcomes. If you can't situate this paper in the context of political science questions, or for the relevance of your research interests to the kinds of things political scientists study, your application is in trouble.

Knowing nothing else but what the OP posted, my sense is that the letters are a problem here. As an admissions committee member, I would wonder why the applicant can't get a third letter from a faculty member (either from their undergrad or their MA) and has to get a letter from an employer. You need letters from academics to apply to a PhD program - or at least from people who have a PhD in a relevant field and can write about your academic potential. If I were to look at your file, it would be the letters and not the test scores that would hurt you. I would, therefore, worry less about retaking the GREs and more about getting new, better, letters in your file. The writing sample is probably fine - though its purely qualitative nature won't help you in some departments or subfields, what we want to see is original research done well and situated in the relevant literature. If you're confident that you've done that, you should be fine on that front.

Definitely ask to meet anyone you are interested in. Departments make an effort to match you with appropriate professors, but feel free to add anyone to the list (but don't be offended if they are not around that weekend). In terms of grad students, you want (1) to meet those who work with the faculty you anticipate working with, and (2) to meet enough people so you have a sense of the mood/style of the department. You'll have no trouble doing this - there will be lunches, dinners, drinks etc. and often you'll be paired with people who are a good fit for you - ie other people in your subfield or (if applicable) geographic area.

In IR, with Kydd, Martin, Pevehouse, etc. being at Madison, this is not a tough choice. I would go to Madison in a heartbeat over GW assuming the funding was not an issue.

Not the person you were asking but... I know several WWS PhDs with academic jobs, both in political science and in other disciplines, in addition to all those working at policy schools.

Nothing more happens than (1) you lose the chance to meet faculty, students, and see the area, and (2) you lose the chance to do any in-person negotiation about funding, housing, etc. I accepted an offer at a school I never visited and suffered no repercussions.

Used to be Stanford and Berkeley (for example) coordinated on the visit to make this sort of thing happen. Whether they still do I don't know.

Even for 'unfunded' students Georgetown will waive tuition. But you still need to pay all the living expenses without a stipend, which can add up - DC is not a cheap town.