Penelope Higgins

True. Georgetown is notorious for offering lots of acceptances but very little in the way of funding. This can, of course, be negotiated (from what I've heard) if you have other offers.

Schools will be more than happy to tell you about this as admission offers go out, but here's the general scoop. Visits are not on the weekend - that way you can meet with faculty, attend classes, etc. Stipends are provided for airfare and accomodation with current grad students. Visiting weekends will be in March and early April.

Yes, the process is slow. From the other side, here are a couple of reasons why. First, the files go through the graduate school (at least at my institution) which is sorting applications for admissions to a huge range of programs and making sure they are complete. Second, when they do make it over to our office, the faculty on the committee are just that: faculty. We all have teaching and research responsibilities that don't sit idle while we are reading admissions files. We're not admissions officers - this is a responsibility on top of our regular commitments. Third, once a list of candidates is compiled and is approved by the department as a whole, it needs to go through a set of decisions about funding etc that happens (or at least needs approval) at the graduate school level. Again, they're working with admissions in a variety of programs. This isn't to say it isn't frustrating from the applicant's end, but just so you have a sense of what's going on at our end.

As a faculty member, I will say that it does you no good to contact me. First, I am not usually on the grad admissions committee. Second, I've only got a limited amount of political capital in the department. Am I really likely to spend it on someone who I have never met in person, and who (for all I know) is also contacting people at other schools, and may go to one of them even if I do pull my limited strings to get them admitted?

Congratulations! Good luck with the admissions process.

Ziz, a 720 is quite a solid score. And it is less of an issue at the non-US schools you list. I wouldn't lose sleep over the GREs if I were you.

Depends if you want to do formal theory, or applied rational choice, and (less so) whether you want to do the latter in IR, comparative, or american. If you want to be a formal theorist, Rochester/GSB/Caltech/Princeton/Stanford are good choices. For applied formal, NYU, Stanford, etc. are good choices. Chicago would not be on your radar screen unless you had a sense that you could work with the folks at the Harris school like Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita.

Depends what kind of American you want to do. You want to find less competitive departments that specialize in your particular area of interest within the subfield (public opinion, institutions, etc.) Ask your advisors which schools outside the top ten might be good fits.

I am on the admissions committee at one of the schools you listed. To be blunt, those scores are going to hurt your application at all the US schools you list. I would suggest that you retake the GRE if you can.

Should have been clearer: I meant that the OP would be fine at Chicago and many other places unless he/she wanted to do quant work. I didn't intend this as a slight against Chicago. Those scores are 'above the bar' for a non-quant applicant anywhere, and will get the file looked at.

If you're approaching these issues as a theorist I can't offer much advice beyond mentioning Princeton and Magill as two places that seem to have a lot of interested faculty. If you're a comparativist, your best choices will depend on the geographic region of interest... there are lots of people doing good theoretical work on questions of nationalism, language, and state building, but most (all?) of them are focused on particular world regions. For example, Keith Darden at Yale works on the post-Soviet cases, David Laitin at Stanford has worked on these questions there and in Africa, and so on.

Agreed that scores should be fine for a place like Chicago. You won't stand out from other applicants in terms of your scores one way or the other.

The big obstacle to good rankings of Canadian departments is the diversity of how political science is approached: Toronto and York, for example, are very different schools, though both well thought of in political theory... But in general, I would list UBC, Magill and Toronto at the top...

You've got a list of most of the top 10 schools in comparative (missing UCLA, for one) but since you don't describe your interests within comparative in any more detail, it is hard to give any more advice. With that experience, GPA, and GRE scores, I'd guess your file would get a good read at many of the schools you list, but a lot will depend on the letters and the research proposal...

your writing sample should be the best thing you've written that is relevant to political science. A part of your thesis (not the literature review!) would be fine. For US schools you do not need to include an outline of your doctoral thesis, since you will be spending the first two years taking courses and developing a proposal for the thesis. And a semester in Cuba would certainly not hurt you. As for schools to consider (though without more information we have no sense of how strong your application will be), Harvard, University of Chicago, University of Washington, Berkeley, and Brown come to mind as schools with faculty who work on the state in the developing world. You don't mention a geographic region of interest, so it is hard to be more specific.

Either approach is fine. Ideally you would just use a paper that you already have written. But if you are writing a new paper, either a single case study (so long as it addresses questions of interest to political science) or a comparative study would be fine.

Lots of people using it to map territorial variation - ranging from studies of electoral fraud to violence in civil war. Less spatial statistics (ie studies of spatial patterns of dependence), more presentation of spatial data...

the previous post is generally right, but note that in the past few years the hires at both BU and BC have come from top 5 departments (Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard). I don't know about Alabama. But I would say that if you get a PhD outside the top 40-50 departments, you should not expect to get your first job in a department with a PhD program.

Wisconsin is building a nice PE group with Gelbach, Copelovitch, Pevehouse, etc.

Both GRE scores matter, but the cutoff (at a top 10 ish department) for using the GRE to weed out applications is higher for math (700ish) than for verbal (600ish) So the OP is above the bar on both fronts, and a higher math score can - in most places - make up for a lower verbal score more easily than vice versa.

Agreed. A good SOP and good letters, with those scores, will make you a very competitive candidate at top schools.

Not true in political science, at least not anywhere I've been.

Peter Singer wrote his dissertation on this topic about 10 years ago at Harvard. He is now at Brookings, not in an academic job - which, as I understand, was his preference. You might see who he worked with at Harvard and apply there (I am assuming it was Steve Rosen, but I could be wrong.)

Yale definitely has some good political economy folks - you could do a lot worse than working with Ken Scheve, for one.

You don't break down your scores by parts of the test, but the math score is what matters. A terrible verbal score (under 550, say) is a red flag for a native English speaker, but schools will pay more attention to the math score. If you're in the 60th percentile there, youve got some studying to do. If the verbal is pulling your score down, I wouldn't worry about it too much. And as far as I know, nobody will look at a GMAT score instead of a GRE score. I'd leave it, along with any excuses about how little time you had to prepare for the GRE, off the application entirely.