Penelope Higgins

3 of those 5 are non-tenure track faculty who likely don't teach or work with grad students. And Chiozza is apparently leaving. I've heard VAndy is trying to hire; no sense of how that has proceeded.

I'm on the admissions committee in my department yet again this year. I can assure you that nobody cares about that sort of thing even if we do notice. We've admitted people addressing cover letters to the wrong school. Actually we've hired a job candidate who did that in recent memory as well. Quality of work wins out.

Government is NOT housed at HKS at Harvard. Social policy is, and the program is joint between HKS and GSAS. In practice, your application is evaluated largely by people in the Government department in GSAS.

Language skills may be seen, in some departments, as a necessary condition for admission. But nobody is going to see language skills as a strength that compensates for weaknesses in other parts of the application. In that sense, languages do not play a role in the admissions process.

Departments don't give a priority to language abilities. Languages are, for political science, nothing more than a tool that you need to do certain kinds of research. They can help your application by demonstrating your preparation for research, but they won't substitute for the other required components of the application package.

The professor should have something more than a topic on the syllabus for you to work with. You can ask for his/her notes from the previous version of the class, or a powerpoint if they use one. And by the way if this is the very first class meeting of the semester (your post was unclear about whether this will be the first course meeting overall or the first substantive lecture) you should simply stick to "here's the syllabus, here's what we're going to cover this semester, here are our expectations, any questions?"

Either one will be fine. While having some math under your belt is useful for improving your application to some types of poli sci grad programs, the field is nothing like econ (yet!) in terms of the amount of math classes required. A major in either math or stats will give you linear algebra and some of the other math behind the standard statistical models we use in political science. Your challenge will be to convince admissions committees that despite your lack of a poli sci background, you've identified questions of interest to you that fit into the discipline of political science. Beyond that, you should major in whatever interests you more.

None of us can tell you how a degree from Idaho State will be received in your home country. But here are two reasons to hesitate about choosing this program. First, funding, especially for international students, will be limited or completely absent. And second, their doctoral program requires students to specialize in American politics (see the description of the graduate program on their site). You won't be able to write a dissertation on the things you've mentioned on here before as your interests. If you're really committed for some reason to not taking the GRE, I would think that universities outside the US would be your best set of options.

By the standards of where you're coming from, even most quantitative and formal work in American politics won't compare. There are departments (like the one coach is attending) that are exceptions, but in general most grad students in American aren't developing new methods or models. Look at the American politics syllabi and at the work of faculty and you'll get a sense of this. This statement, to be honest, isn't based on direct experience: I am not an Americanist. But I have served on hiring committees for American politics and in economics, and the difference in methods expectations is dramatic.

I write this as a faculty member at a school that gets mentioned on here occasionally, in political science. Your admission depends, in part, on your ability to make the case that your interests fit well with those of some of the faculty at the department to which you are applying. The 'POI' model from the natural sciences just doesn't apply. Generally you will work with a committee of several faculty rather than in a lab with a single advisor. Make sure you can make the case that your intellectual interests match those of some of the faculty. You do NOT need to have contact with faculty before applying. Nor does your funding come from a faculty member, with very rare exceptions. Your admission is determined by the department as a whole, or more accurately the representatives they choose, and funding comes from the department or university. You're applying to join a department not to work with an individual.

In my experience, being enrolled in a European graduate program won't hurt you in the admissions process and it may help. Schools will treat you as a regular applicant rather than as a potential transfer student. To the extent that you can both explain why you're applying to US schools and explain what you have gotten out of the program you are currently in, the experience of being enrolled in a PhD program should help your application. Having letters from faculty in the program that can attest to your ability to do graduate level work will help as well, especially if those faculty are known quantities here in the US. You may, of course, have reasons not to seek those letters if you're worried that faculty in France will be upset that you are leaving. You'll need to figure out whether you can ask your current professors for letters based on your relationship with them.

The single best way to learn about this is to watch how hiring works in the department where you're starting a PhD. Go to the job talks, pay attention to how people present their work, the kinds of questions faculty ask, and compare your evaluation of the candidates to that of the faculty. In your first couple of years of grad school, the key thing to do is to think about how each class you take, each skill you build, each paper you write can help you figure out what you will research in your dissertation and what kind of job you want. You can go too far with this and miss out on the opportunity to explore new directions you might find interesting, but remember that graduate school, and especially the dissertation itself, are means to an end. And that end is getting a job and having a successful career. As for the nuts and bolts of applying for jobs, here's a sketch of the timeline for jobs in the US. APSA has a searchable database of positions online, with brief and not always transparent or informative descriptions of what they are seeking. I don't know if you need to be a member to browse this. You send out a job packet that includes reference letters, writing sample (usually the strongest dissertation chapter and/or an article you have published along the way), cover letter, etc. Most people send out 50-60 or more packets, applying for every job that looks remotely like they might have a shot at it. Then you sit and wait for the phone to ring or new email to arrive - and here you thought those days were over after this winter. Some departments do brief face to face interviews at APSA in September. These tend to be more teaching-oriented, smaller departments rather than institutions like the ones most people on here are applying to for the PhD. Some departments narrow down the applicant pool through Skype or phone interviews. Basically all departments eventually arrive at a list of 3 to 5 candidates that get brought to campus for a job talk, one on one interviews with faculty, and sometimes a teaching demonstration. Interviews generally though not always happen sometime between October and February, and once you get a job offer and accept it you may find yourself rushing to finish the dissertation so that you don't have it hanging over your head before you start teaching in August or September.

In my experience, this is where a clear and compelling personal statement and strong letters of recommendation can help you. Your application needs to convince us that you are a stronger student than your record reflects, and that you have a clear sense of how your research interests fit into political science scholarship even if your undergrad was in another field. The reality is, though, that top schools get 400-500 applications for 30 spots. So it is hard to be competitive for admissions at a top department if your undergrad is really "weak and unrelated." I would make sure to apply to a wide range of schools, including some with a less competitive admissions process.

I'm not the OP, but I am a faculty member at a school that gets mentioned on here fairly often, but not one of the three the OP mentioned. Stephen Walt is not in political science at Harvard. He is in the Kennedy School of Government, which is the public policy school. He has nothing to do with graduate admissions for the Government Department and does not normally advise PhD students in that department, though he does occasionally serve as a third or fourth member of a dissertation committee. Same with Milani at Stanford. You need to find out which graduate programs they work with if you want to study with them. In general in political science in the US, individual advisors have relatively little influence over the admissions process. That is because funding comes from the department or graduate school, not advisors. Do not count on them to play a major role in helping your case, particularly if your file is weak on GRE scores or GPA. Your file needs to appeal to a coalition in the department, not just to a single faculty member.

The advice above is right. The best strategy is to identify published work that matches the kind of research you want to do, then see where the authors are teaching and (especially if they are fairly recent grads) where they were trained. For the kind of work you describe, I would look at the faculty and recent grads from Stanford and NYU as you mention, as well as Yale and UCLA.

In addition to clarifying whether you have a region of interest, and if so which one, I'd think about whether you want formal/quantitative approaches to democratization (in which case NYU, Yale, and Stanford would be top choices) or more comparative-historical approaches, in which case I would rank Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Northwestern quite highly. If you're looking for schools that are somewhat lower ranked, Texas is also very strong on these issues for Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Ohio State also does quite well on some regions, including Latin America, and Cornell might be worth a look as well depending on your region of interest.

Someone in my grad school cohort who was wait-listed and eventually enrolled without funding ended up as clearly the star of our cohort. They got their first job at a top 5 department and now have tenure (early) at another top 5 department. Nobody remembers whether or not you were wait-listed or where you ranked in the admissions process once the admissions process is over.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Fulbright and other similar funding sources require foreign students to return to their home country at the end of the period of study as you explain, but only for a certain number of years. This does not prevent you from taking a job in the US. Instead, in practice, this means deferring the starting date on a US job (if you choose to stay in the US) or taking leave from a US job to return home for 1 or 2 years. Stathis Kalyvas at Yale, for example, came to the US on a Fulbright and had to return to Greece for two years as a result. He used this time to conduct research for his book on civil wars while on some sort of leave from his job in the US. As for the funding, it certainly won't hurt you to have a year of funding coming in to the department.

I think this may mean that the department doesn't use a ranked waitlist, but will pull from a set of backups to fill out the admitted cohort in a way that balances for subfield or area of interest. A lot of departments don't have ranked waitlists, or even ranked waitlists within each subfield. Instead, if the two applicants admitted to work on Congress, for example, turn them down, they will look at the next few applicants interested in that area and choose from among them.

Previous post is correct. But I thought OP was asking about a more sustained and formal affiliation with another university, which is also possible. Sometimes that happens in the course of fieldwork, but I know people who pretty much moved to another country as soon as coursework was done and communicated with their advisors by email for the next four years while developing, researching, and writing a dissertation. I was assuming OP was interested in that sort of thing. And sustained research abroad is much much more common in CP than in IR, though not unknown of course in the latter subfield.

There are several fairly standard ways to spend time abroad in graduate school. Nearly all, however, unfold in the post-coursework stage. I've seen students as exchange scholars abroad, spending a year at another institution usually but not always with funding from their home institution but with the invitation of a scholar at the receiving institution who can facilitate integration into the intellectual community. So long as your funding does not require you to be in residence, or you have funding from the receiving institution (this can be very hard to acquire) there is usually no obstacle to doing this. I know, for example, that an Americanist who is now teaching in a top department wrote much of his dissertation while spending time in Indonesia. I may be wrong about this, but my experience has been that these sorts of graduate school trajectories usually unfold on the initiative of the student and not as a result of the networking efforts of faculty members. This means that you might not get much useful information out of conversations with faculty at campus visits. Doesn't hurt to try, though - and so long as you have an intellectual or professional justification for this I don't think it should hurt you at all to explore it in those conversations. Given that you are an IR scholar and interested in Europe, some of the places I would explore a bit are the EUI (which does have some funding for visiting scholars) as well as universities in England, Ireland, and (if language permits) Germany and Spain.

Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research at Syracuse. It is organized by political scientists and mainly draws on them, but would be a good experience for someone doing comparative-historical work. Instructors include sociologists, such as Jim Mahoney. It is not easy to attend if your department is not a member of their consortium, but they do have a limited number of spots for applicants in unaffiliated institutions. More info here: http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/cqrm/The_Institute_for_Qualitative_and_Multi-Method_Research/

Most top departments will pay for admitted students to travel from overseas for visits. Others will ask whether you're already coming to the US to visit other departments, and pay for your domestic travel form one department to another. This may mean that you end up missing the formal visit at some places, but I would think that would be preferable anyway to making multiple international trips within the same month.

Well, I stand corrected. Apologies for the wrong information provided above. It is good to hear that some schools are willing to help prospective students make a decision by facilitating partners attending the admitted students visit; I know others that have explicitly refused to do so and based my answer on that information. Perhaps this is something my current department (not one that gets a lot of discussion on here) should consider, though I imagine in the scheme of things we've probably got more efficient uses for our very limited resources.

All the departments you list in your signature should cover travel for admitted student visits. Usually housing is with current grad students, and visits occur during the week so the faculty and students are around to meet with you. I doubt any department would pay for your partner to attend the visit, and usually your schedule is quite tight with events. You could perhaps ask to arrange travel that lets you stay a few more days to explore the area; you're not likely to have much time during the visit, which is focused more on the department and the university than what life would be like.