Penelope Higgins

Teaching experience will help you if you use it to make the case that you have figured out how your research interests fit into the discipline of political science. In particular, if your letter writers make that argument it will strengthen your application.

My apologies if this information is all obvious, but I'm putting it on "paper" in case it is of use to someone. These comments are based on my experience as a student at a program often tossed around on here, and a faculty member both at a well-funded, competitive program to which many on here apply, and at a less prominent, more poorly funded department. Top programs commit themselves to fund everyone they admit. With very few exceptions at these programs, funding is equal for all admitted students. This funding consists of a mix of assistantship (you TA or RA a certain number of hours per week) and fellowship (you have no responsibilities beyond pursuing your own research), and comes on top of tuition remission and usually healthcare etc. Funding is normally guaranteed for a certain number of years (usually four or five) and additional funding options for things like fieldwork and summer research vary on a school-by-school basis. Lower-ranked programs tend to offer less funding. This means more teaching or RA work and less fellowship, and that packages vary from one admitted student to the next. Some fairly well ranked schools (a search on this forum should tell you which ones) are notorious for not offering funding to very many students, and for making students compete for funding with one another each year. Even worse, some schools simply have very little funding, and hope students will attend anyway. You should not enroll in a PhD program without funding, nor should you enroll before you are crystal clear on exactly how many years of funding you are guaranteed, and what your responsibilities will be as you earn that funding. Nearly all funding is merit based. Some schools have funding for students who fit particular categories - Harvard, in particular, is famous for its list of scholarships for graduate study for people who meet all sorts of arcane criteria. At most schools, especially lower-ranked ones, some funding is allocated at the university level on a merit basis. This usually involves comparing raw data like GRE scores and GPA to arbitrate among candidates from a range of departments. But most funding even in these cases is allocated at the departmental level.

No admissions committees are doing anything this week or next. Professors are either grading exams or already on vacation. Everywhere has "gone dark" until the New Year.

Nobody in political science makes decisions based on GRE scores. They are used as a simple way to weed out files that won't be considered. And scores above 700 on the old test will be enough to prevent your file from getting weeded out at every department. After that, decisions are made based on a more careful look at the other components of your application. In other words, take a deep breath. There's much less to worry about here than it seems.

Hard to know what this means, but I doubt it is bad news. It could be a very very organized program director, but that's not too likely. Another possibility is a director who wants to nominate your application for university-level funding; this is usually done by glancing over files as they come in and picking out those that seem especially strong on raw credentials like GRE scores.

Your question is too broad. There are not "a couple of good texts" in political science because the field is divided into subfields like international relations, American politics, etc and because we lack the disciplinary core of fields like sociology. If you give us more information about the course you are taking perhaps people here can make some suggestions.

You will rarely if ever be able to find out who is on the grad committee, and should not count on getting a significant conversation with its members. If you think a personal conversation would really make a difference in your case, and it almost never does, you should raise this matter with your letter writers. They should be the ones giving you advice, making the committee aware that you are "out there" (along with the hundreds of other applicants) and reviewing your application materials - that is not what admissions committee members do. In my experience on both ends of the process, you should not expect to get much mileage out of this route. Instead, focus on making your application as strong as possible, and ensure that your recommenders address any unique information about your file in their letters.

I have served on grad admissions at two institutions. In one case the committee made all the decisions; in the other each subfield handled its own set of candidates. In either case, you can be confident that someone on the committee will be perfectly proficient in understanding and evaluating your research statement. Your choice of words should be an effort to situate your research interests in the broader subfield in which you want to work.

This is not a field I know terribly well, but I would look at Northwestern (Reno, Arjona), Penn (Horowitz), Stanford (Weinstein, Laitin) and Chicago (Staniland and the IR security people) as a couple of additional options.

See this blog post for a variety of links to current research that you might find useful: http://bit.ly/Y6oXsC

Elisabeth Jean Wood at Yale does related work. I would look her up. If you don't have the credentials to get into Yale, you might see where some of her students doing work along these lines have ended up teaching.

^ is not quite right about the process but correct about the strategy you should take. Many departments explicitly allocate a certain number of admissions spots to each subfield and delegate the choice of candidates to the subfields. In those cases, your file will only go to one field. In other cases, where admissions is handled by a department-level committee, often in practice your file will also get most of its attention from faculty in the subfield you claim (or seem) to fit. There is no reason not to describe your research interests in a transparent manner, and to mention potential faculty of interest in two subfields, but realize that in practice you are being evaluated in many cases by faculty in a single subfield and in comparison to other candidates in that subfield.

Because you are not admitted to a political science program to work in a particular professors' lab or group, faculty as a whole are far less involved with the admissions process than in the natural sciences. As a result, they are less inclined to respond to email, and their influence is going to be less important in your admissions process. I encourage my students applying to grad schools not to reach out to faculty, but I reach out to colleagues on their behalf as appropriate. If you are applying to political science programs, I would not spend much energy trying to contact faculty.

I've never heard anyone reference the writing score when we discuss candidates. We've got your writing sample, your personal statement, and reference letters that talk about your research and writing skills, and everybody knows the test is flawed.

I do grad admissions in my department most years. Our spreadsheet on applicants doesn't even have a column for the writing section of the GRE.

The history undergrad degree won't be an obstacle at all, but you'll have to navigate the divides in the subfield of political theory. You want to find a department that is focused on, or at least open to, history of political thought rather than post-modern/contemporary theory, or analytical philosophy. Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Princeton (to a lesser extent) are all good options to explore. On a side-note, remember to check to see your POI is still at the university you'd like to go to. It seems Justin Fox has left Yale and Princeton for WUSTL.

This post by a Cornell poli sci professor is also worth reading; the advice there applies far beyond Southeast Asian politics.

You'll get better advice in the professional schools forum. My sense is that admissions to SAIS, Georgetown SFS, etc is very hard straight from undergrad and that work experience makes a big difference in the competitiveness of an application.

Most places will require at least some coursework and that you take qualifying exams in their department, so prepare yourself for spending some extra time in the classroom if you do get accepted somewhere. Of course, you can use the opportunity to take coursework on topic X as a justification for why the department to which you are applying fits your interests better than the one you're currently attending.

Brandeis is not a good place to get rigorous quant methods training. I don't know about your other questions, but the faculty there are well known and well connected in the discipline compared to other small programs.

again, try the professional MA forum. This is the forum for political science PhD programs. You've got the wrong audience for your questions.

I wouldn't say always. But in my experience, most transfers happen after a full year of coursework. Often that means losing time since the department you enter will commonly require you to take coursework and exams in their program, but some people find that is a cost worth bearing.

Transferring is fine. But to improve your chances of admission, you will need to improve your file. Starting a grad program can let you do that in three ways: show that you can do well in grad-level coursework, refine your research ideas, and improve the quality of your letters. All of these will be hard to do when applying next year, since you will have less than a semester to work on them, so many people wait an additional year before applying. Your personal and financial situation, of course, have to be taken into consideration in this decision.

Fair enough. Sorry to be too harsh in my "rebuke" but I guess I have spent too much time on PSJR and am afraid its quality of "advice" is bleeding into here. And even for a non-theorist Brettschneider, Krause, Tomassi, etc are big presences at APSA and in the discipline. Finally, Brown has the Political Theory Project that brings in multiple post-docs every year, which adds to the strength of the theory program.

Sorry Doorkeeper. My comments were directed at the poster above you, who doesn't seem to know anything about the field of political theory, or about the Brown department. I fully agree with your suggestion that the OP needs to figure out what his/her interests are and to streamline them. Apologies for the confusion.