Penelope Higgins

^^ is trolling for some reason, or locked in a very narrow view of political theory that only includes Straussian approaches. Please do not take their comments about choosing theory departments seriously.

^^ is true, but Sekhon's adviser (Mebane) left for Michigan a couple of years ago. I still would think that Cornell is too good a program to turn down unless there is a financial or partner issue, but your preferences may of course diverge from mine.

Overtherainbow, I can only speak to comparative and IR, but in those areas, Cornell is great. Just to name a few of the great folks there off the top of my head, look at the work of Tarrow, Pepinsky, Morrison (if they retain him from the various outside offers he has), Bunce, Roberts, Katzenstein, Andersen, Evangelista, van de Walle, Mertha, Shue etc. Those are some very impressive folks that cover a wide range of areas, and I know they have made some strong hires in the past few years. We have interviewed a few of their job candidates in the last 5 years or so, and I have been impressed with their work, and with their comments about graduate training and relationships with faculty at Cornell. To be frank, if they are funding you, it seems to me to be crazy to turn down an offer at Cornell for an MA at a lower ranked program with less impressive faculty.

^ is not true, or more accurately, it is not necessarily true. You don't necessarily need to prove you can do quantitative research, though you would if those skills were relevant to the body of research in which you want to work. Your main obstacle, as the previous sentence suggests, is that you need to convince an admissions committee that you have a carefully considered set of research interests that fall squarely within political science, and that you are familiar with the relevant literature. This will also take finding letter writers who can support your political science application - and those will need to be different letters than those you submitted for history applications.

My sense is that as your adviser says, for jobs in the US, particularly in the field of interest you describe, the UMass name will not help you get jobs. Here is all the placement info I can find on UMass: http://polsci.umass.edu/graduate/prospective_students/placement/ I would make sure to get something more systematic from them when you visit; something that reflects the outcomes for all students entering the program, or at least all students completing the PhD. That said, the idea of doing a (funded) MA there and then applying to PhD programs again is a reasonable one. If you're interested in staying in Europe long-term, the LSE option is a clear winner. If your interest is finding a PhD program and a job in the US, the choice is tougher.

I think meep's comments above are very helpful, but I do want to comment on one thing: in my experience both applying to schools and as a faculty member, I have seen little to no consideration of whether a particular faculty member has "room" for a student. Spots in an admissions class are either not allocated at all (in other words, purely distributed to 'best athletes') or allocated by subfield. For example, in my cohort as a grad student at a school often discussed on here, there were 4 students in CP working on a single world region even though only one professor worked on that region. Fit matters, in other words, but single professors don't make decisions about applicants - at least not in any admissions process I have ever been involved with.

I know for a fact that Temple has not made offers yet, since I saw a colleague on the admissions committee there at a conference and he/she said they have yet to even meet.

That's exactly right. I'm not encouraging people to choose schools based on how non-academics would rate them, but to consider their broader profile at least within the subfield rather than just in a particular narrow area. We're on the same page here balderdash; best of luck with your choice among some great options. PH

Just to point out that in the end you are NOT likely to be hired by the 10-30 people in your narrow research area. Most departments, for example, only have one scholar studying a given world region in comparative, and my department (for example) has only 5 IR faculty, none of whom overlap in their specialization. So you will be at a great disadvantage if you cannot link yourself to debates that are of interest to the broader field of comparative, and to the discipline as a whole. And you will be at a great disadvantage if your adviser and the other members of your committee are not well networked with the discipline as a whole. This does not mean that you should choose a program based on 'status' but it is reason, all else equal, to think about choosing a program that is broadly strong in your subfield and not just in your narrow area of interest.

Given your interests, Harvard should be at the top of your list, since Bates and Robinson both regularly work with students on these issues. Some of the folks Bates has trained in recent years include Humphreys and Weinstein. They also have two junior Africanists, Ichino and (starting this fall) McClendon so there will be lots of Africa faculty there. On Columbia, Kasara has been there at least 5 years, so I wouldn't expect her to be around for too long given her publication record and the fact that tenure is looming. But Humphreys and Blattman make Columbia a very attractive place to be, and Humphreys had several students (Guy Grossman and Laura Paler) do very very well on the job market this year. Princeton, with Lieberman, Widner, and others, should be worth a look. They have produced several strong Africa-focused students in recent years, including Riedl (now at Northwestern) and McClendon, who will be starting at Harvard in the fall.

Most likely the department has nominated you for a university-wide funding competition, against candidates from other departments. Usually this means that you were one of the strongest overall candidates in their applicant pool, or one of the strongest candidates from an under-represented group (my university, for example, has funding set aside for first-generation college students applying to PhD programs) - but it might be that you were nominated for something like a FLAS fellowship if you work on a particular world region for which funding is available at the university level. There is no guarantee that you will actually get funding via this route, which is why the person who contacted you used the language of "nomination." So I would not accept an offer or decline offers from elsewhere until you have confirmation of funding. But it is a strong signal that you are likely to get funding. Congratulations.

I am far from an expert on terrorism, but your list really should include Princeton (Shapiro) and Yale (Lyall, Kalyvas, Wood) as well as Chicago (Bueno de Mesquita, Stanilans) if you are interested in an organizational/strategic perspective on terrorism.

Perhaps this is better placed in the other thread on packages, but I just want to urge folks to think twice or three times before making decisions based on relatively small differences in stipends for the next 3-5 years unless you are supporting a family with your stipend income. The choice you make of which program to attend will have long-term consequences for your career - you should be wary of trading off the subsequent 30+ years for a few hundred dollars a month in the next 3-5. Visit the programs that admit you if possible, make a choice based on which program will be best for you professionally, and prepare yourself no matter what to share an apartment, live on free sandwiches from talks rather than all the fine restaurants mentioned above, and have limited disposable income.

I strongly recommend Custom House for a nice meal. Not as unique as Next (which is super pricey and booked months and months in advance) but delicious and great atmosphere. Last time I went, Richard Daley was at the next table, so you get some politics at the same time.

I've only been on your end of this conversation, so I can't speak to what the DGS might be thinking. I was offered a couple of these when I sent out applications, and the phone call was simply to tell me that I had been nominated, they were excited about my application, and they would let me know how things progressed. I ended up turning both of them down. Most likely they are calling not to evaluate your "perceived desire to attend" since as you point out, there is no way for them to get that information, but to start recruiting you since they can be fairly confident that you will be funded if they choose to nominate you. If you already had an offer that would trump theirs, that is useful information for them. If you tell them that you have not applied anywhere that would trump their offer, that is also useful for them. Beyond that, this is just a friendly conversation and a bit of recruitment - you need to get used to having those conversations over the next few months. And in terms of hurting the department by declining a university fellowship, nobody is going to take it personally or hold it against you. And even if they can't roll down the list to another candidate in political science, the fellowship will roll down at the university level - it isn't like the money vanishes if you turn it down. Finally, the last thing you should be worried about in this situation is how the department or the DGS feels. Do what is best for you. This isn't license to be a jerk, but to be a bit selfish in this process is A-OK.

To be honest I don't have much insight on negotiating funding: I've never been involved on either side of the process. More to the point, the range of flexibility that a DGS has varies widely. Most top schools offer fairly similar and fairly standard packages to all admits but there may be wiggle room in some cases. I don't have any more specific thoughts than that. But I will say that there are a lot of factors in addition to funding that you should consider in choosing a grad program. And if it does come down to comparing packages, which it almost never should, there are a lot of dimensions on which packages can be compared, including not only amounts per year and number of years, but the nature of teaching, the existence of summer funding even if not guaranteed up front, etc. You can learn a lot by talking to current students when you visit departments. So things get complicated very quickly.

As a faculty member in a department that has to play this game often because of lack of funding, here are my 2 cents. The DGS knows exactly what the situation is - they may lose the funding if they offer it to you and they go elsewhere, but they may decide to do it anyway. Tell him/her the truth about where else you have applied, and they will decide how to proceed. Any other talk is cheap talk and everyone knows it. Edited to add: no need to reveal any information unless asked, or to be terribly specific about your other applications, but I would advise you not to be dishonest: tell them you are excited, but unable to commit until you hear from a range of other places.

It is more competitive than its ranking would suggest: it draws lots of applications from people blindly applying to Ivy League schools. Then again, for comparative, I think it is a stronger department than its overall ranking indicates.

Definitely let the department know by contacting the admissions secretary. The information should be added to your file.

Public universities that rely heavily on university (rather than department) fellowships for funding grad students often operate with rolling deadlines in one sense. They admit a very small group of candidates early and nominate them for university competitions for funding. Because those competitions operate across departments, GRE scores tend to be the most important criteria. So if your GRE scores are high, and you applied to state schools that are not ranked in the top 40 or so (think places like UMass, Penn State, Temple, Georgia, not Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin), you may hear something as soon as late January. Other schools use rolling admissions in different ways; I don't know enough about the specifics to comment.

I think we agree more than I made apparent. Think tanks can be a good experience in preparation for grad school, but such work is neither necessary for admission like work experience is in some fields, nor a way to make up for not having a political science background in previous education. That is what I was trying to say; apologies for not being clear.

Can you connect your research interests to what political scientists study? If so, you will be fine, and time at a think tank, which will focus on policy or politics rather than academic social science, won't help very much. If you feel that research experience would help you refine your interests, that is a good reason to do it. But if you can articulate a research focus that falls in the arena of political science, you will not suffer for not having a political science background.

Most deadlines are postmark deadlines. And firm deadlines do not apply to letters of recommendation: those will just be added to your file as they arrive. Nobody will start looking at admissions files until late January at the absolute earliest, so no need to worry about late letters yet.

The MA GPA shows me you can do grad-level work. With a good explanation (preferably in one of your letters rather than in your own statement) for the low GPA, I'm willing to look past it. Some of your schools, though, are much more competitive than others. And funding is a really issue at the DC schools, which will be a problem for you since competition across departments for funding at the university level is based on purely numerical things like GPA and GRE scores. If I were you I'd add a couple of lower level schools to this list to feel safer.

What? Why would you include Hopkins on that list? Columbia and (less so) Brown make sense, but why Hopkins?