Penelope Higgins

For comparative politics in the developing world, the top non-region specific journals are usually thought to be the list below. I can't speak to Asia-specific journals, but most people seem to aim to publish in these. World Politics Comparative Political Studies Comparative Politics Studies in Comparative International Development

The last post is exactly right in my view, but I still see it as a way to let the problem guide the methods you use. Build a toolkit that will let you develop any question, and then specialize in the tools you need to answer it. Take quant and qual and formal methods early in grad school, then seek more training based on what your research entails. As for methods coursework and admissions: if it is (a) relevant to the work you want to do and/or ( a department that has a methods specialty, it will make a difference in a positive sense to have some econometrics and math training. It won't hurt you anywhere. And in terms of the first post, if the work you're seeing about the questions you find interesting is quant work, you should expect to use your first few years of grad school to develop the tools you need to do that sort of work. Few people come into grad school fully trained for the kind of research they want to do - but you should have a sense of what sort of work you might like to do once you've trained yourself.

Given that set of interests, I would add Harvard to the list above given Levitsky's work. I would also look at Elkins at Texas to see if his stuff looks interesting to you. Notre Dame would also be a good fit, with various scholars working on constitutional and rule-of-law issues in transitional contexts.

I'd simply explain that to the departments - and I would delete the name of your current school from your last post. Faculty like me are on this site, and it would not be too hard to figure out who you are with what you've listed here.

The last comment is right, unless you are applying to move up in rankings from your current school. If that is not the case, an explanation is needed - but this can be as simple as a change in intellectual focus that would be better served by the new department, or a lack of funding at your current institution. As for your questions: don't expect to get credit for a lot of coursework. Most departments want to ensure that students get their training. So yes, it will slow you down. In terms of funding, admission, etc. you are just treated (as a poster above said) like any other applicant. In terms of the specific schools, I have fairly little info, except that my sense is that CGU has little to no funding for students.

This makes me feel better about your applications as well. No need to point out anything about your letter writers in the statement. We will recognize the names and affiliations when we see the file.

What a perfect application has that HES may not offer are two things: connections with faculty who can write you strong letters, and an opportunity to demonstrate your aptitude for the kind of coursework and research papers that graduate school requires. There is no reason to pay for another program of any kind unless it can improve these two aspects of your file. It may be better to be strategic about enrolling in courses at HES, and to choose (if possible) those that are taught in person by regular Harvard faculty in a seminar setting, in which the workload in terms of reading and writing resembles that of GSAS graduate courses.

If you have letters from people on the Arts and Sciences faculty from Harvard, the HES thing won't hurt you. Otherwise, this will count against you. With your test scores and a peer-reviewed publication (if it is in a standard journal and not a student journal) you should have an otherwise strong file, but HES is not often seen to be adequate preparation for graduate work. This is because of the open admissions policy to individual courses, because of the online classes (fine for undergrad, not evidence of experience in graduate seminars) and because of the fact that a good number of the courses are not taught by tenure track faculty. I'm not defending this perception of HES, just describing how faculty elsewhere view it. There is, of course, nothing you can do at this point except to write the strongest personal statement you can, think carefully about letter-writers, and apply to a range of schools rather than just top 10 programs.

First, I want to encourage you (and everyone looking at schools) to let the specific research question drive the methods you choose to use rather than limiting applications based on a perception of methods preferred that is often hard to get from outside the department. Second, any department will only have 1-2 faculty that specialize in any geographic area. You also need to have a substantive area of interest within comparative, and to look for departments with strengths in that area. Third, and without knowing your substantive area of interest, a few suggestions in answer to your question about regional strength, with the names of a few relevant faculty off the top of my head. Berkeley (Chaudhry) Penn (Kapur, Lustick) Princeton (Kohli, Jamal) Yale (Wilkinson, Lawrence) Harvard (Singh for India; trying to hire a Middle East person this year) Texas (Brownlee for Middle East, has an India center)

If you are not a native English speaker, you definitely do not need to retake the exam because of the AW score - you are submitting a TOEFL score, which will substitute. Even if you are a native English speaker, we pay far more attention to your actual writing than the score on some standardized test. To be blunt, the grad admissions spreadsheet in my department does not even have a column for the AW score. We completely ignore it.

I can speak to your first question only: age has never come up in discussing a candidate on any admissions committee on which I have served. In terms of the second, I am far from an expert either on Chinese security or on Brown. I would poke around both the poli sci department and Watson and see what you think. I will say, though, that the department in general is not a very quant place, that Watson has a lot of policy-relevant people, and that the Brown name will help you get think tank jobs a lot more than some of the other departments you listed.

2 quick thoughts: 1. MA GPA and performance trumps any 'issues' with undergrad records. Your MA shows you can do graduate work, and that you have a clear sense of your research interests. 2. Brown has a MAJOR China initiative in the works: they are re-organizing the Watson Institute in ways that will make it more social science and policy-friendly over the next few years, and trying to hire two senior-level China scholars. In addition, they McDermott has serious policy/think tank connections in the security world. I would put them on your list. Harvard may be a long shot for you, as it is for everyone applying (even those who get admitted can't count on it) but your file should be competitive at many of the other schools you list.

Just to add a couple of schools off the top of my head that jump to min that fit your profile: Florida (Bernhard on Europe, Smith on parties), Temple (Wlezien on elections, Pollack, Fioretos, Deeg on Europe), and Wisconsin.

A perfect fit in a school will have scholars who can cover both the geographic area and the substantive interests. Those are few and far between for everyone. What you need to "settle for" are schools that have strength in one or the other. You want to apply to schools that have an interesting Europe scholar (because you won't find many with more than one), and to schools that have parties/public opinion/electoral systems folks. Notre Dame, for example, has lots of party system folks, some of whom know quite a bit about Europe even though they work on other areas. I would, if you have not already, go through the list of folks here here, see if any of them look interesting, and see where they did their grad work. These are mostly young scholars in European politics whose work won prizes at APSA. If that link doesn't work, the url is http://www.apsanet.org/~ep/archive.html I would also, given your interests, keep your mind open about going to Europe (whether EUI in Florence or places in England) for your PhD. It makes coming back to the US to teach much harder, but my vague sense (I'm in CP but not Europe) is that much of the interesting scholarship is being done over there.

A strong MA GPA does a lot to make up for the undergrad GPA. If you are getting a letter from an undergrad professor, you could ask them (if you feel comfortable doing so) to explain the reasons for your lower GPA. If not, I think the MA GPA will serve its intended purpose of convincing committees that you are capable of performing well in graduate-level coursework.

OK, but there are lots of approaches to security. Folks who actually do this work can correct me on the specifics that follow, but the general point is that different 'international security' departments will have you doing wildly different kinds of work. . You can go to Georgetown and get trained to do more qualitative/policy stuff (look at the work of Andrew Bennett, for example) or choose instead the more model-based, quantitative work that folks do at places like UCSD (look at the work of Slantchev, for example) and I assume FSU would fall into this camp. I would urge you to figure out more specifically what KIND of work in security and IPE interest you, and to come up with a list of appropriate schools.

orst11 raises a good point. Letters provide two pieces of information to a committee: positive things about you as a candidate, and a 'brand name' of the faculty member writing the letter. An ideal letter will have both. But in making choices about who to ask, you need to consider that nice things about you in a letter mean much more if they come from a faculty member we've heard of. This means choosing people who are known scholars, not a random grad student or visiting scholar who taught your favorite class. It does NOT, however, necessarily mean choosing only senior scholars - junior scholars, if they are recent graduates of the programs to which you are applying, they will be known quantities as well.

I don't know much about FSU of Georgetown admissions (other people here can speak to the specifics of those schools), but I do know that as an admissions committee member at a vaguely similar school, a GPA under 3.5 in a MA program would not help your case. In grad classes, grade inflation is extremely high - a B is the minimum grade for students who turn in their work. So to me, that is the weakest part of your file based on the information you've given us. On the specific schools, here is the little bit I do know: FSU is very very math-heavy in the way it trains students. If you've got strong grades in methods or grad-level econ courses, or math classes beyond linear algebra, that might help them look past your overall record. Georgetown gets lots and lots of applications, largely because it is located in DC and has lots of ties into the policy world and policy-relevant coursework. But it funds a very small number of the students it admits. Even with strong GRE scores, you likely won't be competitive for funding even if you do get admitted. I'm trying to think about what FSU and Georgetown share that makes them both appealing to you, and I confess I can't come up with the shared strength. Maybe if you describe your interests a bit more, we can help you come up with some other schools that would be a good fit.

The letter sent to each school is pretty much identical. There might be a brief set of form questions that the professor has to fill out on each one, but it is basically a "cut and paste job" as you put it. I would simply expect them to ask you for a list of schools and deadlines.

You don't need a masters in political science to apply for a PhD in the US. You'll spend your first 2 years or so doing coursework and preparing for exams before you proceed to the dissertation stage. This is very different from the British system, where a PhD is just the dissertation-writing stage.

Here's the view from the other end of the process: individual professors don't "take students" in poli sci programs in the US, since funding comes from departments or the university and not individual faculty members. Contacting us might help you figure out if the department would be a good fit, but unless we happen to be on the admissions committee (which is about 5 faculty members in my department) and happen to remember our interaction when we open your file, it won't make a big difference. So I would not put too much effort into this, nor put too much stock in the responses you get - people can be warm now and not remember you in March, and ignore your email now but find your file appealing in 6 months. I don't say this to be rude, but to inject a dose of realism, and to try to remind folks that in the end, your chances rise and fall based on what you can put on paper by the admissions deadline.

In my experience think tank jobs help candidates most because they come out with letters from people that admissions committees will take seriously, and those letters talk about the research and writing skills that the candidates have acquired. Along with the quant skills and coursework you describe, and letters from folks at UCSD, you should have a strong application if your GRE scores are strong. I don't want to steer the discussion away from the original topic of the thread, but I want to comment just on the issue of cut-offs. Let me give you a more or less real life example to explain why they DO exist. In my subfield alone at my previous place of employment, we got about 300 applications, and were allowed to choose six students to nominate for admission with a short waiting list. If I need to find the best six files out of 300, what is the easiest way to shorten the list to the 50 or 60 that will be read carefully? Easy: GRE scores. GPA is not usually used as a cut-off because the extent of grade inflation varies across schools, and because there are reasons to reward people for taking challenging coursework like advanced economics and math classes, in which grades tend to be lower. But if your GRE scores are not in the top 50 or so, admissions committee members are willing to bet that your overall file won't be in the top six. Remember that you're not dealing with professional admissions officers. Your file, along with boxes and boxes of other files, will be read by people who want to find the most efficient way to get things done so they can get back to their real jobs. That's the sad truth of the process.

Just to echo what has already been said: we don't care about the AW score, since we can read a personal statement and see how you write for ourselves. But one piece of advice: based on your post here, I think you'll need to do some extra careful revision and editing of your personal statement before you send it out, since the post does display some difficulty in writing that would make me, as an admissions committee member, wonder about your English skills.

For which subfield are you considering GW? People's suggestions of comparable schools with similar methodological inclinations will be wildly different across subfields.

You might consider sending an annotated chapter outline (1 short paragraph per chapter) of the entire thesis, and then attaching the chapter that best demonstrates your ability to think sharply and write precisely about a topic relevant to political science.