Penelope Higgins

Perhaps The Realist will chime in, but in my experience this varies widely empirically. Sometimes disagreements are purely intellectual; sometimes they turn personal. To the extent that departments can balkanize and have disagreeing parties operate in separate spheres, the atmosphere is better - thus one sees separate speaker series and grad student workshops divided by methods approaches. My hunch is that things get truly contentious as the stakes rise; this means that individual grad students are almost never directly affected, but curriculum and hiring decisions are where things can get ugly. As an incoming grad student this is almost never an issue - it has not been anywhere I have spent time - but in putting together a dissertation committee it is worth figuring out what the relationships among the faculty members are like. This can be hard to do, but it is worth getting a handle on.

Take this all with a grain of salt, since I am not a theorist: Princeton: big happy theory group where all the faculty get along very well, but DON'T go there unless you want to do analytical-liberal work. If you do want to do that sort of work, Princeton is the best place around to do it. Lots of community among the theory faculty and grad students, but there are so many students that one can slip through the cracks a bit. Harvard: very diverse theory group, very strong in a variety of areas, great placement record. Less community than Princeton in part because of the faculty diversity, but all seem to get along quite well. If you work with Tuck or Rosenblum, and impress them, you'll do well on the job market. Don't go to Harvard to work with Sandel. He doesn't work with grad students. Yale: serious divides among the theorists, which (according to some reports) spill over into personal interactions and tensions on dissertation committees. Lots of brilliant individual faculty, but a less coherent theory group, and theory has a less significant profile in the department. Placement suffers compared to H and P. Chicago: was a very contentious group in the recent past, has seen some turnover (especially younger hires) and seems to produce interesting students. I don't have a good sense of the placement of Chicago theory grads. A great place traditionally to do theory, trains students well. Has suffered since Iris Marion Young passed away. Strong ties between theory and other subfields; placement record not so great.

Don't think too much about the fellowship amount in making these decisions (unless you are supporting a family). The department is a great fit for you, and is guaranteeing you five years of funding. You can always supplement that by teaching summer courses, doing research work for faculty, etc. And living cheap for 5 years won't be nearly as bad as you think, given that you'll know lots of folks in the same boat.

The first two paragraphs of the quote below are absolutely right. Don't do this unless you are sure you want to commit yourself to a life of research and teaching. But the third isn't quite right: finishing an MA and re-applying is a pretty seamless option. Nobody at Northeastern will be surprised - in fact if you do really well, and they have your best interests in mind, they should encourage you to leave. My department, again not one that gets a lot of discussion on these boards, just did admissions. Over half of our admits - and the top candidates who received preferential funding - came in with MA degrees from lower-ranked places. We do expect them to do coursework here and to pass our exams, but we do NOT treat them as transfer students. I would encourage you to seriously consider going to Northeastern, since it is a funded offer, and to use the two years to figure out whether you want to commit to academia long-term. But like Tufnel I could just be a message board troll...

With a degree from Northeastern you will have a hard time getting a job in the same range as Northeastern.Look at where their graduates have placed, and note that many of these are not tenure track jobs.

If you finish the coursework for an MA and do really really well, and get strong letters from faculty at Northeastern, you can apply to programs at that point. Northeastern will understand if you do this, especially if you are an undergrad from there. We have students who do this all the time, and we encourage them to move up to more highly ranked departments after their MA if they are good enough. My current department, more highly ranked than Northeastern but not a place often discussed on these boards, has sent MAs on to multiple top 10 PhD programs in recent years - it is a viable option, but you really need to impress the faculty as a grad student to make it happen.

American is a great place to do an MA in international affairs and get lots of DC connections. It is not a strong program for training academics. I've had great students who did an MA in political science there before entering the PhD program, but I would not do a PhD there if I wanted an academic job. Even if you are limited to DC, there are better options like Maryland, Georgetown, and GW.

This is exactly right. For CP, they will suffer a bit as well now that Migdal is at least partly retired and Levi is not working with students so much. There are some really strong junior faculty at UW, but they don't have a track record with students yet. So buyer beware...

Not sure what you mean. But unfortunately a lot of schools list placements, rather than what happens to all their PhDs, let alone every student who enters. Binghamton is not unique in this. To be honest I know nothing about the program, though certainly there are some strong faculty there. I just wanted to bring that information to your attention.

Interesting faculty, not much placement, so it is hard to call it a top program. See the listings here which certainly do not include all the folks who finished but didn't get placed.

Some quite strong placements in the past. Here is a list of placements, though I don't know whether they leave off folks who don't get a job. A good place to do a (certain kind of CP); I don't know anything about American.

You won't be able to get credit for these toward departmental requirements, but you should have no trouble taking language classes at almost any institution.

I 100% agree that the skills are needed. I just know that my current department which has no math camps does a lot to train students to read quant work in the first semester and year of grad school. We do more in scope and methods, research design, and quant 1 courses than my grad department, which had a math camp, did. That was the reason for my suggestion that if there was no math camp, the department likely is aware that students are not prepared in this way, and does something to prepare them. So I think we are all on the same page as far as the set of skills you need; I'm just suggesting that you check in with the department about how to acquire them before you dive in to summer preparation that may or may not be useful.

Sorry, not my specialty; I'll leave it to someone more informed about the formal side of things to comment here. I'd rather do that than give you erroneous information.

That question is too broad. What subfield/methods/type of work do you want to do?

This is a pretty good rundown. I would add that like Yale Princeton, in CP and IR, is also a seriously divided place along methodological lines. Harvard is diverse but not divided - more of a big tent place where students can find a home regardless of their interests. Don't go to Stanford to do CP unless you want to do formal and/or quant work. These are VERY different places if you are a theorist. Since you have not mentioned your subfield it is hard to provide any more information.

Take a stats sequence when you get to grad school. You'll be fine. There are better things to do with the summer before you start. So long as you understand basic statistics (significance, control variables, size of effect) before you start, and so long as you work at it once you start grad school, you'll be able to get up to speed quickly. And your plan of talking to the grad director is a good one. I would also have a conversation with the faculty you expect to work with to pick their brains about this issue.

In my experience wait lists are not ranked. They are used to balance a cohort (not just by subfield but by regional or other interest and demographic characteristics) rather than just to fill spots. Also, I am sure that ND admitted many more than 12 applicanta; they admit the number that they expect (based on previous experience) to YIELD 12 students.

In my experience, this makes no difference: remember that the admissions committee's composition is often quite different from one year to the next, so we may not know that you applied last year.

100% sure that Princeton is done with admits; don't know about waitlists.

Yes I am. Social science methods are completely distinct from the legal 'case study' approach. Being trained in one gives you no grounds for practicing, let alone teaching, the other. Notice here that you dropped your earlier claim that political science courses are mainly fact-based. You don't want to defend that claim any further?

This is just not true. Students should be learning how social scientists think, make arguments, and explain the phenomena they observe. For example, should you teach the facts of the civil rights movement, or instead use it as an opportunity to introduce students to framing, the collective action problem, the relationship between economic and social change, etc? Should you teach the facts of the 1992 LA riots, or use them to introduce theories of ethnic conflict? Should students memorize the political parties behind each president, or understand the theories of political party chance over time? If most of what you learn in a political science course are substantive facts, either you got very little out of the course, or the professor failed you as a teacher. And THAT is why JDs' role in political science instruction is extremely limited at best.

While I agree with all this, I will say that some departments, including mine, pay quite a bit of attention to math GRE scores for theorists. But then again our theorists are quite analytic-normative. Also, as noted above, our concerns about Chinese students only apply to those with degrees from Chinese universities, letters from Chinese faculty at those universities, and generic-seeming applications.

No disadvantage at all in my experience for foreign students, with 2 caveats: First, they may have more trouble generating recommendation letters from people that my colleagues and I know. Second (and this in my experience is limited to applicants from Chinese universities) one sometimes takes entire applications with a big grain of salt when 100+ applications from the same university with identical test scores and letters arrive. Certainly no percentage cap. Realist may want to disagree based on his/her experience, but that has been mine at a couple of institutions.

This is the time for a phone conversation with the graduate chair or department chair. Explain that you are interested in attending Pitt, but cannot make a decision without full information and a statement in writing about funding. They are reasonable people; this must be a mis-communication, and will be best resolved in person.