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Alright, last year Duke was full of keeners and got the results n by the equivalent of tomorrow. However, in previous years it has taken much longer for results. Odds? Also, who is quitting their job....now?

If I recall, Stanford makes decisions mid-February. I wonder if my charitable donation to Stanford is tax-exempt when I get rejected? The big programs for this week are Duke and WUSTL Next week are Penn State, NYU, UChicago, Berkeley, Rochester, Pitt, UCLA, Texas, Cornell

I think it is typical for state universities to rely on their centralized graduate admissions center to verify that transcripts are accurate etc. Usually the department does not make the admission decision, but rather the graduate admissions center - technically the department makes recommendations. I will cry if I ended up not getting in...DO YOU WANT ME TO CRY MADISON?!!! DO YOU?!!! EDIT: From the admissions site: "If you are recommended for admission by your program, this will be noted as an “update” within the status check section of MyUW. At this point the program will send your transcript(s) to the Graduate School for final review...The Graduate School admissions staff will review your application once they have received your official transcript(s). They make final admissions based on minimum requirements."

Yeah, the 'application status update' page has no status. I found the same admission status on mine (recommended for admission) - 1 for 1 on applications!

EDIT: checked. Suspecting that next week is UW-Madison, WUSTL, and Duke.

I obtained lower MA grades than I would have liked due to some life events and poor response to those events, but more importantly because I have bipolar disorder and did not realize or receive (some) treatment until after immediately after my MA. What do you recommend for situations where a problem that led to decreases in performance in the past has been somewhat addressed but could well affect the PhD experience, i.e. how should applicants and their letter-writers address this? My concern would be that by providing that context for the performance it might cause enormous concern by admissions over my ability to finish the program.

Do you typically think of grades in percentiles then? I.e. the UK scale is out of 100 yet there is (1) decided non-linearity in marking (going from a 69 to a 70 is much more difficult than a 49 to a 50) and (2) a 69 out of 100 is (in my opinion) the equivalent of an ~93 percentile , where 94%+ would be an A, 90-93 is A-, as opposed to a 69%.

It is not - thus the laughter.

Starting to go crazy. No idea how to prevent it. I also want to submit a different SOP to a university but imagine they will laugh at me if I send a new one at this point.

The worry is strong. My SoP for my first applications was much less impressive than my final SoP What are the timelines for decisions usually? Stanford says early February at the latest, others say April.

And the waiting begins...(although WUSTL application is due in ~3 weeks).

For those who were looking into political economy in a polisci department: did you notice the massive discrepancies across departments in the level of mathematical rigor? I saw at Duke that you complete the MA economics micro and macro courses for a 1st subfield while at a place like Yale it's not such and therefore real analysis/linear algebra is not expected.

amen. thesis the worst process. 14 applications, 65 hours/week job. If I don't get into 1 of them, I'm going to be very upset. Note: Worst thing about this process is the early applications I submitted appear to notify the earliest and also are the most competitive (e.g. Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia)...meaning it's possible that just because of the notification distribution I will receive a lot of rejections before an acceptance - if there is an acceptance. Although I know the numbers and should ignore the rejections since I had a comparably low chance of admission from these, it does mean that I will probably be in outright panic mode after receiving 6 or so rejections because I'm irrational. Ughhhhh.

Ugh. Waited until the last minute to submit my application to Columbia and missed the deadline by 3 minutes because I forgot about time zone difference. It is submitted but the submission shows it was submitted on the 4th and their deadline is the 3rd. Are they going to look at my application? Side note: hands-down award for most confusing application goes to Texas.

I did not ask if I should wait until my scores are ready but rather a specific question.

Funny thing: there is no way that is true. They take awhile to process (~5 days)

FYI, I am applying to 14 programs. It's completely reasonable, if you find faculty fit. Some programs will have only 2 faculty or so you may be interested in, but if you're comfortable with that, go for it.

I have taken the GRE twice - once awhile ago and another very recently. The older scores are visible on my score report page while I probably have another 10 days until the newer scores appear in my score reports - currently the newest scores indicate "Absent or not available." My question: what happens if I order the newer test scores be sent to universities while my online score report for the newer scores still indicates "absent or not available?" Am I correct to assume they send the scores once they become available? If so, does ETS send them immediately (so long as I have paid for them and selected recipients) or is some action necessary on my part? Thank you!

Question: if I go massively over the writing sample word limit, how does it ultimately look? I was planning to send my master's thesis - which is about 35 pages of analysis (within the range of some programs but about 10 pages outside for others) - but it is about 75 pages (lots of appendices and references!). Cutting it at some section break makes little sense because it misses the argument but going way over probably is not ideal. I imagine it just means they won't read the whole thing, right?

What is the difference between (2) and (4)?

Precisely my concern. The bigger concern is actually a stupid error (I hope) on ETS' site. I registered for GRE sittings in June 2014, October 2014, and December 2014. I have complete the first two. However, the "Most Recent" box currently indicates my most recent score is in December 2014 - when I haven't taken this test nor will I take it (I am canceling) - and I will be submitting applications to some programs with deadlines BEFORE December 2014. So, they could receive a report with "most recent test date: December 2014" despite the application being submitted (and department's deadline occurring) in November! It's really unclear.

I've been scouring these forums, but can't seem to find a substantial volume: anyone have any SOPs for Political Science or Political Economy PhDs available for review? It's really unclear how much I should be delving into my research topic: ii move from polisci generally into my subfield, then talk about a general issue i want to focus on (democratization) and some factors that i'm interested in that might explain that issue (e.g. changes in institutions causing democratization, or whatever). My SOP takes up about 1.5-2 pages single spaced, with about 2-3 paragraphs discussing my research interests, 2 paragraphs discussing my academic background, 1 paragraph discussing past academic and non-academic research, 1 paragraph discussing skills, 1 paragraph discussing interest in my subfield, and 1 paragraph discussing faculty i'm interested in. Hard to tell how much detail to go into in the research statement - i want to keep it as broad as possible without sounding clueless but don;t know what that looks like.

Actually, I just noticed that the score report includes the date of the most recent GRE exam. Therefore, department CAN tell.

Universities often ask for the 'most recent' GRE scores if you have taken the GRE more than once. Supposing a student decides to submit older GRE scores after scoring poorly on the most recent GRE, can universities identify when a student submits older test scores through ScoreSelect? Thank you.

Really struggling with figuring out how to do my SOP....I'm not going over 1,000 words, which is limiting. Here's my paraphrased structure, anyone got any advice? ***The hardest part is in explaining my past research (i've done a lot) and the faculty's without breaking the word limit. Is dedicating only 1 paragraph to the university's fit appropriate? I've been told explaining your interest in detail and then mentioning some relevant faculty will let them drawn the link, since they know who their faculty are and what they've done - probably better than you!*** I worked in public policy and studied public policy, but realized i'm not interested in analyzing policies but rather how economies affect the policymaking process and the policymaking process affects economies. This interest arose when I was reading books/paper A, B, C, which brought up some questions. It also inspired my MA dissertation and a paper I wrote that won some awards. As a result, I'm applying to your university for comparative politics/political economy. At University X I'm interested in the informal and formal institutions that cause inequalities in political participation and the effect of these inequalities on political economic outcomes. After reading X and attending Y I became interested in examining through a comparative lens, the relationship between class inequalities of voting behavior and electoral turnout and how this shapes the extent, structure, and financing of redistribution. While there are many questions related to this that would be exciting in developed countries W, Q because of M, N, there is a lot of opportunity to look at this in other contexts where it has been under explored - in particular developing economies and hybrid regimes. During my MA dissertation, I noticed that there is plenty of literature on how variable X affects democratization and plenty of literature on how variable X affects voting, with many focusing on economic theories related to redistribution and welfare states, but little integrating these two literaturesl: as a result our models don't really make much sense - we can explain democratization pretty well and elections in young democracies pretty well, but do our models of voting in young/fragile democracies really line up with our models of democratization, as it pertains to this variable? This has large implications for redistribution, as theories D, E of redistribution in these contexts are based on economic models that would need to integrate both of these! In attempting to answer problems in this area, I would draw on past skills gained doing research at PLACES where I did THINGS. This provided me with good skills for doing research and tools that i hope to build on during my coursework phase at university ____. While a lot of this research is public policy research, it uses the same skills and i've been able to synthesize and understand research from across disciplines and subfields. Additionally, my academic training provides me with all of this useful methods training and acquaintance with polisci such as ______ in courses on ____ that I took with _____. I have experience with political science due to these courses, and I'm very quant although i don't have any math courses on my transcript (try taking my econometrics sequence without math!) University ______ is a good place to do research on this because Prof _____ and Prof ______ are there. Their focus on _______ and _____ are highly pertinent. Additionally, they use similar quantitative approaches that I'm interested in given the rise of data in countries of interest and new advances in methods such as X, Y, Z. During grad courses and undergrad, I focused on quant methods and formal modeling...I hope to build upon these strengths but also look forward to developing skills for mixed methods that are often necessary for comparative stuff. Please take me, I'm great and <3 you!