esotericish

Same - no decision.

I too applied to Emory, but no news yet...

this waiting is just not fun. and then if I do get in somewhere, I have 5-6 months left of working in a job I have no enthusiasm for.

How do they know how many you are applying to?

Ditto the above. I would also recommend just working somewhere in the nonprofit world. A lot of international-oriented NGOs are VERY competitive, but a lot of people come from other nonprofits because it's a similar skillset needed and people who hire at NGOs recognize that.

So hopefully most schools don't care if recommendations are a few hours late? Like, literally 3 hours.

I was looking at the admissions statistics for Minnesota, and they had something like 8 of their 20 admitted students last cycle with a verbal score of 161-165 and a quant score at 156-160. Which is very encouraging.

I have no publications but am coming from about 2 years of non-academic work after completing an MA in the field.

If you want to work in the NGO world, go get internships. They're all very competitive, but it's the only way to get a start. An MA might help with that, but you will be in school for 2 additional years that you could have put towards starting a career. And you will likely be in debt. Seriously, don't get an MA if you want to work for an NGO. Go get internships.

whew - quite the lift. I'm doing 12 and working a 50hr/week soul crushing job. i hope this works out. going to be very upset if I don't get in anywhere.

how many schools is everybody applying to?

I have some experience in the DC-based NGO world myself, and you definitely do not need a master's degree to do that.

hahaha valid point. or diversity, depending on where you grew up I suppose!

...what if you've faced no diversity?

Same thing happened to me by two people I very much trust -- and who read lots of these and accept some very qualified PhD students every year. I basically removed most of the personal parts of it and focused on clearly talking about my interests, where they're headed, what I've done, etc. I did include some of the personal information I initially had in a later paragraph, but found myself editing that out for the shorter length requirements some schools have.

I too put my application into UT Austin and found it pretty straightforward. It's a bit cumbersome to have to go through two separate portals, but the document upload side of things was pretty simple.

Wondering about this too! I saw Harvard's application does this.

Interesting. Did you bring it up at all? I'm in a more or less similar position although with fewer years of work. I'm currently doing something just to pay the bills. Did you say anything like "Hey I did this stuff for years but I'm really committed to getting/finishing a PhD because of it"

Ah I see what you're saying. Thanks for the feedback. Since you're answering questions...do you have any general advice on how to talk about non-school related work? I've been working full-time since finishing my master's degree, some of it's relevant (internships, Hill experience...well this isn't really relevant) some is not (communications-type work). Is there a good way to phrase this so it comes across as "hey, I've done stuff outside of academia, it's prepared me for the rigorous process of completing a PhD and I know it's what I want to be doing"?

Can you think of an example of how you've seen this done well? I'm really struggling with figuring out how to talk about my interest in the faculty (in so few words) without it sounding contrived or cherry-picked. How general or specific should one be?

Hi all - digging this thread back up. How reasonable would it be for my SO to work in Detroit while I went to school at Michigan?

Any tips on what studying worked for you? The math is killing me. I'm 25 and haven't done this math in over 10 years.

Ah, good info! Here's what you were referencing: https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/about/scoreselect

Hi all, I took the GRE for the first time about 4 years ago for my MA applications. I didn't do terribly - 84th percentile on verbal, 54th quantitative, and a 4.0 on the writing. But I didn't study as much as I could have, and I'm signed up to take it again in a few weeks. I'm applying to PhD programs in political science. Let's say, hypothetically, I do slightly worse on this retake. Can I send my old scores over the new ones?

Yeah that's a really solid GPA. Especially if you have good GREs and recommendations. Don't let it keep you from applying anywhere.