law2phd

I realize that I've already expressed my opinion here, but I strongly agree. I think the responses here are needlessly stressful for OP, especially if further math classes might hurt his GPA (and therefore his application file). If he has to pay extra for these classes--as I thought I understood from one of his posts--they make no sense at all. If the question is what OP needs to do to get into a top program, the answer is that his quant training is fine provided that it translates into a 90th percentile or better GRE score. I was accepted to multiple quant-heavy programs, including from OP's list, and I haven't had formal math training beyond high school level calculus; a strong GRE score and a SoP that displays a working knowledge of contemporary mathematical methods as relevant to his subfield is sufficient. I realize that OP may not think I'm contributing anything here, and that's fine, but the people who find this via a google search a year or two down the road are otherwise likely to make some very questionable decisions which could foreseeably cost them admission to Top 10 departments and/or cost thousands of dollars and months of time for no ascertainable benefit. Admission committees do not need to see these courses on transcripts, and anyone who can't learn game theory or linear algebra on their own with a couple of textbooks lacks the aptitude for a quant-heavy field in the first place.

I honestly don't think course selection matters that much--including how much math training you have. Even top departments will teach all of the math you need, provided that your GRE score indicates that you have the aptitude to learn. To be competitive for all of the schools you selected (I'm particularly looking at Stanford and possibly NYU), I would focus on a minimum 165 quantitative, which is doable with a lot of practice at high school level math.

I think the SoP may be the most important aspect of your file. The rest proves that you are minimally competent to be at the department; the SoP shows that you know what you are getting into, that your interests are in areas of strength for the department, and that you are likely to do the sort of scholarship in your career that will bring prestige to your degree-granting institution. It's good that you have the better part of a year to make it as strong as possible. I would particularly focus on reading articles from recent editions of top publications. Pick up a few recent issues of the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, etc. Read all of the abstracts. This will give you a lens on which subfields and sets of research questions are of most interest to you. Read some of the articles that seem most interesting to get a feel for how political scientists talk (how do you say what you want to say in the SoP as a political scientist?) and argue. Be able to convince admission committees that you know even more about the discipline than your credentials indicate (although your credentials are strong as it is). This is the stuff I really wish I had known when I was applying. I focused on research topics and subfields as they were discussed in the poli sci classes I had already taken. Unfortunately, those classes are often largely restricted to landmark articles and ideas that are a decade or three out of date. The methodology I'm suggesting is what I've been using to find advisors post-admittance. I think I would have been accepted to more programs had I been doing this from the beginning.

Edit: Removed. OP doesn't need a multipage rant on how awful the law/teaching market is now

As someone who has actually done exactly what you suggested at one of the schools you suggested, I thought that my experience in doing so (and the fact that it did absolutely nothing for my career in polisci) might provide some basis for offering an opinion on the matter. But, hey, thanks for the downvote

Law schools are also currently in the middle of a death spiral, with the lowest number of people seeking admission in more than 40 years. There are no longer enough applicants to fill top schools with people capable of tying their shoes and chewing gum at the same time, and lower schools can't fill their seats, period. I think that for the foreseeable future, the focus is going to be on cutting budgets without being able to get rid of tenured faculty, not hiring new people. I really wouldn't recommend a JD for anything these days. Edit: Also note that some top schools provide fellowships to do work at the law school, if it's really necessary for your interests. See: http://gsas.nyu.edu/object/grad.lawfellows

Up until the last half-page or so, I was still finding it entertaining. Keep it rolling!

I think this explanation works for why you wouldn't get into 1-2 schools for which you are qualified. I think that the probability of going 0/7 to well chosen schools for which you have the credentials is quite low. This suggests that there's something in the application file that's a mismatch to the programs OP applied to. Maybe he just chose the wrong schools (poor fit between his interests and what they specialize in), maybe he picked bad letter writers, maybe he didn't write a good statement of purpose, maybe he didn't really have the GRE/gpa for the schools he applied to. Without insider information, there's really no way of knowing what you need to do to increase your chances next year. If you can't get inside information from a department, you could try sending a full application file over to a mentor/letter writer that you trust. I had a senior faculty member at my school who had been teaching poli sci for ~30 years review my credentials: he let me know that my GRE quant was pretty poor for schools in my range and that I should apply broadly to maximize my chances of at least one admission committee not caring. The advice was sound and led to my best offer being from a school I wouldn't have applied to otherwise. As to the original question, a non-funded masters is almost always an awful choice from a financial standpoint. You will never recoup that $50,000. And after room and board, Columbia is going to be closer to $70,000. Only you can assess whether getting into a program is worth putting yourself in a situation which will probably objectively harm your wealth significantly for the rest of your life.

Wait--sociology courses use math? I just had to read a bunch of books about how black children struggle through school, women struggle in the workplace, etc. and write a bunch of "How do you feel now?" papers about it.

On the bright side, Walmart is raising wages above what my alma mater currently pays STEM graduate workers with degrees from MIT. So there's that.

You don't necessarily need undergraduate quant training, even to study poli sci at a quant heavy program. As one top professor told me, poli sci isn't economics: you aren't expected to be a mathematician before you start. You are expected to put in as many extra hours as it takes when they're paying you solely to learn the tools you need to succeed in the field. If you're in undergrad, you started college post-financial meltdown. You should thus know by now that the options are (a) work at Walmart for minimum wage or ( work countless hours, sacrificing sleep and a social life as necessary, to find a job with even a minimal wage and social status premium over Walmart. The days of getting paid to do something you actually want to do are over in this country for the 99.x% of us who aren't superstars.

I'm only an admitted student myself, but I would have to imagine that any T10 (and probably T15 or so) would provide adequate training for anyone with the motivation and talent to make TT. The better job prospects of T5 schools are almost certainly due to the self-selection of superior students into those schools. Since you are a constant in the equation, there shouldn't be a huge difference.

Hopefully this is not the general idea you are taking from this line of concerns and criticisms. Poli sci is an incredibly difficult field to get into as a career, even for those whose interests and skills are in line with the direction this field is taking--which is increasingly quantitative, based on statistics and big data analysis. You are going to face significant difficulty at every step of the way if you are not in line with those trends: you will find it more difficult to write a SoP which fits the strengths of top schools (read: schools from which you can get a job), you will find it harder to find an advisor once admitted who is interested in your work, you will find it harder to find a job as a junior faculty member when you aren't researching or prepared to teach in areas the department actually expects to be specializing in decades down the road, and you will find it hard to get tenure for the same reasons. I applied to poli sci programs as a qualitative-based theorist with absolutely no formal training in political science even at the undergraduate survey level. I still received a couple of offers from elite programs, presumably because I was able to place my research interests within a coherent framework that can build from and contribute to where the field seems to be going. Even if you aren't a math person, you probably need to be able to do the same--or find a different field to earn a doctorate in.

I think this differs on a school by school basis. I remember that during my application process, some schools specifically said that they were usually not open to admitting students with doctorate-level training in closely related disciplines (one of the UCs, I think--UCLA?). Other schools would undoubtedly consider the perspective granted by a doctorate in economics a plus, given the increasing convergence of the two fields. Because of that convergence, however, I wonder whether an additional doctorate would be worth the time investment for you. If you are interested in pursuing comparative research from a formal methodological perspective, you might already have substantially more advanced training than most political scientists working in that area. As a general rule, I think that formal theorists trained in economics departments have more nuanced training than formal theorists trained in poli sci departments. I seriously wonder whether any necessary 'migration' could be accomplished as one or two years as a post-doctoral researcher, as opposed to several more as a graduate student. Just something to think about--hopefully it has been useful.

As an undergraduate student, it is highly suspect that you have an opinion at all of what subfields and methodologies have "no value." It's one thing to say that you aren't interested in doing primarily quantitative work for whatever reason; it's another to suggest that people with decades more experience than you in the field know less about what constitutes valuable research. I can only assume that your dismissal of quant research is because you really don't understand what it is about or what it attempts to do in regard to leading political science in a direction such that it can actually be taken seriously as a science (formal or empirical). As another poster said, you are going to have to be a lot more diplomatic in your dealings with people in the field than you have been here. It's true that "not everything is a nail." It's also true that only nails be scientifically analyzed and that the field cannot progress unless non-nails are abandoned to the humanities, which are not constrained by any form of the scientific method. With regard to your substantive question, it really depends on what sort of ideological bent you want your research to take (pomo, Straussian, etc.). Your question really cannot be answered until you get a taste for which leading theorists tend to think and write in a way agreeable to you.

I think (subfield-substantive) fit can be overweighed. As a professional academic, you will have to get used to being off on your own to some degree; you might end up the only person at a university in your specific subfield. If you can find supportive faculty members capable of mentoring you in the methodological toolkit you need for your research program, I think that would go a long way even if your specific research interests do not overlap much. Any indication of program desirability can be manipulated by strategic behavior, but I would at least focus on schools that make a strong effort to make you seem welcomed. I've received emails from ten or so POIs at schools to which I have been accepted, and some put forth a great deal more effort in the recruitment process, mentioning parts of my writing sample they liked (and why), specific examples of students who have worked under them on related research projects and how their careers turned out, providing examples of papers they have co-written with students on similar topics, etc. They're likely overselling, but making the effort to oversell should at least be loosely correlated with making a strong effort on the department's behalf elsewhere. These are the sorts of people I feel comfortable committing to work with for several years based on asymmetric information. Edit: I didn't mean to suggest that professors are largely disingenuous in their correspondence. I just wanted to point out that even if you (wisely) assume that the program may not be as ideal for you in every way as it can sometimes be presented, you will still get incredibly valuable information from interacting with POIs. When I'm deciding who I want to work under, I at least want someone who takes the time to strongly signal that he would be a good mentor.

If two prestige-whoring based ranking systems disagree as to how programs should be ranked (I suppose the NRC r-rankings could be characterized as something else, but not usnews or the s-rankings), it probably indicates that the schools are sufficiently indistinguishable from a prestige basis that you should make your decision based on something else. I would recommend placement data or the congeniality of prospective advisors.