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Charlie2010

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Everything posted by Charlie2010

  1. I DID say math scores AND abilities. I recognize they are correlated, not identical. But every admissions committee in every quantitative discipline in the country finds them to be a strong indicator. If there were students out there with weak math GREs who a program could identify as undiscovered gems using other indicators (and thereby steal away from the narrowly GRE-focused programs) they would do it. Kind of a "Moneyball" story. But no one has found such a formula. In any case, I agree with Balderdash about the threshold scores. How much weight to give those scores relative to other factors you can argue over once you're on an admissions committee.
  2. Are you talking about an IR program or a poli sci program that has IR scholars? If the second, you'll need to improve your math scores and abilities, since a good chunk of the leading edge material (though by no means all) uses quantitative techniques. You have to at least be able to read these and evaluate the quality of the analysis. Otherwise you'll be stuck either having a knee-jerk negative reaction to what could be good stuff or (just as bad) being bamboozled by pseudo-sophistication wrapped in greek letters and computer code.
  3. The original poster is coming from an econ background. In that field, everyone might agree that it's handy to have Krugman/Obstfeld on trade, Varian's undergrad micro text, and a few others, as palatable references for the basic concepts you should have down cold. There really is nothing like that in political science, because of the field's more diverse views on how to do social science and what it even is. Also, many people will come from non-PS backgrounds, or will come from a school that teaches a very different flavor of PS than you will be learning where you go. (e.g. they read a lot of Aristotle and Hobbes and can blow you away with that stuff, but now they are going to have to start from zero with a lot of empirical methods that will be easier for you). So don't worry too much about prepping before fall unless the program you are entering offers you specific guidance.
  4. A great honors thesis is as much research experience as you need, as long as the rest of the app is strong.
  5. I'll echo Penelope's and RWBG's comments, and also say that they both seem to really know what's going on in all their responses. To be crystal clear (and a bit rude), if you tell any top twenty (thirty?) program that you want to be a methodologist, but have not taken calculus, you will be laughed out of town. Stats courses that do not require calculus are not considered to be particularly rigorous or demanding by the standards of this group. Better than nothing, but that puts you way behind where any methodology specialist should be starting grad school. That said, I think what you really mean is that you like doing applied work using statistical methods. That's great! Lots of people are doing that, in every subfield, in every department, and many of them start out without the necessary calculus background (although this is rarer and rarer). So really any department would be fine. If what you mean is that you want to be in a program that will let you take more stats and calculus, and will trade off by requiring fewer book-intensive seminars, then you could try one of boutique departments, Rochester, Stanford GSB, or Caltech Social Science, with a second tier being NYU or WUSTL.
  6. Well, no political scientist will argue against you if you believe politics matters!
  7. That sounds more like development economics than poli sci. Look at Esther Duflo's work in India.
  8. Then UCSD, Berkeley, Rochester, Princeton, Stanford GSB all spring to mind as good options where there is at least one tenured IR modeler, and some opportunities for interesting advanced courses.
  9. Core micro theory is hard everywhere, so it makes for a better signal. Trade theory at at the grad level can be softer, depending who teaches. Also, a strong micro core will make trade theory easy to pick up, as well as set you up to do formal theory if you want to. You made the right choice.
  10. I'd agree you shouldn't pick a program for just one professor, and especially not an untenured one, as they are the most likely to move (both voluntarily and involuntarily). Any place that has a strong group of quantitative comparativists and at least one China person should work. And even if they don't have a China specialist, you could still make that research program work since you already have the language and institutional knowledge. UCSD and Wisconsin would be great choices.
  11. A terminal masters from a PhD program will not help you much, except to the extent that you're applying for a job where they require an MA but don't really care what it was in (which is true for some government jobs and policy jobs). But a good policy MA program will give you much more relevant training and, as important, a link into an alumni network that can get you internships and later jobs.
  12. Rochester, WashU, and Stanford GSB are the three best known "boutique" departments specializing in mathematical approaches to political science. NYU is also up-and-coming in this niche. It's not clear to me if Caltech will be as influential in political science down the road as it has been in the past. Their recent placements have been more in economics: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/ss/phds/alumni#2012 Any other top-ten department can also put together a strong methods+formal program for you, although you'll have to read more books along the way and learn how to interact with people who don't think math can usefully be applied to the study of politics.
  13. Having served on a committee, I would disagree with Balderdash's emphasis on customizing the SOP to fit the profs at the school. Most of the people we accepted just did a little bit of that at the end, a tacked-on paragraph that helped us know which faculty might want to review the SOP if the overall application is strong. However, displaying a good sense of what an interesting and tractable research question might be IS important. You don't have to be certain you'll actually do it (you probably won't) but articulating it will convince us you know what you're getting into and have a shot at doing something interesting for your dissertation. Balderdash sounds like someone who I would have expected to get in somewhere. Hopefully you have discussed your last SOP and the rest of your record with your advisors, and have a fresh recommendation from someone at Cambridge saying how impressed they are with your research potential. Other than it may just be luck and fit, and the tastes of those on the committees.
  14. There are essentially no terminal MA programs in political science. Given your objectives you are looking for public policy or international affairs programs.
  15. Stanford poli sci does not teach much game theory, and only has one or two game theorists on the faculty. It prefers to farm this teaching out to the GSB (business school), which specializes in this area. If you want to do IR-oriented game theory Berkeley (Powell) or UCSD (Slantchev) might make more sense. Princeton and Yale have also strengthened their offerings in recent years, although not so much in IR. If you hope to get enough background to write correct, publishable models, however, you'll probably need to take the core course sequence in an econ department or a boutique like Rochester.
  16. Most programs are happy to have you continue to study the language relevant to your research area and will help you get funding for that. You can take courses during the year and/or in summers. For a hard language like Arabic you'll also want to get a grant to spend a full year at one of the serious programs in an Arabic-speaking country.
  17. The GRE will matter everywhere, although it will vary slightly how much. Most top schools have at least one faculty member who has studied or taught in the British system so they will know how to interpret your performance even without a GPA. At any rate, GPAs are hard to compare even across American institutions, so you're not going to get excluded anywhere serious just because they can't assign a point value to your GPA.
  18. At this point I wouldn't worry about trying to do stats, methods, or game theory. Just focus on improving your math basics--single and multivariate calculus, probability, linear algebra. But it's true that most incoming students even at top programs won't have much more than a couple of college calculus classes from freshman year, and departments will compensate as best they can.
  19. It's pretty common, especially statistics. Area studies people sometimes do anthro or soc that pertains to their region, or even history, and methods or formal people may also do econ. Psych courses would make sense if political behavior is your research area.
  20. Harvard tends to get the highest yield. Because of this, they can be very selective in their admissions (since so many come). That means they mostly only accept and only get great people (or great fakers). Great people coming in means that at least some will be great coming out. But that doesn't necessarily mean the program itself made them any better, or that those people could not have done just as well had they gone anywhere else in the first tier. So if you're accepted there, don't just go because of the name, go because you're convinced they'll give you the training and mentorship you need.
  21. I disagree with both the Realist and Penelope Higgins on this. Most of the top ten programs do have a "math camp" or even a math semester because to learn methods at the level required to intelligently read (read, mind you, not produce) a large part of the research on almost any substantive area, you need more math than most political science undergrads take. You can focus on qualitative work and not learn the methods if you don't want to really understand those branches of research, just as someone could rely entirely on English-language sources to study EU politics, but I don't think this will result in the best research.
  22. I can't see this as bragging, because what glory is there in bragging to a message board? But the key point is that the decision is exactly the same as choosing between any set of similarly-ranked schools, in general. And the specifics depend on your focus and fit with the schools that admitted you.
  23. I didn't answer the original question directly, but I don't think you can just draw a sharp dichotomy between large and small programs. An empirical approach here would be to look at the assistant professors at ten places you'd love to work at, and see where they came from. Then scale that by the size of the admitted classes at the small vs. large schools. Or perhaps you should look at ten places that aren't your dream job, but would be acceptable, since that's where the typical PhD admit ends up.
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