VMcJ

There are plenty of applicants (and students and scholars!) that straddle the line between IR and CP. It's not a big deal to be slightly ambiguous in respect to those two subfields IF there is a obvious reason for it and you have a clear and concise proposed project in your SOP. 
You may also want to be strategic with respect to competitiveness. From past cycles, the comparative subfields were thought by many to be more competitive than IR in regards to available spots vs. applicants. I believe this fluctuates from year to year though. Might be something to think about when declaring your 'first' subfield.

Why did you post in the results thread if you haven't applied to these programs yet?

First of all: don't freak out too much on GRE scores. Many people have been admitted even to Top10 programs with GRE scores not that great. Anything like 160 on both parts is good enough for almost everywhere. The same goes to your GPA: not stellar, but you don't need to be dragged by it.
Second: although Georgetown is definitely a good program (I applied last cycle, unsuccessfully), I think you should consider applying to other programs related to your academic interests. It's not good to have only one option.
Third and most importantly: focus on your SOP and your letters of recommendation. They are by far the best indicator you can provide and the things they will look for most of the time. Fit is important and you need to convey how good an addition you can be to a given department.

Hey all, this isn't my application season (post in last year's thread here), but I did want to impart a bit of advice. It is likely that your research interests overlap somewhere with another member of this forum. While you're all still on this forum (as most of you will likely never return after the beginning of grad school), I encourage you, if you are comfortable with doing so, to talk to each other privately and de-anonymize. Networking is a huge part of how you fare on the market, and it does not hurt to start today. So turn to each other and start talking, arrange to meet each other at conferences, and possibly co-author something once you feel ready to do so.
This is not empty advice. I am currently co-authoring a project with a (former?) active user of this forum, who I will leave nameless unless they wish to announce themselves, and it's looking promising. The type of people who self-select into GradCafe are usually ahead of the game, and all of you this year were no exception. So get networking!

April 15 is right around the corner. And I am pleased to say that I just formally accepted an offer this morning (and rejected one, so hopefully that clears up a spot for somebody on the waitlist). It still hasn't sunk in yet.

OMG! Finally, I get admitted from the waitlist of Boston College! So pumped and thrilled! Will anyone attend BC this coming fall?

Just accepted an offer. Really excited/anxious for this!

I was waitlisted on my #1 and today just got the offer! So happy! Good luck everyone, stay optimistic! 

I read this thread with a little concern and wanted to add my own perspective. I am presently in my fourth year, recently defended my dissertation prospectus, and am preparing to start gathering data. Prior to my PhD program, I worked as an attorney and taught practical courses at two law schools. In this thread, I’ve seen three related, basic concerns: job prospects, strategies for maximizing job prospects, and the work load. Take my advice as a current student with a grain of salt, but be aware that the path to success in this field is idiosyncratic enough to doubt that tenured faculty know how it works, either.
Job Prospects
BigTen is right here, and the attempt to rose-tint the job market issue by noting that an important number of tenure track positions at research universities are held by graduates from 10-25 ranked schools ignores the struggles faced by the vast majority of student from those programs. It is frankly unconscionable that faculty at 50+ ranked schools encourage graduate students to attend. I truly believe the emerging consensus that a number of graduate programs exist to fill the egotistical and labor needs of the department rather than because they provide reasonable employment opportunities to graduates. Evaluating job prospects and placements by reading placement boards provides some information. Watching your colleagues graduate and fight for positions provides another.
Attending a PhD program outside the top 10-12 is a real gamble. Most students in this range seem to place at universities or outside jobs that at least provide standard of living and a reasonable connection to the questions and research that drew you to study social science in the first place. But the plight of Visiting Assistant Professors who make minimum wage is real, and in most cases the PhD does little outside the academic/think tank world other than convince employers with no idea about the academic job market that you’d leave. After the 12-14 rank, most graduates have fewer tenure opportunities, period. They certainly face uncomfortable constraints on the region and pay they must accept for any measure of job security.
If your passion or self-assurance prompts to take the risk of attending a program outside this range, do yourself a favor and pay special attention to the advice in the following section.
Securing a Stable Job
Publishing: Ask yourself an important question over and over again (and ask your advisors): can some part of the questions that animate me be answered in a compelling, novel way with data that exists on the internet? If the answer is yes, you need to work on publishing. If the answer is no, then you need to focus on generating compelling research and data collection designs. When you graduate, hiring committees will have an opinion about whether it should have been possible to publish on your question during school, and often times the answer is. Often times (especially in comparative politics), the more promising candidates are the ones that generated awesome data sets.
Networking: I promise you this works. Every week during your first three years of graduate school, find two non-academic employers that have jobs you think you might like and be qualified for, then email a person that has 5-10 years experience in one of those jobs asking for advice. Ideally, you would get 15 minutes to speak with them about their own day-to-day (like you’re interviewing them about whether you want the job) and what skills the job takes (as though you are preparing to interview for it).
This means you send out 300 networking emails in three years. You’ll get maybe 40 people willing to speak with you and 10 that like you. Find excuses to stay in touch with those people, and 1 or 2 will have a job for you when you graduate. This job worked for young law school students I mentored and seems to be working for MA candidates I work with now.
Grants: Winning a grant is easier said than done, but it can be very beneficial. Winning a grant that pays you to research frees you from needing to work and sends a signal to future grantors and employers that you are promising and talented. Winning grants for research activities achieves the latter. 
I have not won any of the general work-replacement grants, but those I know who have burst ahead of the rest of us. They have zero distraction. This is part of why students from private schools like Harvard and Stanford outperform equally talented students at Michigan or UCLA. They work less.
I have been fortunate enough to win a couple of small but prestigious-sounding grants to fund research. It has completely altered the way senior colleagues view my work and promise.
Work Load
I think the gallows humor about reading in the shower is part of what makes for bad graduate students. It is absolutely true that you cannot read enough to stop feeling behind your classmates or (heaven forfend) the faculty teaching you. So why bother?
First the saccharine advice: if you are an interesting and curious enough person to attend a decent PhD program, there is very little in the world, and nothing at school, worth the sacrifice of five to seven years of your personal growth and exploration. I don’t care if you end up teaching at fucking Harvard, your colleagues will never look at you with the wonder your friends do when you serve them a perfectly seared scallop or play them Fur Elise on the piano after you eat someone else’s scallops. They won’t know you like your mother or your husband or your son.
Here’s an inconvenient truth: 90% of you want to go to grad school in large part because you want to feel smart. Your colleagues will rarely make you feel smart, even though you are. The whole enterprise is about identifying flaws in even the best work (in order to improve it) and on some level, this is miserable. Don’t believe me? Ask students at the schools you were admitted to how they felt about the process of drafting and defending their prospectus.**
But your friends and family will make you feel smart, especially if you turn your substantial talent to excelling in at least one thing they can relate to. You want to feel proud and useful and cherished and special? Learn to give people something that gives them instinctual pleasure. (Usually not an AJPS article.)
Now for the professional advice you won’t ignore: You will have plenty of pressure to read deeply and critically and to learn method. I don’t suggest ignoring this. But the best ideas and the best careers don’t seem based on picking apart the causal identification of a key article. Great insight requires time to rest and percolate, and inspiration comes from wondering why people haven’t solved real world problems more often than it comes from replication data.
Models don’t provide insight. They describe it.
Good ideas require some amount of travel and art and philosophy and debate and REST and EXPERIENCE and EXPOSURE. If you want to have any hope of avoiding the scholarly lament that “my research and my life talk to twelve other people” you have to set aside some time to be out of the literature and out of the methods.
I’m not suggesting you spend every Saturday smoking weed and reading Batman comics. Maybe baseball games and 30 Rock marathons are rare indulgences now. But don’t cancel your subscription to the New Yorker or stop seeing your friends, because politics is about real life and on some level no one trusts that the academic without work experience, without family, without friends, without hobbies, has any insight about what animates actual people. 
Good luck with everything.
**Setting aside the problems with political science as a science, while this process of critique and revise makes everyone feel stupid and insecure, it does help you eventually feel proud of and defend your work. But to scratch the itch of feeling competent, you’d be better off having kids and teaching them to camp or make great spaghetti sauce or something.

I just accepted an offer and declined several others. I hope that helps some people who are waiting on waitlists!

I completed my undergrad at OSU. Definitely possibly to find affordable/safe housing! Indianola Ave is not what I would consider dangerous at all. it's an area that a lot of undergrads live in. on the east side of campus I would say stay west of 4th ave, south of Hudson, and north of maybe 8th ave. You may be able to find some cheaper suburb areas (Grandview and Clintonville are some of the more expensive ones) and I would advise staying away from south east of Columbus. I currently live northwest of campus. TONS of good eating in Columbus. We're a bunch of foodies I'd say. Lots of quick options on High St and near campus. I would advise against a meal plan. I did mostly cooking during the week and will adventure out to places for food on the weekends.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

Today I decided for OSU. I hope this means somebody can get good news from the other programs that accepted me.
Still have to hear definitively from Notre Dame, but to assume rejection at this point is better.

I just wanted to make a post again here... if you've been accepted to Ohio State and don't intend to attend, please let them know as soon as possible. I've been waitlisted for funding and would very much like to go there.
(I am also waiting to hear from Georgetown, still.)

@VMcJ - It depends a lot on your institution and the infrastructure for this built into your department and university, but I would say not really. There are always professors looking for someone to analyze some quantitative data that they can't do or can't do well, but you have to either be in the right place at the right time or make yourself available. In my case, I got into statistical consulting in two ways:
The first was reliant upon my university's infrastructure; there was a social science research institute at my university that hired graduate students across quantitative social science fields as statistical consultants. I found out about it by taking an advanced quantitative methods class in my department - the TA for the course was a fourth-year doctoral student who worked for the institute, and she mentioned it. I asked her to give me more information about it, and because I was a good student in quant methods she connected me with the director of the program. He interviewed and then hired me. I started working there halfway through my second year in graduate school.
The second was acquiring sort of a reputation around my two departments as being quantitatively able. That was disseminated simply by having conversations with other students, helping some of my cohort-mates with their biostatistics homework or statistical analysis on projects, and generally being an excited puppy whenever statistics would come up. Eventually people started recommending me to other people for consulting projects. For example, one of my 2nd-author papers happened almost/sort-of randomly; the professor whose office was across the hall from my PI was an anthropologist who wanted to run a controlled trial and asked my PI if he knew anyone who could handle the stats for the trial. He recommended me.
I would also highly recommend being proactive and simply asking. If you demonstrate yourself to be a capable student in statistical analysis, and then you ask your PI or other professors in your department if they know anyone who is working on a paper and would like a quant consult for publication credit - or honestly, just even let them know that you are looking for those kinds of opportunities - they'll remember you when the time comes.


@AnUglyBoringNerd - No offense taken, really, more amusement  I hear this characterization a lot from undergraduates and early graduate students. It's understandable, really, since the media presentation of work in a corporate office is pretty much this - a cog in a machine, in drab grey or brown cubicles, counting the minutes until 5 pm. I think that's one reason why aspiring academics are so passionate about the field in the first place, because it's like - I get to read and think and write about super interesting things and someone will pay me for it? It's so different from people's usual conception of a paying professional job, so it's very appealing. And I think that believing that academia is exciting and different and that the alternative is corporate drudge work is what keeps some students and graduates tethered to academia, even if it's not the right choice for them or their preferences have changed.
My response to it is just my version of the truth, which is that has not been my experience the corporate world at all. And it is a Corporate Behemoth. Sure, there is bureaucracy - but no more than a large research university (you ain't seen paperwork until you write a federal grant!). I looooove my job. I do really interesting work, I get to use most of the research skills I learned in my research-based PhD program, I work on products that millions of people use and love every day, and part of my job is watching people play video games (and occasionally playing them myself). And I certainly don't feel like an easily replaceable cog in a machine - just finding hiring a replacement for me would likely cost more than a year of my salary, not to mention the lost productivity while they try to train someone to the level I'm currently at. (And, to toot my own horn a bit, I brought a unique set of skills into this position that would be really difficult to replace.) My company also cares about their employees and it shows in the employee morale and benefits they offer here.
Just saying - corporate life is not so bad  


@BigTenPoliSci - This is a misunderstanding of my fields, I think. Social psychology is not a field that commonly offers any part-time options and is not geared towards training professionals. My program (which was also a top 20 program in the field, by the way), as all social psychology PhD programs, was geared towards training and producing academics for the field and that is what the vast majority of graduates have gone on to do.
(Social psychology is different from clinical and counseling psychology. And even those PhD programs don't commonly offer any part-time options, and are designed as academic/scientific training programs. If anything, they require more work than a social psychology program because in addition to research and teaching, there's also the clinical hours they need to perform.)
Similarly, although master's programs in public health often offer part-time options and are geared towards training professionals (much like some master's program in political science), doctoral programs in public health - and specifically PhD programs - are not. They are also academic programs that are primarily geared towards training academics, although there are more professional opportunities for PhDs in public health outside of academia. I took 4-5 courses a semester for the first 3 years, took a set of 4 comprehensive exams across two fields, and wrote a dissertation that tied together the two areas. I also taught, published, and wrote fellowships and grants.
I did mention that I think a lot of this is departmental. Departments across fields are going to expect different things than others - I've met people social psychology who have said they are expected to work different hours per week depending on their department. I still maintain, though, that a program that regularly demands 72-80+ hours per week and thinks that's not enough is demanding too much.

It's not impossible. Lots of people do this every day, and leave academia for industry positions. You have to make time for it; you have to carefully choose opportunities and pursue threads that will help you build this networks. And you need to do it very early.


I have completed a PhD in the social sciences and I can very confidently say that I have never read anything in the shower. (How, Sway?)
I absolutely did more than just work - in fact, I had a very robust social life and I still managed to leave my program with five publications and two fellowships. And I got married. And I consulted on the side. You have to manage your time well. But it's not necessarily true that all you do is work. It's unhealthy to do nothing but work, actually. (I suppose this is also departmentally specific. I am horrified by the prospect of any department that thinks 72-80 hours per week of actual work is not enough. I think this is a dysfunctional department.)


I would give the exact opposite advice. Consulting work is what helped me get my current position. And even if academia is your goal, you can get publications from consulting on the side - I have some second and third authorships from doing statistical consulting.


Yes, but those jobs are competitive as well.


People have such interesting conceptions of what corporate work life is like.

Here are the US News Rankings in 1995, 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2013 for Political Science (p.13) for Top 20 and some other programs.
( http://web.mit.edu/ir/rankings/USNews_Grad_Rankings_1994-2016.pdf )
As you can notice, in two decades:
- Harvard was always 1st;
- Princeton worked its way to the Top 3, while Columbia did it to the Top 10 and NYU to the Top 15;
- Chicago, as @Comparativist noted, dropped from Top 5 and now is Top 15;
- MIT and Duke are very stable in their places as "Top-10-but-too-close-to-15";
- Wisconsin, Rochester and Minnesota have been falling for a while.

Here are the US News Rankings in 1995, 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2013 for Political Science (p.13) for Top 20 and some other programs.
( http://web.mit.edu/ir/rankings/USNews_Grad_Rankings_1994-2016.pdf )
As you can notice, in two decades:
- Harvard was always 1st;
- Princeton worked its way to the Top 3, while Columbia did it to the Top 10 and NYU to the Top 15;
- Chicago, as @Comparativist noted, dropped from Top 5 and now is Top 15;
- MIT and Duke are very stable in their places as "Top-10-but-too-close-to-15";
- Wisconsin, Rochester and Minnesota have been falling for a while.