shrimps

One thing I've heard on three separate programs' blogs or videos this week is the idea of "building momentum." Instead of trying to pick the single best place to talk about your quantitative skills, think about how this can be demonstrated throughout your app. All of your grades in previous quant-heavy courses (which sound great!) are already on transcripts and are therefore part of the picture the AdComms will be looking at. If there's a part in any of your statements where it makes sense to mention either your previous research methods course or a specific interest in building those skills, I'd say go for it, but don't spend too much time on it or try to shoehorn it in if it doesn't naturally go with the flow of your statements. The additional optional essay is a great place to address your GRE score directly - lots of people don't test well, so acknowledging the low score while pointing to all your previous positive quant experience outside of the terrifying context of a test center seems like all you need to do. Also, as far as Fletcher goes, remember that that 60th percentile is just an average! A full half of enrolled students scored lower than that, and in some cases, may have scored much lower. Echoing @CakeTea, AdComms are looking at a holistic picture. An interesting candidate with compelling things to say in their essay who has a low GRE quant score but other positive class experiences on record has much less to worry about than a totally bland candidate with higher test scores.

I'd recommend looking at the concentrations different degree programs offer - most of them do offer economic development or social policy specializations, but it's worth looking at the required courses for each to see what matches your specific interests. Also, think about what specific skills you'd need for the kind of position in econ/social policy you'd want to have after grad school. If you want to analyze policy, you'd want to focus on quant-heavy programs, but if you're more interested in the management or implementation of policies, this may be less important.

I think the name in and of itself is probably minimally important. The part of your undergrad experience that are most interesting to the admissions team will be your transcripts and your academic LOR, and the biggest way the prestige of the institution plays in is to give those things context. A GPA of 3.4 might read differently depending on where it's from. Schools want to see that you challenged yourself with increasingly difficult classes, took leadership positions, and were engaged with your academic community, but I do think they understand that opportunities can be very different college to college. This doesn't only apply to how well-known a school is, but also how well-funded or how large - generally, you aren't going to be faulted for not taking advantage of courses that weren't offered. I do think @went_away raises a very valid point that people who graduate from prestigious colleges can have advantages in entry-level jobs and internships that put them frustratingly ahead of the game. However, it's worth looking into the lists of undergrad institutions that incoming students are coming from. Most MPA/MPP programs put these demographics somewhere on their websites, and it's definitely not just a collection of the US News top 10 who get in - those are represented, but people are also coming from all types of places.

Some schools that people have reported here receiving full funding for are USC, U of Chicago, and Carnegie Mellon Heinz, but I think many schools in some occasions do provide merit scholarships that cover full tuition. Sometimes these require extra essays, sometimes it's as simple as checking an extra box on the application. Your best resources will be the scholarship pages of the school websites. I'd also highly recommend looking back through the "Decisions" threads here for the past several years. Usually when people post their results, they'll also include the funding offers they received, and you''ll start to see certain patterns. All that being said, there's really no master list of fully-funded programs because there's no surefire way to predict what funding you will receive. In Donald Asher's Graduate Admissions Essays book (which I first heard about here and highly recommend, it's awesome), you can't calculate how much grad school will cost you personally until you get your offers. Figure out which schools tend to be more generous, figure out which of those interest you, and then apply to all of them so you'll have more options (and hopefully, scholarship offers) to choose from.

@RCtheSS and @sp108 - I'm somewhere between the two of you as far as number of programs. I'm looking at seven programs these days: CMU Heinz, NYU Wagner, Columbia SIPA, HKS, WWS, USC, U Penn SP2 (They've got a new Data Analytics focus to their MSSP degree that looks super interesting). In the past few weeks, I've been totally surprised by how much of my "working on apps" time has been taken up by emails... emails to LOR writers, emails to admissions reps, emails to students. I guess it makes sense, but I'd been so worried about getting my SOP together, it didn't even occur to me that I'd be putting in so many hours in Gmail.

Hey GradCafe Team, I'm applying for MPA/MPPs this fall. These are all professional programs, so I'd like to have a letter of rec from my current supervisor who I get along with very well and work closely with day-to-day. However, because this is a LOR request plus "oh, by the way I'm applying to grad school" email, I've been putting it off like crazy. Since most of us will be asking current supervisors for letters of rec, does anyone have any example emails or general tips for how to do so classily? Many thanks!

Hi Cloutma, My sense is you can absolutely change your concentration, though it probably needs to be relatively early on so you have time to take the required classes. At the SIPA info session, they did say that they generally don't encourage it after the first semester or so, but even then it's possible. There's a helpful quote about exactly this on the SIPA blog this morning, actually: As for choosing between the two on your application, I highly recommend putting together two hypothetical 2-yr schedules for yourself, one for each concentration. Keep in mind that you'll be able to change your mind when you arrive, and that you'll also get to round whatever you choose out with a specialization. Hope that helps!

YUP. Also, congrats!!! SIPA is amazing, and also that is a huge fellowship from a place that is notorious for not giving them.

What are your goals? I'd like to end up doing analysis or strategic planning for urban/social policy in the US, with an emphasis on economic development. That could be at an NGO, city-level government, a public-private partnership, a foundation... I'm not really sure yet. A definite goal during grad school is to find out more what the day-to-day of those positions would look like a bit better. What programs best fit your passions / desires / plans and why? So far, it's a mix of MPA/MPP/MUP programs. The one downside of snooping all the past discussions on GradCafe, for me at least, is that so many people seem to have an international focus. Which is great! But it means that I often have to take those recommendations with a grain of salt since they don't line up with my interests (probably a good idea for forum-reading anyway). I spent a good part of my undergrad working and studying abroad, and I'd love to keep that breadth in my grad studies, but I also know that I'm a lot more interested in living and working with communities in the US. I'm looking programs that have and emphasis on building strong skills for quantitative analysis, but don't necessarily require you to have an extensive background (read: calculus) already. Also, I would like a pony. What have you done up to this point to narrow down your choices? I've been taking some pre-reqs through UCLA's online extension, and I've gone to some info sessions in my area. Plus, to echo a lot of people here already: All The Spreadsheets. I've got a sheet with application requirements and deadlines, one where I can keep track of professors who look interesting, student groups alumni who are doing things I think are cool, alumni who I might have a school/work overlap with and could potentially prod for opinions... I've also found it really helpful to look at the classes and put together a potential 2-yr track for myself. I'm 100% sure that would be subject to change once you get there, but it's a good way to imagine what your experience would be like at different programs. It helped me eliminate some programs that seemed cool in general, but that I realized wouldn't actually get me the things I wanted to learn most. Also, it feels great to get excited about programs that have classes you're dying to take, especially while slogging through all this lovely application prep.

To find classes by subject, you can search by online courses only on UCLA's Extention site (link here). I also work full-time, and have been taking two classes this quarter. The micro/macro combo is nice because the classes do kind of build off each other, they use the same (expensive) textbook and every once and a while, the reading material overlaps. It's about a solid 15 hours of extra work a week, in part because taking a class online does require being more proactive about seeking out resources. I think it's totally doable while working a regular job, but that being said, I'm really looking forward to taking just the one class over the summer term.

Yeah, you can really take them from anywhere. In my Macro class, we all wrote little introductions, and it turned out 50-60% of the students were based in China. I'm just finishing Macro and Micro now and will be taking Stats over the summer. Happy to answer questions if anyone's got them.

For what it's worth, I've had good luck working with UCLA's Online Extension courses. At around $600 each, they're certainly not inexpensive, but they were still the cheapest option I was able to find for online courses or community college classes in my area (NYC). They also have the benefit of being tied pretty tightly through UCLA's online platform, for everything including midterms and finals. The second cheapest option I was able to find what Berkeley's online courses, where you have to take a final at a certified proctored site, and there wasn't a lot of graded coursework to help boost a bad test grade if it didn't go well. Anyway, don't know if that's helpful for your specific needs/budget/schedule, notsosure, but thought I'd throw it out there!

Hey all, I won't be applying until next Fall for MPA programs (which would start in the distant-feeling future of Fall 2016). My weakest point is a lack of really any undergraduate quantitative classes, but it sounds like some people here have recommended trying to fix that by taking Econ or Stat classes for credit before applying. Has anyone taken any good for-credit, graded online courses? I'm based in New York, so if anyone's taken any solid evening/weekend courses in the city, I'd love to hear about that too. All the online/options I've seen so far are a good chunk of change, so it would be great to get a rec beforehand. Thanks so much!