guest789

Yeah, what's the saying? A watched pot never boils? I guess the equivalent is "an email never arrives if your inbox is open".

I know that is a thing, but it's entirely the wrong mentality to have. Only do a PhD if you have a burning desire to be a professor.

A PhD is only necessary if you want to be an academic! Otherwise it has no bearing on distinctiveness or whatever.

The fact that there are rejections posted today as well means that they're fake. Rejections would just be a mass email sent via Campaign Monitor or something, no need to do that one by one -- hence we would have received one already! @Indeed It is definitely both. I know someone last year who had a solo top subfield journal article. He is at a top department, but still... That's the competition.

Do you have any names of people who have done this, at the top of your head? I'm curious because I'm from the UK and was told that a UK degree works for the UK and other countries (e.g. Australia, New Zealand, maybe Canada but all three still have a US bias), but the US is really where you want to be as it has the most global mobility. Preferably junior folks, I don't know if PS rockstars like Pippa Norris represent the average PhD graduate (plus she did it ~40 years ago). ETA: I'm also guessing it might be subfield dependent - theory, in particular, might draw from the UK more than, say, American Politics.

Is Berkeley your top choice so far?

Michigan is definitely looking at applications (but then again, all schools are at this point). Someone from Michigan (I can't tell who, it just says an anon profile who is faculty member there) viewed my LinkedIn this morning, so I think they're still deliberating ... but it's unlikely they have decided.

Yes, I think so. Particularly given it's over Zoom. I'd wear a nice sweater and pants just in case you stand up hahaha. Congratulations on the interview.

Okay, WTF, you're just trolling now.

How are you hosting this? I hope we're not costing you tons of money - if you need to, it might be worth pulling it down and just giving us the R code to run locally.

@sf.leeThe phone calls were fake.

Looks like it will be another day of no news for me...

I want to point out that there are a ton of rejections in this field - seriously, most professors I know say it's something like 90:10 rejections:acceptances for things like articles, and so on. Sorry this isn't a feel-good message, LOL, but what I'm trying to say is that this is potentially a good practice run for academia where you're rejected all the time.

EUI looks amazing, such a gorgeous campus.

We have similar research interests. No Stanford comms/poli sci? I applied to Top 10 political science programs and two computational social science programs. Literally no "safety" programs at all, YOLO.

I think most schools that are GRE optional will be delayed for a week or two (see Northwestern as an example), so I don't think now is the time to stress. At least this means they must be considering all of our applications which is nice - I was kind of thinking they might throw out applications of people who didn't take the GRE. But a delay indicates otherwise.

Oh wow, there is something to be said for awkward grad students - what a terrible way to deflect.

You're going to kill it this application cycle! --- I just want to hear from one school. I spoke to a friend of mine at Berkeley and he said that the department (usually) lets them know who they've admitted once the admissions committee has decided and it sounds like he hasn't heard anything (unless he didn't want to be the one to reject me LMAO), so... I don't know how accurate the Berkeley phone calls are!

It means you're a finalist, congrats. I presume it means you might not get in or you will, but it's better than not being invited to this event. I didn't apply to ND.

None of us can tell what this really means. Once you're above the cut off - which you are - it's about your SoP, LoR and WS. Also other things - e.g. maybe the person you want as a POI is a known asshole (but unbeknownst to you) and they don't have any students for that reason.

I really have no idea, but if I had to guess I would say that schools ranked 20-30 require a stronger "fit" with the dept - and this is impossible for us as applicants to know, given that fit depends on so many things like whether a professor even takes students - whereas top 10 depts are so broad and strong in most ares of poli sci. So if you have a mainstream poli sci interest that they are excited about, you should be fine in a top 10 dept, but there is a chance that might not be covered at all in the 20-30 school. You have two waitlists - that's awesome! I wouldn't count yourself out yet.

Because I have too much time on my hands and I've read pretty much every results thread - no not really. There is no such thing as a safety school when it comes to PhD programs and it's very likely a school ranked 20-30 is looking for very different things when compared to a top 10 school. So your app might be a perfect fit for a top 10 - but then again, no one knows.

I'm beginning to think that there's no point in wondering if it's true or not. Either way we'll know the results for all of our apps in a few weeks.

If you're not here to speculate or chat, why are you here? Just wait for your emails to land in your email inbox and go get a life.

I think the March release date sounds like a CYA thing just in case they say they'll be out in January but they actually don't release them until mid February - all notifications will definitely be out by March, including rejections. Doesn't Northwestern stagger rejections anyway?