guest789

What are Michigan's comparative strengths relative to other departments? Survey methods, American politics (at least historically)... Public opinion research. I think this is what they mean.

Quick note: I think you mean multiple regression. A multivariate regression, where you have multiple dependent vars, isn't that simple. Unless you do mean multivariate regression, which is cool, I just want to be sure you're not mixing up the terms before you submit your paper.

Uh I think references and bibliography are counted in the page limit... Aren't they? I'd just get it under the limit of, say, 20 pages. Shorten your lit review. A lot of political scientists enjoy reading the empirical stuff way more than a literature review. I would not cut your graphs - they are your contribution to the literature and show that you can (hopefully or have the potential to) do independent, empirical political science research. You basically want to mimic a political science journal article as much as you can. My paper is 18 pages with 4 graphs and a title page with an abstract. I single-spaced my bibliography, but everything else is double spaced. I think this is a fairly standard length for grad school apps and in the discipline overall. EDIT: If you have additional things that you want to include, but aren't crucial to the main point of your paper, put them in an appendix and upload it to GitHub or another web-hosting page. This is just my opinion as a fellow applicant, FWIW.

I would write a standard paper, 15-25pp with an introduction, methods, results, conclusion. Most schools seem to have a 20pp cutoff, so I'd suggest keeping it shorter if you can. Concise writing is good writing in this case.

The only thing you haven't addressed is whether you have the math background for GSB and Harris. Formal theory is a niche subfield too, so I don't know whether departments are actively seeking students in that area. I'm sure you know that there are very few jobs in formal theory (in general, not just this year). A lot will depend on how good your other documents - writing sample, SOP, LORs - are. They'll certainly be read, but if you have a letter that essentially says "I don't really know this person well in a research sense, but they did well in my class" that's not a good sign. Basically there is very little information or reassurance we can give you - clearly you're not going to be eliminated right away, but no one has any idea what the process looks like after that point. EDIT: Regarding your list - I think it's good to be ambitious. It's a tough field we're entering and hierarchy absolutely 100% matters. I only applied to top 10 departments as I don't see any point in leaving my nice-enough job (but it's not my passion) to do a PhD program that often has worse off outcomes than the top programs. If this strategy fails in March, well... I have a good fallback in data science.

Of course they will - 1) current students/ABDs need monetary support, 2) all international students last year would have deferred. Some domestic students are likely to have deferred as well. EDIT: I'm assuming int'l students were unable to enroll if they were remote, but maybe they started their PhDs from their home countries if they couldn't get a visa. Point is, it will be tough.

Try and get an RA gig - there are more in econ than in poli sci though... Sometimes you can find political scientists in policy schools who are looking for full time RAs as well. To get these gigs, you need to be good at R/Python/maybe Stata and usually have some evidence of this, e.g. a GitHub profile. They are awesome for your development as a scholar. I would say these RA positions are at most major universities in the US -- check out some political science labs, like the democracy-focused lab or the lab focusing on immigration in CP/IR at Stanford. MIT has several labs as well, including the election and data science lab and the political methodology lab. All hire full-time RAs. If you're more interested in field work JPAL should be hiring, but I'm not sure how COVID has affected that. If you can't get one of these jobs, look into beefing up your quantitative skills. Learn R, get good at it. You can do this in your spare time. Other alternative ideas are something in a think tank like the Brennan Center or a public opinion company like Pew. Princeton also has a post-undergrad RA program where you can take methods courses in poli sci and work as an RA for a Princeton professor.

I'd just submit to places that have made it mandatory (so NYU, WUSTL, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA) and probably wouldn't submit to others. The low verbal score can presumably be offset by a killer writing sample and LORs (TBH I think these matter more than anything else, so if you have a trustworthy/well-known academic who will fight for you, that's good), just like a low quant score can be offset by an amazing quant writing sample - and by quant I mean, like, building models in Stan... Because that will be your competition and given your low scores you need to be better than your competition. I'd go with the first one - AW doesn't matter that much from what I hear.

MIT now optional

I though it would be useful to compile a list of schools requiring/not requiring GRE scores. Departments that are requiring the GRE for upcoming December 2020 applicants: Stanford Department of Political Science Harvard Department of Government MIT Departments where submitting the GRE is optional/not required for December 2020 applicants: Princeton Yale Berkeley Columbia Harvard Kennedy School Ohio State UChicago (pending a successful hardship claim) Departments that are not accepting the GRE at all for December 2020 applicants: Michigan UCSD Not sure/haven't updated admissions FAQ: Wisconsin Duke

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.703.1946&rep=rep1&type=pdf If the link is broken, do a google scholar search for "What Do We Learn from Graduate Admissions Committees?: A Multiple-Rater, Latent Variable Model, with Incomplete Discrete and Continuous Indicators". There may be more recent work in PS, the journal that focuses specifically political sci education and the discipline as a whole.