hupr

If you plan on teaching in the US, you should probably do an American doctorate. Also there's the question of funding. I'm only really familiar with France and the UK (the former much more than the latter), but there's nothing even close to the institutional support that one gets at a good doctoral program in the US. If you're American and plan on doing a PhD in Europe without being independently wealthy, start looking for outside funding, take out a ton of loans, or plan on working full time and doing your best to get around labor laws. The only advantage I can think of is that in theory, you can be in and out in about 3 years, but that's generally not very realistic if you have to work to survive.

If you explain that you'll be out of the country during the visit, you can probably figure out a time for a visit that would work for both you and the school. Visiting at a time other than the recruiting event can also be a good way of seeing a school as it is on any given day instead of how it looks when they've rolled out the red carpet.

Take the best offer you have. Worst-case scenario, you can transfer later on if you don't like it .

Thanks for the congrats, guys! Now trying to schedule midwest and new england visits on a single trip from the mideast.

Thanks! Hopefully good news is forthcoming...

comparative, working on conflict and sectarianism.

I just woke up to an unofficial email acceptance from a POI at Brown. They apparently tried to call but either couldn't get through or thought better of it because of the time difference.

I think that this thread goes to show that at a certain level, "fit" doesn't really count for anything. After all, if the same person with the same research agenda is getting accepted to wildly different top programs (say, Stanford and Yale), then fit isn't really playing that large of a part in his/her application.

I would be very surprised if writing samples were getting more than a cursory skimming. I actually appreciate the honesty in not asking for one.

Charles Tilly - Coercion, Capital, and European States Jeffrey Herbst - States and Power in Africa

I'd say the high teaching load might be acceptable if you're allowed to design your own course on a couple of occasions. Teaching experience is one thing, but X +3 semesters of teaching the same beginning and intro to French (for example) isn't really going to be counted as much or any better than X semesters of the same. However, if during that heavier teaching load, you're able to design your own courses and/or teach higher level "content" courses, then that extra experience will help you a fair amount on the job market. They're not just looking for how many semesters of teaching experience you've had, but also, and even more importantly, the depth and breadth of that experience. A candidate who's only taught lower level language courses is going to be less competitive on the market than someone who's taught the same number of semesters but who has also done a course on the Revolution, or Francophone African lit, for example. At the end of the day, though, 3 semesters a year for all 5 years of funding is kind of a heavy load, especially if it's not well remunerated.

Off the top of my head, here are some departments with people working on South Asia: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Wisconsin, Berkeley, NYU, WUSTL, Stanford, And several schools even have programs or centers devoted to South Asia, so if you want to find an advisor with a methodological or theoretical approach that suits your research in the poli sci department and then supplement your committee with area specialists from other departments, that's often a good way to go. I think that unless you're working on some place pretty obscure (there's probably a dearth of people working on Bhutan, for instance), you're not going to have a hard time finding a department that can accommodate your research agenda based on geography alone. Like I said before, though, you might have a harder time when it comes to melding geographical, theoretical and methodological affinities.

No one is saying that there are as many Africanists as, say, people who work on Europe or North America. But to go from there to the contention that the only schools with Africanists are Berkeley and Brown, or even that it's difficult to find someone working on Africa, is patently false.

What are you guys talking about? There are tons of people working on Africa all over the place: Wisconsin, Northwestern, Stanford, WashU, Georgetown, UCLA, Toronto, Boston U, Yale, Michigan, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, etc. And those are only the higher ranked schools that come to mind off the top of my head. Finding Africanists isn't the problem; it's finding ones who share thematic, geographic (Africa is a big place) and/or methodological approaches that makes it more difficult. Likewise, tons of departments have people working on South Asia.

One good question is to ask about the nuts and bolts of TAing. At many places, the obligation has been factored into your stipend, but at others, teaching is added on to your stipend. So, depending on what kind of a class you teach (and how many hours it meets), you can get an extra $2,500 to $5,000 per semester. NYU has recently moved from the former system to the latter, but I'm not sure how representative they are, and my impression is that they did this in response to efforts to unionize grad students, which is to say not out of the kindness of their hearts.

First you're putting Ayn Rand on the same list as de Tocqueville, and now you're comparing her to Marx? Seriously?

This is just plain false. I know of several people who were shut out one year and had to choose between several offers (often from the same schools that had rejected them) the year after. Statements of purpose can be improved, as can letters and writing samples, not to mention GRE scores. Finally, the situation at the schools you're applying to can change as well.

If you're in the UK, I don't know how it's running up to a grand (unless you're flying to Alaska or Hawaii). Check out kayak.com for a better deal. I recently found tickets from Beirut to Chicago for about $1000...

Ayn Rand? Really?

I'm trying to deal with this issue right now. I've gotten 2 offers so far but am waiting to hear from another 7 schools. The first school is only willing to give me a few hundred dollars for a visit, and the second said in their letter that they'd pay for 100% of a domestic flight. The problem is that the visit I'm most interested in is at the beginning of March, and I'll only be able to make a single trip from Beirut to the states. So I'm thinking about trying to visit at the end of the month in case I get any other offers and want to do several visits in a single trip. Also, I'd like my wife to come with me to see the cities that we might be living in, but I'm not really sure we can afford to buy an international ticket, since we're already having to save a fair amount for the move this summer.

Depending on where you're flying in from, you may be able to patch together the visit funds that various schools can offer into a single ticket and then visit several schools during a single week. That's what I'm trying to do...

Here's a good list for comparative politics, although I'm afraid I couldn't boil it down to 4-5 books: http://www.publicaffairs.virginia.edu/drupal/politics/readinglist_cp What you might want to do is look at a MIT's open courseware to see what textbooks are being used in some of their intro classes. For the record, I've never taken a poli sci course either, but so far, I've gotten offers from Northwestern and Madison and am waiting to hear from another 8 schools. I think I've got a somewhat unorthodox background, but I've also got a couple relevant languages under my belt and considerable experience abroad. Also, as regards the political theory literature, with perhaps the exception of Nozick, anyone who's taken a few undergrad philosophy courses should be familiar with all of those.

From what I understand grade inflation in doctoral programs means that anything under a solid A is problematic, and if it happens more than once or twice, you may end up with a terminal MA. This may vary depending on the department, though.