PoliticalOrder

There is no need to get so defensive. You obviously have some sort of bias here but don't let that cloud your judgement. The fact of the matter is that it is a pretty middling department. Being able to comp in methods is, like the other poster said, not unusual at all and is par for the course in virtually any top 30 program. Their course offerings are extremely limited. For example, this spring they only offer 5 graduate political science classes...that is EXTREMELY low. It appears they offer others in different 'departments' but who knows what students are in these programs? MA students? Placement is quite poor, mostly LACs and directionals. Pretty small faculty. And finally, it offers multiple MA and masters programs within the department. This can be quite concerning as it points to the fact that the traditional ph.d. academic program is mixed in with a number of professional programs. It is what it is, a barely top 50 political science program. No need to pump its tires.

"Personal reasons" is often window dressing. From what I have observed people usually leave for four reasons: 1) They didn't really know what they were getting themselves into. They had a distorted vision of what obtaining a Ph.D. really was. They didn't realize how much of a grind it was. They didn't know the field as well as they thought before enrolling. They didn't really have much research experience and didn't get really what it was. Eventually they lost interest or weren't willing to put the work in. 2) They aren't that great of students. They didn't do well in their classes. Professors didn't have a very high opinion of them and they couldn't form a committee for their dissertation. They struggled in methods or quantitative skills. Couldn't pass their comps. Couldn't publish anything. One can 'power through' and still get through it; but they might not have the support of the faculty and might not have very good academic job prospects and decide to not finish. 3) Mentally unfit. They were just not mentally strong enough to endure the grind. Too soft skinned, too mentally weak, couldn't take criticism, or something more serious that prevented them from being a good student. 4) They left the program for a job that paid much more than their stipend. Some people probably enter doctoral programs in too much of a 'cost-benefit' manner and when they realize that they have to lower their standard of living and/or won't make great money even if they get their TT job they choose to pursue something more lucrative. These are not mutually exclusive. Actually often, number 3 compounds other issues (or any other combinations of the above). If that statistic worries you, you have to look at deeper why it is worrying you. There is high failure rates for the vast majority of vocational or life goals that people have. If something like 50% of doctoral students are not finishing and that worries you, you have to ask yourself; could I be part of the 50% and for what reasons?

What are we supposed to say exactly? You have some good things obviously > good GPA, double-major with stats, stellar GRE. We obviously have no idea what your SOP, LORs, and writing sample are really like.

Listen, there is a myth on this board (and other venues) that stats are an incredibly important measure of success. Yet, one just has to look at the evidence to say that is not the case. 1) Go through past year's results and you will see plenty of applicants who got in to top programs with 'average' stats. 2) There are some universities that have average GPA/GRE scores available (especially public ones) and what you will see is the average GRE Q score (something that is heavily emphasized on this board) is somewhere from 158-163 for even the best programs. That means that half of the applicants getting accepted have scores worse than that or at least very close. 3) Stats are noisy, ESPECIALLY the GPA. No one knows what GPA really means across institutions, and there isn't much of a discernible difference between a 3.6 or a 3.7 or a 3.8 in the grand scheme of things. Furthermore, there isn't really that much of a difference between a 161 Q vs. a 159 Q; it is a matter of getting a couple of more questions right and people who sit on committees know this. 4) Once you meet certain cutoffs, stats become essentially meaningless. With that being said, they do matter sure. But they won't get you accepted. Ideally you want a 3.6+ GPA, and a 160/160+ GRE (or close to these cutoffs) and you'll be fine wherever you apply. What is going to get you actually accepted to a program? Many things (no particular order): 1) (to address ResDQ) letters are important. Letters from people committee members know are likely to be read more closely. But you need strong letters...and by strong letters that means you have to establish relationships early and deeply with professors. Working 1 on 1 in some capacity with professors is a must for every letter you submit. 2) Overall trajectory...applying straight from undergrad is fine, but those who have a masters and show clear progress are likely to be perceived as lower risk. For undergrads, taking advanced courses and/or graduate courses and excelling in them matters. Taking independent studies matters. Doing theses matters. Attending conferences matters. 3) Research experience. If you have multiple months of RA experience, you definitely have a leg up compared to those who don't (and this will also show in your letters). 4) Quant background. You aren't expected to have double majors/math minors or anything. But having an intro to probability and stats as well as differential and integral calculus gives you a leg up; even more if you do things like linear algebra and real analysis, ect. Bonus points for somehow getting a grad quant sequence under your belt. 5) SOP. Matters a lot. Be professional, show that you know what you are doing. Clear proposal that is different from established literature and has interesting questions. Show that you have multiple of people to work with and they aren't just people you read off the faculty list. 6) Writing sample. Matters as well. This shows that you are actually capable of doing graduate level work, making a puzzle, and surveying the literature; something a lot of undergrads have trouble doing well. Those 6 things get you accepted to programs. Lots of people have perfectly fine or stellar stats...getting this is not challenging. Showing committees that you can excel as a graduate student in political science and knowing what you are doing is done by extremely careful attention to those latter 6 things.

If you really think those are the most important aspects of a Ph.D. application you are in for a world of hurt.

You got part of this true, but not the latter. No matter how many media outlets, candidates, and people have tried to paint this from an ethnicity/racism/sexism perspective, this election really wasn't won or lost on any of these demographics or aspects. Looking at the preliminary demographics, Trump actually received higher voting percentages from blacks and minorities than Romney did. Furthermore, as you pointed out, Clinton's advantage among voters with a degree was actually extremely marginal. The election was won and lost in the rust belt. Clinton was not able to draw sufficient voter turnout and received a significant drop-off than Obama did even in 2012 when it wasn't a large win by any means. The four states in the rust belt (Ohio, PA, Wisconsin, Michigan) all turned red when they had previously been blue for a number of years in presidential elections. Trump was able to mobilize voters that are disillusioned from trade deals, unemployment, poor economy, ect. while Clinton lost ground. It was really as simple as that. ------- I don't think there is going to be any major repercussions. Although I think the poster that predicted lower numbers of applications from international students could be correct, hard to say though. F-1 visas will not be going anywhere and that is the primary demographic that we are talking about here. Nor do I see any legislation directly at universities that would be significantly detrimental to internationals. It would also be hard to make legislation that impacts private universities, which doesn't really effect things - public universities in the US have had lower international student percentages (esp. graduate students) for a while now.

The straight-forward rub is that doing a Ph.D. at a Canadian university (even a top one) will most likely relegate you to being competitive in only the Canadian market. It is relatively rare (even extremely) for people to get tenure track jobs in the US or even Europe with Canadian Ph.D.s. The reverse is not true; people who graduate with Ph.D.s from US universities (especially top ranked ones) have access to virtually any academic market especially if they are competitive candidates (publications + good dissertation). The main downside of this is that the Canadian academic market is quite limited > not a lot of job openings (and I imagine especially the case for English) so that is going to significantly reduce your chances of obtaining TT jobs. I would strongly advise people not to make decisions based on political situations (outside of really serious ones like large-scale conflict/war, rampant authoritarianism, ect). Coming from someone who has spent a lot of time living in a number of countries (including both the US and Canada), political climates rarely, if ever, impact individuals directly. I currently live in the US as a foreigner and I do not expect my life to change one iota nor should I because of X person getting elected or whatever. In fact, even outside of my personal situation, I do not expect the US to change at all really for the foreseeable future because of the results of this election.

I'm going to be frank. You seem incredibly unorganized. You cannot use previous application materials, you need to submit everything again. It is too late to retake the GRE, your scores will not reach in time (unless you were literally taking the test today or very soon). Do you really think you can pull together a new SOP, CV, writing sample, in approximately 3-5 weeks (depending on application deadlines)? I think it would be possible to get LORs this late in the game, but it could be in bad taste if your deadlines are early December. You need to learn from your mistakes from last cycle. If what you say about barely getting rejected is indeed true, then you were competitive enough to get into programs. However, applying to 4 programs was a mistake - way too little. I would highly suggest you do not apply this cycle and better prepare for next year's well in advance and apply to at least double the amount of programs as before.

Why not just use the three you used previously? "What should I do? Are there any legit online resources? Would there happen to be any assistant/adjunct professors on this forum willing to receive $50 for writing a good letter on my behalf? If so, please include your email." You cannot be serious.

Well, it doesn't seem like you have many options here. 1) Do you even have any quant training? No point in trying to write something that you don't really know what you are doing in. 2) There is no way you can just throw together an excellent writing sample from scratch in a month and half (or less). Submitting a purely theoretical paper if you are trying to apply for comparative politics is not very desirable, but what else do you have here? Try to make it the best you can I guess. Is there any way you can expand the democratic theory into something empirical with a puzzle that fits well into comparative politics scholarship? That's probably the only way to make this really work.

So I did a quick search through all the application FAQs of the programs I applied to. This is the basic rundown: - 4 stated they take the take the highest scores from each section (this would help you) - The rest didn't state anything. Looking at some other sites that compiled a bunch of different statements from departments, basically there are four approaches: 1) take the best scores from each section, 2) look at any improvement, 3) look at most recent test, 4) look at best single test score (probably most common approach along with #3). It doesn't appear like averaging is a large practice whatsoever. Considering what I gathered, there isn't much downside for people like you guys to not to report both scores considering the high end reward - a higher overall composite score - and little downside.

Yeah, I am having trouble weighing the costs on that one.

This is probably most of it to be honest. Unless you have other personal problems going on at the moment that are not allowing you to concentrate.

Stick with 2 pages for all your applications. You don't need more than that and people on committees don't want to read long-winded SOPs from 100s of applicants. A key signal you should be showing is that you are able to say a lot but very concisely. You could also have two templates. One for 2 pages and one for slightly longer. But at the end of the day the shorter the better generally.

Not really, a revise and resubmit at this stage in the game on a solo authored paper is about as high as anyone can expect. There are downsides to this 'signal.' For one, I would imagine the writing sample is going to be the paper that you submitted to the journal. If they think the writing sample is not that high of quality, making a big deal about submitting it to a journal in your CV and SOP could be viewed as a negative not a positive. Furthermore, you have to be aware that there is a decent chance your paper could get desk rejected in the next month or so. Your paper is not currently 'under review' and it may be dishonest to represent it that way.