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Troll

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    Washington
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    Political Science

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  1. Perhaps we lawyers are qualified, but that is not the issue here. For instance an engineer could teach high school calculus. But does anyone think the teachers unions want a bunch of retired engineers entering their job market as math teachers? Similarly, political science departments have a vested interest in excluding lawyers from adjunct positions. A PhD is not about learning how to teach or research, it isabout joining the college professors' guild and if you want the chance at a cushy academic appointment you need to spend your time learning pointless made up theories just like everyone else. Alternately, if you are brilliant and hard working go to lawschool at a top five school, kick ass there, clerk on the Supreme Court and then teach law school for triple the money of political science teaching while giving up a seven figure firm job.
  2. There is a simple answer here. Only a very small percentage of law school graduates are academically focused, most of those go on to clerkships,then go on to either lucrative white shoe firm jobs or tenure track law school positions.These positions are far better remunerated that political science positions. Why would a lawyer give up $250k a year to teach civil procedure to teach intro to American government to a bunch of kids who were in high school the year before for $60ka year? The remainder are only professionally trained and not interested and/or able to teach.
  3. As alawyer in a political science graduate program, I am not sure I would agree that the rigor law school quantitative classes is less than in social science programs. In fact I think the statistics classes I took in law school were farmore intensive than in graduate school. Moreover, the level of editing and fact checking in law reviews is higher by several orders of magnitude than anything in political science journals. The distinction is likely the difference in duration. Law school is three years and doctoral programs are 5+ years. The difference is creative research and being a teaching assistant – two things one does not do in law school. Finally, if academic jobs were opened up to lawyers, it would add substantial competition to the already scarce academic job market – something social science departments have a vested interest in avoiding.
  4. Does anyone know anything about American Studies programsand the extent to which they might be good backups for applications to politicalscience departments?
  5. I did a bit of that in law school, though as I am sure you can imagine, it is not the bread and butter of the average JD program. I am considering an LL.M though while in grad school, does anyone here have any knowledge ofLL.M programs for graduates of American law schools?
  6. I am far from an expert; they are pretty open if you email them.The program is new so they have no placement record. However, the program iswell funded and might be a good gateway to teaching at religious colleges.
  7. I have yet to hear from them either. They appear to be one of those rare conservative leaning departments and my guess is they are trying to bide their time to pickup applicants who may not get their top choice, but are willing to sub down for ideological reasons.
  8. So if an offer is not verbal is it a pictogram or perhaps an interpretive dance? Perhaps you meant oral? That having been said an oral contract can be enforced. Especially if you act in reliance on it. Since we are on the topic of contracts, your first right under a contract is, to breach the contract. Now, if a university breached its contract to admit a student the damages are fairly clear, but the inverse is not likely to be true. Schools have wait lists for that very purpose so, unless you are a Nobel laureate who has been admitted to Podunk University and they have based their development campaignon your being a student there, you are likely going to escape liability for the breach.
  9. What surprises me about this thread is that everyone seems to take the rankings as canon. According to US News and World report: “Rankings of doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities are based solely on the results of peer assessment surveys sent to academics in each discipline. Each school offering a doctoral program was sent twosurveys.” Put differently, in ten years some people on this board will be filling outthose surveys. Now does anyone really believe that Ohio State is better than Cornell or that Michigan is better than Yale? Perhaps more realistically Cornell and Yale rejected more people than Ohio State andMichigan, yet minted fewer degrees. Similarly, places like Johns Hopkins and Georgetown get a bad name in the academic community because they have loads of civil servants getting their doctorates and masters simply to get GS pay scale jump. Also, the rankings only ask professors at schools offering doctoral programs, thus fellows at think tanks such as Brookings or AEI or professors colleges likeAmherst or Pomona are not counted. While the professional rankings are grounded in test scores and employment rates, the rankings for academic programs appear arbitrary at times.
  10. I imagine it would impact MBA/MPA programs the most. –then secondly JD programs. I applied for grad school in political science not because I lost my job in the finance sector, but because when the bonuses got smaller the allure began to wear thin. Another thing that impacted my decision to apply was that my company offered to pay for two years of grad school if we left our contracts.
  11. So UT rejected me this week. A bit surprised because it was my backup, but indifferent because Duke admitted me the day before. Perhaps in keeping with the Austin city motto, the UT graduate admissions just likes beingweird.
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