ultraultra

I have gotten into 5 schools. At three of them I didn't talk to POIs at all. At one of them, I had already known my POI for about a year. At the last one, my recommender knew my POI and e-introduced us. I'm not sure if these last two had an effect, but I do know that my recommender talked to their Berkeley colleague about me, who then talked the committee about me and I still didn't get in there. My sense is that POIs can help make sure your file gets a second look, but these advance convos aren't necessary or foolproof, and the other indicators in your file matter the most. Again, I agree with @Determinedandnervous. At this point, maybe the best thing to do is take a deep breath, consider whether you even want to go another cycle, and then devise a plan to strengthen all the parts of your file over the next year. You could maybe even write to some of the schools you didn't get into, to ask if someone would be willing to tell you why they decided as they did.

Agreed with @Determinedandnervous that it will be a bit weird to write POIs at this point. For what its worth, I don't think that cold-emailing POIs has much effect in general. If you're writing to ask about the program before deciding to apply, that's one thing. But its highly unlikely that a professor will be willing to go to bat for you with the ad comm after just a few e-mails. A lot of the faculty I've talked to just ignore these e-mails, including ones who I know (firsthand) to be very good mentors to their students. I think its a good idea to e-mail POIs if you already have a relationship with them from earlier, or if your recommenders know them and can e-introduce you. But otherwise it just seems to have a neutral-to-negative effect (from what my advisors have said).

I also got into Michigan today . Thrilled as it's my best-fit CHYMPS. To think that literally 3 months ago I was crying over my GRE Q score... 5A 0W 1R, 5?

http://thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=political&t=a&o=&pp=25

Sorry you've been having such a tough cycle so far. Maybe it has something to do with fit - did you only apply to departments with lots of people working on your research interests? I've also heard schools are taking far less theory PhDs, because there are very few theory jobs so it's hard to place students. That might be part of it. Though of course, I don't know much about your profile.

I got one today!

Congrats!!

I was actually discouraged from mentioning my activism/organizing background in my application. The main points my advisors made were as follows: Schools are wary of students who are doing a PhD in order to 'change the world,' since that's not often what academia is like. Schools are wary of students producing biased research to suit their political preferences. The research that takes place in non-profit contexts is often quite different than the type of research that takes place in academia. In any case, with limited space, it's better to focus on academic research experience because that's typically more relevant than other work experience. I'm sure, as with any part of this process, it's pretty idiosyncratic, and while some ad comm members may have those concerns others won't. But I tried to keep in mind while I wrote my applications that I have no idea who is reading them and what those people value or believe in. I'm sure there are ways to frame your organizing experiences in a way that neutralizes the above concerns and bolsters a general narrative of research potential. But I just think it's important to go about that in a careful way and keep in mind that some people may not see such experiences as a plus.

171/171/6.10

attn: whoever wrote this, let's be best friends? I just barely stopped myself from bursting into laughter in seminar San Diego State University/UCSD Department Of Political Science, PhD (F16) Accepted via E-mail on 8 Feb 2016 ♦ A 8 Feb 2016 Offered $121,343/year along with BMW lease for work and a Range Rover lease for personal use. Housing is condo on the beach to be provided by departmental funding. Three French trained butlers to be at my service. Regular foot runs from SH. Probably won't take it though. I'll just try to leverage it at a different school for some more cash. OSU offered me all of New Jersey to attend there, so yeah.

reference letters and research experience are important - improve both to the best of your abilities

Just got an acceptance from UCSD! Honestly pretty surprised as I thought it was a bad fit, but apparently they thought differently.

Don't want to crush your dreams but Rochester sent out some acceptances already

( ) There might still be a chance. Don't know your profile, but it could be that NU and NYU did not deem you to have good fit but other schools will.

Strange that so few people have reported NYU admits. It's almost as if NYU read this forum and decided to notify @IndEnth and I ASAP because we were both so sad yesterday. (Okay I know that didn't happen but anyway )

I'm not that OP but fyi, I e-mailed the grad assistant about something to do with my transcripts early this week and I didn't ask about decision timing but even so she concluded her e-mail by saying they're almost finished reviewing decisions (read: not done) and "anticipate sending notifications in the next few weeks." So this week seems like a stretch by any measure, and I doubt she was misleading you on the phone.

My subfield is technically American (really, it's behaviour, but this isn't a subfield most places), if that helps

No clue if they'll send all the e-mails out at the same time. The one I received included my name and (though not very personal) didn't seem to be a mass e-mail.

No changes though I'm not sure that I would even be able to tell given that NYU's website is so confusing and in like 8 different fonts and 10 different colours

I got into NYU!

Congrats to all the people who got good news today! Feeling a little down as Berkeley was one of my top two choices and I haven't heard anything from them. From the results page it seems like my numbers were fine for the cutoffs (so that's somewhat of a relief) though it looks like no international students have heard from them (or posted, if they did hear), so I wonder if my nationality was a factor. Trying to stay positive, in any case.

Congrats!!!

Also on the no incentive front - it's not that there's an inherent problem to staggered release of results. The issue (for applicants) comes when folks are looking on grad cafe and then speculating / getting worked up about the information they see here. Whereas if we weren't all refreshing every 10 minutes, we'd just go about out lives in blissful ignorance until we got a yes/no from each school, which is presumably how it worked before this site existed and overloaded us all with information that is sometimes extremely stressful while simultaneously being utterly unhelpful. Though, of course, here I am and here we are anyway.

Whenever I've contacted departments about my application, it's always been the administrator/staff member in charge of graduate students that I've reached out to. Though I'd hold back unless you're really desperate - it's not particularly useful information anyway.

I made my initial list through a combination of browsing these forums/PSR for threads on my research interests, asking faculty, and looking up scholars I liked. I shortened the list by going through department websites and writing down names of POIs and then repeatedly showing my list to faculty, asking for cuts/keeps. Like others I also cut one or two schools on the basis that I couldn't handle living there for five years (particularly UCLA, though the LaCour thing played a role too in that case). In the months before submitting I had a sense that I should try to intentionally include a breadth of rankings, but I was also conscious that I'd rather strengthen my application and re-apply than go to a school with questionable placement potential. Plus, my advisors all encouraged me to aim high and said that I would have a good shot at top schools. In the end I ended up with 11 schools, the top tier of which includes some CHYMPS where I have reasonably good fit, the lowest of which rank in the 30-40 range (though all would likely rank higher in my subfield if those data were available). Retrospectively, there are some schools I should have applied to but was never cognizant of, and I threw an application in at one T10 place where my fit is actually quite poor, which I realized too late and regret. But so far I've only gotten good news/reviews and have two acceptances which I feel good about. So in the spirit of Downs I think I somehow found an optimal trade-off between information cost and payoffs ;).