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Monody

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Posts posted by Monody

  1. To talk about something else: Any idea when we are expecting Columbia, MIT, and Stanford? End of next week? Also what does it mean if it says on the applicant page for Stanford that I can order original documents from the universities from which Ive sent them transcripts?

  2. 2 minutes ago, Kenga said:

    To everybody who got rejected from UCSD: stay strong, the cycle is still long and you'll get a good program to go to.

    You should be happy that you don't have to do the work. And angry (if you planned to publish it) that they took "your" dataset idea.
    Look on the bright side, you can run the regressions now and don't have to build the dataset.

    Well, I wanted to publish the data and reap the citations as well as use it for other projects. Now Ive to wait for them.

  3. How should I feel when I get to know that another group of scholars has nearly completed a dataset on which Ive been working on for the last 4 weeks? Should I be cheerful that I got to know it before I spend another 60 hours on it or should I feel as sad as I am now? I hope that I do not get a rejection today as well. Bad signs...

  4. 5 minutes ago, Comparativist said:

    Just curious, how many of your applied for their first subfield as comparative politics?

    Doesn't seem like there is a lot that actively posting...

    I applied for IR, mainly. Conflict studies is somewhat in between and I am more interested in conflict dynamics and less in onset covariates and such so I figured that IR may be closer.

  5. I only meant that it may be comparatively easier to get a TT job at a non-top university in your home country with a US top-10 PhD than at a comparable non-top US university, because the value of the degree and the competition may be different. No idea whether this is actually true but I can imagine it.

  6. 56 minutes ago, DBear said:

    I'm not applying for Poli Scin (though that's what I majored in in undegrad/ my first MA) - but I saw this thread and I think it really is applicable to a lot of different disciplines in the non-money making fields (ie NOT engineering etc). I think one of the reasons that these misconceptions are fostered is because maybe people have professors (and parents) that may not be in touch with current application stats. Some of my professors, though they are very familiar with the application process, they just don't realize that there are SO many more applicants and graduates than when they went to grad school in the 80's/ early '90s. 

    @MonodyI think it's true that if you keep your options to outside the U.S., it really does open up a lot of opportunities, but for top universities in many countries, the competition that @BigTenPoliSci has mentioned is exactly the same. I'm an international student from Korea and to get a TT position in a top university, one would be up against people who have graduated from the top 10. Every single one of the professors at my alma mater have degrees from a top U.S. university and the top university in Singapore or HK is super competitive to get in the door let alone TT. Obviously, the situation would be different depending on the country, but more and more, a degree with a top university in the U.S. is becoming a basic requirement, not something that adds value, to an application in many parts of the world.

    @StadimeterI think doing a phd/policy work is actually more possible than you think. I know a lot of phds in policy/ poli sci that didn't go into academia. Also while working in international development, I ran into  a lot of phds in various government agencies around the world and especially in international organizations (namely the world bank group). 

    Of course, competition is fierce everywhere, but I'd say that a US PhD can put you above the pack with regard to others who don't have one and if you are willing to lower your standards by a bit you will hopefully find a job where you can work on your research and be paid well.

     

  7. 27 minutes ago, CarefreeWritingsontheWall said:

    Oh very true! But I wouldn't write off some of the more sophisticated research that say, Chris Blattman has produced on DDR programs in Liberia. It's coming, but I think less high profile. Have a friend ho is also applying in this area, and has delved into mixed methods research. There's a lot of there, I just don't think it's been considered "foundational" just yet. IPE has certainly exploited firm level data and product level data over the last 5-10 years, but even so. The top quant articles are really recent.

    As an undergrad, I only took one methods class. I knew no coding, and never took statistics. I ran really basic correlations/t-tests in Excel in my undergraduate thesis at the request of my advisor, who then showed me the basics of Stata in the summer. I had a friend in economics help me with it too, but it was basically a mess. My MA is what gave me my methodological training - which is pretty average when it comes to what people are using in the field today. I did a general research design/methods course that gave a lay of the land covering interviews, surveys, formal theory, and a three week introduction to quant. The second was purely into to statistics, covering OLS/MLE, bootstrapping and MCMC simulation methods. Third course went into panel data with fixed and random effects, survival models, mediation analysis, quantile regressions, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, SCM and matching, difference in difference, and nested analysis with process tracing. At ICPSR I did MLE and advanced regression analysis which covered corrections for nonlinear data, multiple imputation and a whole host of recent developments. Everything was oriented around applied concepts and coding. I saw the math, but was never expected to do it until I started my PhD this Fall. 

    I can't really speak to the average methodological knowledge someone coming out of a BA is expected to have. Amongst the people in my cohort who came in right from undergrad (or had been working between but had no pursued another degree), only one of them had touched R or Stata before and that was because they had chosen to use it for their senior thesis. Some had taken undergraduate courses in calculus, but only a few. Overall the program assumed a basic knowledge of univariate calculus and matrix algebra. Most of us couldn't remember how to do it tbh and I personally had never done it as I had never taken calculus, though I knew that the concepts were operating under the programs I had been taught to use. But I can't say whether or not this is in the norm amongst every program. When I interviewed elsewhere last year, it felt about the same. Talking to people starting methods programs elsewhere, it does seem like they assumed a lot of us since most other math camps reviewed univariate calculus and ours assumed we already knew it. 

    Ive to say that sounds foremost interesting as I always assumed that the methodological training would be better at the undergraduate level in the US and second encouraging as this part will pose less of a hassle as the Econ courses that I am currently taking are quite intense in that regard. Thanks for the roundup.

  8. I didn't intend to debate the truth of the original post. I frequent PSR (for some self-loathing reason) and EJMR (which is a bit better) and the situation seems to be bad anywhere. But as I said, I don't think that going to graduate school is the worst decision possible if one likes the work and is flexible with regard to the final international location and sector afterwards. 

  9. I've no idea whether this is actually true, but isn't this risk somewhat alleviated if you are an international and capable of working either in your home country or another of which you are speaking the language? From my limited observation, it seems that degrees from internationally recognized US universities also carry their prestige benefit elsewhere and if one is less concerned about getting a job at the best possible R1 in the US and willing to take a potential pay cut, the situation may not be completely dire. The latter should probably also be true for US nationals. At the end, if one is sufficiently flexible and work hard enough than - and that is maybe just my opinion - one should get a nice job (private or public) somewhere.

  10. 1 hour ago, tkid86 said:

    Not anxious necessarily... I've had my applications in since October (had to — was out of the country with limited internet access) and have been more or less fine since then. But now I am ready to know the outcome of all that hard work and move forward to figure out what next (and start planning; I'm a planner). 

    Same here practically. Given I changed some things here and there but Ive mostly been fine even though I checked my inbox quite frequently after those fake princeton acceptances came up.

  11. You can have a look at the "Begabtenförderungswerke" and see whether the application period hasn't yet passed. They are basically party-based foundations that offer scholarships for students based on performance and political orientation. Some of them offer scholarships for foreigners and partially also interest-free loans. At least mine (Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung) does.

  12. You mean whether you can earn 8000€ + 6*700-900€ per semester? I would argue that this is hardly possible. That is about 12200-13400€ per semester or 2000€+ per month. Sorry to be so frank, but I dont think that this is really doable and I would argue that this would even be the case if you were to get a RA position or something like that. It's probably hard to even get a job if you dont speak German.

  13. As a German who lived in Berlin most of his life I would first ask how much you have to pay in tuition? Other than that I would say that you can survive on 700-900€ in Berlin depending on the quality of life you aspire to have? Even though the average rent is increasing as long as you are willing to make use of the public transport system there should be a number of places where rent is comparatively cheap. Also note that food and the like a arguably dirt cheap in Germany anywhere.

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