tortoise

My long term goals haha! First I've got a near-term goal: suppress certain paranoia that has developed over the past several years, at those times that it is unreasonable. For instance, zerolife mentions China - which is relevant to my interests - and the alarm bells start screaming. lol As I opened my SOPs, I have spent the past three years at YouTube, defining policies and ensuring legal compliance, watching our site change the world for the better, and fighting every day to protect it from those who would see that capacity for change destroyed. This work has been extremely gratifying, and extremely frustrating. We have helped many, many people, and every day run into the limits of what we can do within existing legal frameworks, and fail to help many more. I want to go beyond working within this matrix. I want to fix it. I have a pretty good sense of what I want to accomplish, and a pretty poor understanding of how and where I might best do it. Advising legislators in DC? Back in the non-profit sector? Back in the private sector? lobbying? *shudder* or maybe lobbying 2.0? *doubleshudder* lol Somewhere in the executive? Fluke or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmFekhcnmU? Or just same-old smokescreens? I've got some cynicism issues to work through as well That's about as much as I can say at this point.

Huh. I find these extremely interesting to read through. Thanks everyone for sharing! I only discovered this site last week: after I got my first acceptance letter I looked around curious whether other people were announcing their application results. I went through the application process as though in a vacuum. I don't think I would have done anything differently if I had been accessing this sort of information, I just would have been even more painfully stressed. I am glad I was not thinking about these things even more than I was; such is my temperament. Program Applied To: MPP Schools Applied To: UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon (MSPPM), U. Michigan, U. Chicago, Harvard Schools Admitted To: Carnegie Mellon [$17k/yr], U. Michigan, U. Chicago Schools Rejected From: UC Berkeley, Harvard Still Waiting: nope, all done. Undergraduate institution: UC Berkeley Undergraduate GPA: 3.1 Last 60 hours of Undergraduate GPA (if applicable): Undergraduate Majors: Mathematics, Political Science GRE Quantitative Score: 800 GRE Verbal Score: 750 GRE AW Score: 5.0 Years Out of Undergrad (if applicable): 4 Years of Work Experience: ~3.5 Describe Relevant Work Experience: two short internship stints at a tech-policy-focused non-profit public interest law firm. 3 yrs doing policy and legal compliance at a web 2.0-ish company. Strength of SOP (be honest, describe the process, etc): Berkeley is the only one of the programs I applied to that asks for anything of real length. The others were all just dinky little things. As others above noted, Cal's deadline was a month+ earlier than any others. I slaved months on my long piece for Cal, and believed it a great essay. So did the biased friends and family who read it for me. I recounted my passion and the importance of my work of the past few years, and crowned it with a tiny paragraph about pursuing a graduate degree. It was a splendid piece of writing, in my humble humble self-emphatuated opinion, but I can imagine three potentially huge problems with it in the eyes of a reader: - too passionate. I acknowledge that I am capable of sounding a bit crazy. - too focused on a particular topic. To someone looking for a candidate with my interests, surely I must look great! To someone not looking for that, surely I must look notgreat! - not enough about the value I anticipate deriving from pursuing a Master's in public policy. As for all the dinky essays... this aspect of the application process is what annoyed me most: every program asks the same thing, with slightly different permutations of word count limits for answering each part. I haphazardly sliced and diced my Cal essays to fit the requirements of the other programs. [[back during the application season, I was actually thinking about putting my essays up on the web. I didn't have any particular reason to, it just struck me as the sort of thing that probably most people would shy away from without reason. The couple people I mentioned this intention to were like "OMG you can't do that!" and I was like "orly?" and they were like "at least not until after application season!" and then I guess I kinda forgot about it. Do you guys share those here? [or I suppose I could search for related topics...]]] Strength of LOR's (be honest, describe the process, etc): I don't know. I didn't read any of them. Not as great as they could have been 2 from people at work I believe competent to speak to my work performance and abilities, who I think could have interestingly different perspectives. 1 from a prof I took a graduate seminar with my last year at Berkeley. I actually took several relevant grad classes in my last semesters, with great faculty at the top of their fields, @Boalt, SIMS and GSPP. I didn't establish strong relationships with the profs, and didn't keep in touch with them. Here's a piece of serious advice for anyone still in undergrad: develop real relationships with your profs, and keep those relationships alive after you graduate! Or tell them about your future plans (public policy is commonly an "after a few years of work" sort of thing) and have them write a letter for you to keep on record with your school for later use. Other: It was by no means a certainty in my mind, going in, that anything could overcome my horrendous undergrad transcript. My GRE was reasonable, and I think my resume looks pretty good. But I honestly expected to not get in anywhere. It's nice when going through something like this to have a job you don't completely hate.

Nice idea! I'll probably drop in

Hey! I'm just about set on the Heinz MSPPM program. Legal-focused tech-dyed social science background here; tech policy future for me! What attracts you guys about tech policy? What kind of social science interests have you been pursuing? -jacob

Greetings, likely-future-classmates!