MrBP22

I literally just made an account moments ago just to tell you that this would be incredibly weird. Do not bring your mother. Nobody else will have parents (or friends) there. You are an adult and this will make you seem like an immature child. I don't know of any program/circumstance in which it would be normal to bring a parent.

You guys all being picky when you got admissions with funding when most of us won't even get a single admission...

That's awesome thanks a lot!  

@amaliaov
Congrats on getting admitted!
Rent in Denver (and Colorado in general) is pretty high right now because everyone seems to be moving here. But after a quick search (I used www.apartments.com) I found studios that were anywhere from 800-1200 per month. I think you would be able to find something if you looked hard enough.
I'm a native Coloradan so I'm pretty biased, but Denver really is a fantastic city. It has great bars (and local beer) and pretty good clubs for going out, teams in all four major sports, and is only an hour or an hour and a half from amazing skiing/snowboarding/hiking in the mountains. There are concerts and music events all the time and one of the best places in the US to go to a concert (Red Rocks Amphitheater) is about 30 minutes from Denver. You will definitely get all four seasons here; it's gonna be hot and dry in the summer and cold and snowy in the winter but on average we get around 300 days of sunshine a year. 
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

Oh shove it. You are not any more authoritative than me. I am a second year security student here, and have been here much longer than you. Therefore I have a better perspective for the program, and I share my thoughts freely with others, both positive and negative. This is better than painting a rosy picture that exists only in fiction.

I wouldn't recommend you go to any of those schools for that level of debt. There's no doubt Fletcher is a whole lot better than Korbel - which is a very weak program - but not even Fletcher will do all that much for you if you don't have that much going for you already. 
'IR' isn't really a field, so you're going to have to be much more specific in articulating what it is you would like to do. 
A 4-week coding boot camp will do more for your career prospects than a two year grad degree from a SAIS or Fletcher. 

Also worth checking out are the contending companion articles: 
It’s Never Been a Better Time to Study IR by Francis Gavin of SAIS
America’s IR Schools Are Broken by Stephen Walt of HKS 
My key reflection on the rankings is to bear in mind that they are compiled from "Responses from 1,541 IR scholars at U.S. colleges and universities." A common thread through both of the accompanying essays is that traditional, academic IR is behind the eight ball to some degree when it comes to understanding and serving the modern requirements of practitioners in the field of IR. 
Given that many (most?) on this forum are interested in professional masters programs in IR/PP/PA, to ask allegedly cloistered scholars where one would get the best professional preparation for a career in IR seems a bit self-defeating. 

My take is the analysis of the "top" programs is sloppy and is really nothing more than a popularity contest. Goldgeier's tweets on the subject I think are spot on. MA hopefuls should base their decisions to attend schools based off of program fit, whether the school offers a program best suited to a candidate's career goals and of course, how much funding the school is offering. School rankings and prestige matter little especially if you intend to seek employment with a government agency or NGO as they do not seem to care where you went so long as you have all the requisite "skills". 
I was surprised to see these rankings come out as I had heard from someone that works at FP that they were taking a lot of heat from various schools who believed these rankings were hurting their brand, and there was talk of scrapping them all together.
 

The former dean of AU SIS has a good thread on the rankings. 
 

@tairos Did you find it hard to find security related internships and stuff? I just got accepted to the GSPS program and I was thinking about doing the security concentration as well.

I also applied for the International Security program for Fall '18. What are your career goals?

I recently applied to their Int'l Security program for Fall '18. What program did you apply for?

Get 3+ years of work experience then apply


Why do undergrads think they can be "fairly certain" of things like this? When I was an undergrad, I wasn't fairly certain of anything. This attitude has served me well. Also, no it won't.

There's a sticky thread for these questions, dude. 
I don't think your application hinges on the volunteering. In fact, it (and the general lack of extracurriculars) would probably matter more if you were applying for MBAs. For MPAs, it's a little out of left field - volunteering isn't really relevant to professional civil service, especially in econdev. Volunteer if it's something you want to do for yourself or your community, but if you're just doing it to get into grad school, I'd advise you to invest your energy into better strategies. 
You're actually not as special a case as you believe. Lots of people get MPAs after working in the private sector (and go right back to the private sector afterwards). Lots of people come from a consulting or a government contractor background, which you could tie into public service somewhat, but people come from straight-up private enterprise as well. More importantly, a lot of people come from low-level admin or research assistant work. This is so you know the level of competition (it's not that high). I suspect you're also suffering a small misunderstanding of the purpose/scope of the MPA: it teaches you to be a bureaucrat. It has nothing to do with volunteering. 
If you want to work in econdev doing actual econ (and not legislative reform or development consulting), you need to be careful about what programs you choose. Firstly, it's difficult to get hired (these days) without a PhD, and even if you do, there's no telling whether you'll get to do actual economics (which is to say you won't, even if you have superior data analysis skills and know something about the theory - the field is dominated by economists, and we're cliquey). Most MPAs (with rare exceptions like HKS-ID) don't remotely prepare you for a PhD in econ. In this field, getting the masters is the first and the smallest hurdle.
The GPA is low, but if you asked me to choose one program where it's okay to have a 3.1, I'd say UChicago econ. You should probably have at least one academic letter, but it's a professional program, so supervisors are fine. Write a great personal statement about how the public sector would satisfy you or whatever and you should be in the running for SIPA or anywhere else.
duh. that's why they exist.