kaykaykay

Apart from the money what can you loose? Worst come to worst you do not send your subject scores.

Going with an untenured prof is always risky (she can move up or down or simply away), and prof A sounds like a dream.Of course having only one prof of ineterst is a different type of risk (if nothing else you have to build a committee) If there is not much difference in ranking and money I will choose prof A. Then again the partner and location situation is tricky and you have to find your own cost-benefit evaluation on that. hmm.... I guess... I see why you asked the question

In theory they do in practice they will ask why did you go there if you do not want their education? In short you will end up doing the coursework. If you are ok with that you can apply either way I guess, there is a person in my cohort who has a foreign PhD already in the same subject. (Do not ask me how how he tailored his SOP because I do not know. ) And yes he is doing the course work too- I guess if you want to get admission you really have to tell that US education can benefit you in a new way and be willing to restart your journey.

Till apr.15 you can do this without any problem (let both programs know). After the 15th you will have to get an official release, which can be frowned upon. I never heard of anyone who was denied the release though, schools do not want to force students to attend if they do not want to.

I lived in my advisors house for a few days when I moved here. There has not been any awkwardness although I saw the professor and family having breakfast before I even started classes. (It probably helped with my sanity that I know that the person is human and perhaps playing a bit when grilling students) Also I heard a story about a student who was pet sitting for advisor and the student slept in said advisor's bed (well of course in the person's absence). I guess professor- grad student relationships are much more on the adult side with some flavor of family ties and possible future professional friendship when the grad student will enter the profession.

I would carefully investigate the work of the younger, on campus advisor to see if I would be happy with him without the retired advisor just in case.... Maybe teh youg scholar is a great guy and this triangle arrangement will work well no mater what!!! Are there more professors in that university whose work you are interested in? Just going for one person is always risky even if he/she is mid career because anything can happen. MAybe you could try to evaluate the program without this person and see if you would be happy there and then take the possibility of working with this great person as a bonus! hmm? At least in my field emeritius professors do not do that many university service and do not hang out in the university that much, which I imagine could make communication, advising and getting info about what is going on in the department a little bit more problematic.I do not think that recommendation letters would be a problem (people do not forget him/her) but emeriti cannot chair a doctorate committee. Universities try to convince you with all possible means to take their offer. Take these things into consideration, you may need to rely on the on campus advisor for certain things.

As far as I know sometimes admission commitees call the recommender to personnaly ask them about a candidate (that is why you have to give a phone no.) . Of course this is impossible in this case. I would actually ask a trusted prof who has an experience with admission committees preferably in your area of interest to get all the ups and downs of this choice.

I guess that depends on the year too. I do not really see why that would be a set rule. Other than there are less fellowshipsthat international students can apply I do not see why the Canadian departments would consider international students extra costly or undesirable.

For me it seems that the prof might be fighting for you. So I would let them know , maybe it gives them some leverage.

Even if you did not have letter graded evaluation system you must have some sort of transcript ( and basis of a GPA) from China. I cannot imagine that there is such a thing as GPA unknown. How did you apply to Northeastern???

ok this is assuming that you are not an alcoholic so temptation is not an issue. in that case just do not go to these clubbing events. your concern made me smile a bit... first of all, who knows what happens in a year.. you may change and end up liking beer. If not you should just get a soft drink, nobody will laugh at you. grad students are no undergrads, usually these people are over the peer pressure years. but if you want to have something there are beers with lemonade in them which are like 3% alcohol or so and taste very much like a lemonade. Said this I would really not recommend starting drinking just to socialize and especially I would not recommend trying drinking for the first time on a visit. while a beer or a 3% radleer should really not cause a lot of bad side effects, alcohol can be a fickle friend for the first time even in small amounts, especially if you have jet leg, and feel stressed from meeting professors and students.

Ok I have to say I am an international student, and I had not seen most (80% up) of the words in the GRE in my life before I encountered this test. I got 350 on my first try. It is "fun" to guess the relationship between two words that could mean anything in the world. I read plenty of books, Dickens what not but hey it was in my native language. (I bet not many people could beat me in vocabulary there....) .. So there you go. I got the 3000 words' list and I sat down and memorized as much as I could. I got 650 verbal, which is not brilliant but good enough to get me through the initial tresholds. So yes, you can just memorize a huge list of words that you will never use and get a passing mark on the GRE. I bet reading helps but what the test really tests is your ability to concentrate, do memorization for an extended period of time and to perform under stress imho.

For me this was a decisive factor. After a year I do not regret my decision. My POI is taking as much interest in guiding me and getting me the best opportunities possible as it was promised by how they treated me during preview time.

I do not want to belittle you and I do not know your academic rank. To be honest I do not know the academic rank of your TA either. Looking at the Wikipedia could be done at any level in my opinion though, you do not even need a high school diploma to google Science. The names: Government at Harvard and Politics at Princeton are reminders how the discipline was developing. Do you think that Library Science is also called a science because it wants to resemble to biology? I think the whole discipline's self questioning about whether it is a science or not is a characteristic of the social sciences in general and has no connection with the name itself (ha again Science ! ) . I 've got plenty of that in the Economics department too. The answer is , no Political Science or Economics are not hard sciences but they are social sciences.

Yep. Ok so I will try to write it more slowly so you can understand it better. Before posting here do the curtesy to try to get some remote information on your claims. Wikipedia is a great start! Of course if you are more scientifically inclined (haha) you can do an entire research! No, science does not have the same meaning in Political Sciene than in Hard Sciences. It has more similarity to Computer Science or Library Science. ok I really do not want to do YOUR research for you or your TA= you should get some information on the WWW about English language and pass it on to him/her to!

read the wikipedia article for Science. There is the answer to your question. A TA is a TA but still he should know what he is talking about.

I am from East of Austria (still in Europe). I would be very surprised if it did not exist in Austria. Open ticket at least here does not mean that you can leave the reurn time open but it means that it is valid for one year, you have to give a date of return but it is changable for a nominal fee. You should ask a travel agent because they have several different options. In my experience tickets are much cheaper if you have to transfer. I got tickets much cheaper to fly Frankfurt -U.S. than my German friend because I was not taking a direct flight. (this means Mycountry-Frankfurt-U.S is cheaper than Frankfurt-US with the same company with the same flight) I would recommend taking a short flight to a Europen hub and try to get the long flight to directly your city in the US because US domestic flights are austere but that is just me.In my experience prices are almost the same in both combination but maybe from your countries it is diffrent.

I am confused what you want to study and where you want to study. Most schools in the UK or in Canada do not require GRE neither in PoliSci nor in Liberal/Fine Arts. you should try to figure out what you want to do in life, what degee you need to do it (where you want to do it) and then if absolutely necessary retake the GRE. There are really nice tutoring companies, maybe for you it would be a benefit to take the crash course on concepts and test taking techniques. Also I think some departments have a policy that they cannot discourage prospective applicants. So probably it would be better to ask if they do not give you cut off points readily about the average applicant's score.

I would say nothing. If I remember correctly I wrote some very small amount in (as much as I actually had, or could gather like 500 or 300?) but no one cared.

Are you never planning to go back to the Netherlands? Because you can use a lot of return tickets within a year. If not than still you can buy a return ticket, no one will look for you and drag you to the airplane, and there will be no questions when you get the visa (you could still return to visit!) . I did lose a few return flights during my long career as an international student.

Good Luck!

you may want to take a look at this list: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/wgape/members.html

Pradeep Chhibber at Berkeley is an India specialist. I hope this helps to start searching for more people. Often you have to look out for South Asia as a region.

forgive my eye, I have actual things to work on. so no I do not agree with that . institutions are a lot different in poli sci than in law. back at the day they were the same hence the name "Governmnent" at Harvard by the way. But as the name shifted to Political Science so did the substantive subject too shifted from law, from constitution to institutions. No, JDs could not teach American Institutions if it is taught for poli sci undergrads , it is different from public law.