DreamersDay

I am looking to find an excellent GRE tutor for the quant section. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to go about finding one and figuring out if they're a good fit? Thanks

I am aiming for extremely competitive graduate programs in a social science field. I have an excellent academic record, ivy league/oxbridge credentials, publications, but struck out of my target programs this time and have to reattempt the GRE. After putting in about 2-3 weeks of studying via magoosh I got a 168v/158q/6.0w I am not a math person. I understand from a reliable source that, despite an otherwise strong application package, a 163 or 164 quant score is an effective prerequisite for my goals. I have eight months between now and when I'm applying but it would be logistically difficult for me to devote myself to the GRE after September so, I am aiming to take it in August. How can an otherwise academically talented but math-deficient person most reliably get from a 158 to a 164 in about 3-4 months of studying?

I do not believe any top 6 program has interviews...bored, sad people post fake results.

I think that the answer to this question doesn't exist on this forum unless there is a member of the Wisconsin admissions committee reading this.

On the other hand, maybe if we talk about the discipline when hope to enter and implicitly about decisions made by us in April, it will be less of a draw to anxiously check this thread every 30 minutes for a jump-scare of a post by someone about a school you care about but haven't heard from? ;-) Though in seriousness, is there any scenario where this thread is going to promote mental health when used this way: 1. If you haven't heard from the school's you're hoping to attend, then checking this thread repeatedly for other people who got in is just going to drive you nuts. 2. If you check this thread and - to your horror - see that others are reporting getting into your target school, then this will *either* make you insanely anxious in the days or hours leading up to getting formally rejected, or it will make you insanely anxious in the days or hours leading up to getting accepted. Either way, you'll feel worse for having seen it, for more days. 3. If you get into a school, they'll call you or send you an email, you wont find the answer in GradCafe. If you get a rejection from a school, there is no point in checking grad cafe about it since you've already gotten the rejection.

I do not think you are making an apples to apples comparison here. You quoted this as " Michigan (#4) places 60 percent of it's PhDs in TT jobs after 5 years, Notre Dame (#37) places 53 percent." Michigan provides much more of its data. Nortre Dame provides percentages for initial placements for the 2015-16 year, and 5 year placements for 06/07-10/11, the later of which mixes pre-financial crisis and post-crisis data. And they seemingly arbitrary cut the data for everyone from 11/12-14/15. If you saw an academic study funded by a product manufacture that just arbitrarily cut out a mid-portion of their data regarding that product, wouldn't you be suspicious? They also provide no attrition data whereas Michigan does: how do we know if their placement record represents an artificially improved set of outcomes because they're not graduating more of their students? Consider a more apples to apples comparison: the initial placement of the class of 2016 (the only year that Notre Dame gives by itself) Notre Dame placed 1 person (9%) initially in a tenure track teaching position in 2016. Michigan placed 35% initially in a tenure track teaching position in 2016. That doesn't seem like anything like a 'marginal difference', that seems like a huge difference. And, given that they literally had just 1 initial TT placement in 2016, that makes the omission of the immediately proceeding years even more suspicious. Were there years they placed no one? And, doesn't the dramatic drop off between an average initial TT placement of 38% for 06/07-10/11 vs a 9% initial placement record for 15/16 indicate a sharp decline in placement, perhaps even more dramatic than what is actually shown since they cut out a large set of their data.

Where is your data on these specific claims? My impression was that many of these schools do not publish a full list of their graduates post-PhD positions (including unemployed and non-academic) by graduation year, nor do they transparently publish transparent attrition rates - both of which are necessary to determine true placement levels. The Nortre Dame placement webpage appears to only list successful candidates, of whom many are Notre Dame post-docs (who knows if that leads anywhere) - making it impossible to determine overall rate of success.

The amount of philosophy type courses will depend on the law school. If you want to do this the five viable law schools are Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford and NYU. If you want to be an academic philosopher of law in a philosophy department you need a PhD in philosophy - a JD is nice but neither necessary nor sufficient. If you want to write on law and philosophy as a law school professor, it is essential to go to a top law school (one of the five mentioned above) and a PhD in philosophy would be very important but perhaps not quiet necessary. A JD/PhD program at one of the schools mentioned above would be the best route to give you the most options and the greatest chance of success.

If I could suggest with some more direct knowledge of this process: 1. You really need to go to a T18 school in Law. 2. There is literally no such thing as graduating in the top of your class at Yale because YLS grades are not convertible into a GPA and no rankings or graduation honors are given. There is no such thing as graduating in the top 5% of your class at HLS because the highest distinction has a top 10% cut off. And none of this matters because no one actually cares about your grades when applying to law teaching positions and you will not be asked to produce a transcript. Their only relevance is in securing clerkships and fellowships that are useful signals. 3. Clerking for a federal judge is nice but not necessary, a SCOTUS clerkship is rare and totally unnecessary (though would help if you have it). 4. Literally no one care that you worked at biglaw and if you practice in biglaw for long enough to develop your area of expertise you will actually hurt your chances on the law teaching market for having been away from academia for too long and appearing to be a burt out senior associate. 5. It is extraordinarily difficult to get a law teaching job without doing a post-JD teaching or research fellowship at a law school, it is essentially a prerequisite unlike a biglaw job (meaningless) or a clerkship (a signal of prestige but not essential). 6. It is impossible to get a law teaching job without publishing law review articles.

Pepperdine law is not considered a good law school for legal academics and going to any school outside of the top 20 would be extremely damaging for any potential academic career. If you went that way you would not get into the Yale Law PhD program: look at the profiles of who they admit on their website: they have five Yale JDs, one Harvard JD, one Michigan JD, one Georgetown JD, one WUSTL JD. The Yale PhD program has never admitted anyone from a school ranked lower than 20 and overwhelmingly prefers Yale JDs. Pepperdine is ranked in the 60s or 70s depending on the year. If you want to be a law professor and you have not yet begun a law degree, it cannot be stressed enough that your vital task is to get a sufficiently high LSAT score to have a chance at admission to Yale and to gain admission to Harvard. Yale would be better than Harvard but if you can get mid-170s scores you will at least get into Harvard. If you can't get into Harvard, going to Stanford, Chicago or Columbia might be okay but you'd still be at a disadvantage compared to candidates from Harvard and Yale. If you can't get into one of those schools but can get into a top 20 school, you will have a narrower and more difficult route to being a law professor though its possible. But don't even think of accepting an offer from a school ranked lower than say, Alabama, if you want this to be an option in your future, and really don't go to anything ranked below Chicago if your preferred plan is to be a law professor.

Extended water fasts will take weight off rapidly but its very likely to come back since they will slow down your metabolism and not provide a sustainable pattern of eating you can follow indefinitely. I've done multi-week fasts three while in grad school, while working - they are not nearly as hard as people think after the first couple of days...but each time I regained weight. Intermittent fasting however, ideally eating one meal a day in the evening (meaning fasting for 23 hours only, not for multiple days), is highly effective and sustainable. It reduces or eliminates food cravings and hunger and seems to have only beneficial (if any) cognitive effects. I lost 20% of my body weight, returned to a normal BMI, and kept it off doing intermittent fasting. If establishing more self control over food is what you're after I think it is a really good way to go.

Preemptively encouraging people to disregard the obviously fake Harvard polisci acceptance which was posted a month early, on a day the university is closed. Yeah. Right. Try harder Polisci Rumors troll - or get a life!

Probably a grade from a first semester of a four semester program will be less damaging than if it came later in your studies also, as long as you excelled at other quant classes.

I think even cursory research will show that the type of prestige that matters is whether admissions committee members recognize and are impressed by your undergrad and masters granting universities (which is mostly a question of whether its an Ivy, Cal, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Oxbridge, or the five most famous SLACs), which helps, whether they've heard of your college (which is neutral), and if they've never heard of your college it is at best neutral and at worst harmful. Actually referring to your college's reputation as RevTheory1126 mentions is probably a kiss of death on a SoP...so really this conversation only matters to people who are either high school students or planning to take a terminal masters degree...and if you're in either of those categories you would be should go to the most prestigious university you can because it has a lifelong impact on your applications (at least until you have a PhD.)

A JD will not credential you to teach in a political science department by itself without a PhD in political theory or philosophy. A PhD in Polisci makes a candidate for a law teaching job more competitive and a JD makes a theory PhD more competitive in the Polisci teaching market.