smug-face

It means that you're unlikely to hear back before the deadline, which is April 15. Them not having heard back from either candidates is good news though -- it means that there's still a chance they'll decline their offers. Good luck!

After a lot of thought I've declined my Emory offer - hopefully that will help someone on the waitlist!

What does the Fulbright scholarship entail? If it's fully funded, definitely go to Columbia. Not only will it allow you to network with top US polisci faculty, but a funded MA is a very strong signal of academic potential. It would also make sense financially. LSE may have more rigorous training but PhD programs will re-train you anyway, so it's all about the signal you send. Focus on nailing your GRE and work on a strong quant writing sample and you'll be fine. Good luck!

For sure, DM me

I did not reach out to faculty. Most blog posts from professors I've read also recommended not reaching out in advance (e.g. Cyrus Samii's at NYU, Chris Blattman's at Harris). As to people talking about PoI, I was also surprised -- though I have to say, in most (all?) of the programs I was admitted to, the DGS who emailed me with the good news was also one of the people I mentioned in my SoP...

I think a few things I did right were: Not be content with my first (mid-160) quant GRE score. I wanted to do quant work, I knew that I needed exceptional scores, and I knew that this year especially, "good enough" was not gonna be good enough. So I took the GRE again and I think that really helped, especially because my math background was pretty good but not stellar (e.g., only took some undergrad calc, no real analysis). I also did this because I was applying to several GRE-mandatory programs, which I thought would place a ton of weight on my scores, and because I assumed that GRE-optional ones would mostly receive very good scores because of selection effects (only high-score applicants would send in their scores). Apply to places with a good fit. I didn't apply to stellar places like Harvard or Stanford polisci because there's just no one there that does what I want to do. Incidentally, the places that I got rejected from were all places where I struggled to find more than 2 faculty members with whom I thought I had a good fit beyond broadly similar research agendas (e.g. democratization, institutions, development). What I mean by "fit" is, has this professor recently written a paper that made you think, huh, that's pretty close to what I'd like my dissertation to look like? Not contact faculty. Not that it would have hurt necessarily, it's just that it's unlikely to help in any way. Better invest the time and energy reading faculty's work and seeing how it fits with your interests. There's nothing they can tell you that you can't already find online.

Thank you! It was about noon ET when I got the email. No mention of how many were admitted, sorry!

Got into Chicago Harris! I'm over the moon -- such a great way to end the cycle!

Best of luck! Historically there hasn't been a lot of Harris-related activity on the results page, which is not great for expectation management...

Has anyone here received any news from Chicago Harris (PhD)? I'm so anxious to wrap this thing up!

Hi all, has anyone here applied to the PhD? Any news?

+1 on Yale rejection. Expected, it was probably my worst fit (that and Berkeley). Still thought it was worth a shot! Now I'm really just waiting on Harris to wrap this up. Congrats to those admitted/waitlisted and virtual hugs to those rejected!

Yeah, my verbal was already good and I applied to do formal theory so I just did the quant! I heard good things about verbal, too.

N=1 but I cannot recommend Magoosh enough. I was plateauing around the mid-160s (quant) and after a couple months of Magoosh videos and exercises I nailed a perfect score! The exercises are actually a bit more difficult than the real thing, which I think is good since it gave me a cushion (particularly in terms of time management).

Same! Expected, but still worth a shot!