uncle_socks

For Northwestern specifically the odds don't seem pretty good (based on my couple years of lurking). It seems like they keep a lot of people in waitlist limbo hell every year. Georgetown too. Both of these schools have way too many applicants and too low of acceptance rates for their US News ranking and it shows. Different schools with official waitlists are generally better -- though of course there are caveats. Don't expect movement on the Stanford waitlist (do they even waitlist??) but the waitlist at Duke or NYU is pretty fair odds. This isn't law school though, no one should have high hopes for any waitlist. Some schools have ranked waitlists, but I think most schools accept off the waitlist on an as-needed basis (where they compensate for losing all of their CP's to yield so they accept a CP or something along those lines). Another thing that people sometimes seem to forget on this forum: declining a spot at a school DOESN'T automatically open up a spot for someone waitlisted. Yale accepted like 40 people last year for a cohort of less than 20. They didn't give out 20 more offers to waitlisted prospective students, they knew this was going to happen and planned for it. All schools know that most people get into more than 1 school and it's just inherent in the process that not all offers will be accepted, so they admit around that. Besides, most schools lose money on grad students (again, unlike law schools who make $$$$$$ off of students) so the incentive to take someone that they're not 300% enthusiastic about is lower.

And for some schools, math camp is very much not optional.

Interviews at visit days? friendly and a little serious, so be ready to talk and answer questions about what you want to research and who you want to work with, but also with some small talk. Mostly very casual and they're not judgy, they just want to convince you to make the right decision. Edit for vandy interview: a little more serious than above, but the professor will probably want to have more of a conversation than like a formal job interview. Congrats on the vandy interview, it means they like you.

Definitely a troll. Wasn't going to say this earlier but this guy's first posts about getting into Michigan were very similar to the style of post that falsely spammed the results page. Not to mention that if he is real that he'll be easily doxxable to all faculty/grad students at Michigan/admitted students within a month + the public within a year if he enrolls at Michigan based on info provided already on this board and a clearly bad irl attitude. I struggle to believe that someone is that unaware that people here are the community that they're about to enter. Ps @sloth_girl (but also posters at large, and those seeking to follow a similar strategy in the future), I know people have been sporadically giving you a hard time here because you've applied to so many programs, which is BS because schools know how to manage waitlists. The fact is, unless you come from an uber elite undergrad+excellent grades+recs from famous people, nothing is guaranteed and if your goal is to get into the best possible program (and if you're trying to get your SO a nearby job as well), you're best to not to leave out any school in the top 15 if finances allow. That's how the market works. Fit matters, but our perception of fit is so different from what the admissions may perceive as fit. If you want to talk programs/vibes my PMs are open. I went through a similar cycle to yours (found the forum later though so here I am retroactively lurking and posting) and know the analysis paralysis feel and know that deciding is easier when there's someone to talk impressions and worries through with.

Expect to admit a cohort of 8 does not mean they're accepting 8. Considering yield, they probably admit 2-3 times 8. Admissions are hard, but Pitt isn't admitting only 7%.

If someone who got into NYU has a reply-by date for their fly-in, that would give a good benchmark for when to (to put it bluntly) give up hope on the PhD program. ETA: it was Feb 20th last year.

They said something like that last year too, but what really happened was that they sent all PhD acceptances at once, and then waited a while, and then sent unfunded MA (they don't fund) and rejections a month later. Everyone who got accepted to the PhD (possibly small n of waitlisters aside) all heard at the same time.

It's subfield and region specific, and there are also subfield rankings. But generally I'd say H,S > P > MC > Y.

Just curious, who are you considering "top MA programs" to be?

There are no really defined top 5 MA programs. Top 5 PhD programs are probably around 165/165/5 if I had to make a wild guess. Your GRE is good enough to get you through the first sift at any program, but GRE doesn't alone get you an admit. A "poor" academic record is subjective: 3.5 GPA? definitely fine and if your goal is a PhD eventually, you should just apply for PhD programs. A 1.5? probably not fine. Also no one cares about AWA. They'll read your writing sample and learn a lot more from that.

Just curious, did they say how many they admitted/an acceptance rate or anything?

Search "politic* -london" and you'll get political science and "politics" (what NYU and Princeton call their Dept) results without LSE

People last year were admitted without interviews.

I have a hunch that it's fake, but someone who applied to Berkeley should check their portal and update the rest of us here if anything has changed.

Emory doesn't do interviews anymore, at least not for everyone.

Yeah Jas seems like a big move. Hopefully he'll be active within the department (not sure if he's keeping his side hustle at Bridgewater) because having him is really great for Yale and a massive loss for Berkeley. Yale has Aranow tenured too so it seems like a real possibility to come out as a real methodologist from Yale, though it's a little rough because their CS and Stats departments are not as high ranked as other CHYMPS. Kalla is cool but just as a general precaution I'd be a little worried about banking on pretenure folks -- they very easily move and don't get tenure. Everyone thought Jason Lyall was going to get tenure at Yale but Yale didn't end up giving it to him, for example. New Haven near the school is fine, it's not really worse than U Chicago's safeness of location. Columbia is right by a pretty dangerous park. I wouldn't let that stop me from going if it was otherwise the best school I got into.

Oof I must've found a different old tableau through Google instead of looking at your link because mine hadn't been updated since 2017. With regards to your theory on not funding: they don't do that. Everyone gets full funding (about 28-29k I believe), and a couple get additional funding for internal awards. If you bring in your own funding (ie winning NSF or being sponsored by the military) your award terms might be a little different but you won't get less than the 28-29k. They also universally provide a few good benefits (insurance type) especially to families with children. This is quite enough to live pretty comfortably in New Haven. Every top program has minimum funding requirements and pretty much never admits without funding as a result. Yale just has relatively poor yield. If we want to speculate on their yield, I know it comes down to the following factors: getting into HPS, Yale having a weird visit day, Yale departmental politics, Yale still being in a weird qual-quant war, Yale being relatively weak in methods compared to Michigan and Berkeley, Yale being in New Haven, Yale's recent placement record. The only top schools who play this game are UCLA and occasionally Ohio State (might be missing one but it's certainly not CHYMPS), and even these cases are rare these days.

Yes, 100% not a problem at most PhD programs. It really just depends on your research agenda and job market paper. Most jobs have specific subfield requirements, so obviously if you're doing comparative "public policy" then you're ok to apply to a comparative job and some IR. But ofc if you're doing narrow American public policy then you can't apply for a comparative job. No one really cares what your "major" is. They just care about what kind of work you're doing. Yeah again main subfield doesn't really matter. Take classes that are interesting to you and do work that is interesting and don't worry about subfield. Unless your primary is theory, then worry about subfields. Also if you're serious about public policy, consider straight up public policy PhD programs as well (usually within the same school that houses the MPA/MPP). They might be better for actually getting a job as a public policy professor.

It won't save someone who would've otherwise been declined, most likely. Schools know that people get multiple acceptances and regularly admit more people than that can enroll because they know many of their admits will ultimately go to different schools, and they admit with that in mind. Put it this way: a school like UCSD (which has a tough yield game because it's ranked beneath CHYMPS but many people who get into a CHYMPS will apply and get accepted at UCSD) doesn't care if it admits 39 vs 40 (made up numbers) because they expect 20-30 to go elsewhere anyways. And if they really do care that much, they'll use the waitlist. Feel free to decline offers of admission early, but there's a very real chance that what you're doing isn't going to help a fellow applicant because schools expect people to decline offers anyways.

They overenrolled in 2018 so they accepted around 4% last cycle (2019). Yield was too high in 2018. So they had to accept way fewer in 2019. It should be pretty normal now, and it was just a 1-year 1-time correction.

I don't think Harvard got 600+ last year. Someone from last year who got in to Harvard said "the letter said they admitted 25 of almost 500 applicants" so yeah probably that. Princeton says they get "well over 500" in the last 5 years but I think that probably just means around 500. Admit around 40, lots of which overlap with H and S. Stanford is harder to gauge as far as the denominator goes, but they admit around 20 for a class size of ideally 14. I can't imagine a world where they get significantly less or more than the ~500 P and H get so again we're at about 4%. I'm generally unsure about Berkeley both w.r.t. the numerator and denominator -- that information wasn't revealed in a recent admit letter that I saw. Same for Columbia. Both are very obviously higher rates than HPS. Pretty much it's hard to get specifics from places that don't directly publish like Michigan does, but it's clear that we're working around ~5-15% everywhere. Edit: Also on Yale, now that I've been able to look at it on non-mobile (and wow that site's bad on mobile), it's worth noting that this year's cohort has like 10 people and last year's has like 11, while the Tableau (older data) shows 16+ but more frequently 18+ matriculants. No info if they have fewer admits, applications, or just yield in the last two years. For the record, people I've met who got into schools similar to Yale as well as Yale did not choose Yale so at least I'm quite sure their yield is not going up.

Do you have the link for Yale's tableau? Very interested. I think Michigan was >400 last year. (They also publish that information but haven't published last year's yet but it's worth noting that their acceptance rate last year was a big anomaly.) Duke also publishes, but as we all know they're not accepting people this year. Both of these are at about 10-15% normally. MIT last year was "over 380 applicants" and "less than 9%" admitted. Not sure how many Princeton apps there are but they admit about 40 each year. They'll lose like half of these admits to Stanford and Harvard. Programs like HYPS and Columbia probably have more applicants (and lower rates), but also likely more junky applicants who never had a chance ("I want to be president" types) just because of their prestige. Most people who get into a CHYMPS will get into Columbia, and most people who get into a HPS will get into another CHYMPS school; this stuff is highly correlated.

https://gradschool.duke.edu/about/statistics/political-science-phd-admissions-and-enrollment-statistics Looks like they only ended up enrolling one woman that year (I've heard this same story lol). They got 9/20 women last year though so they sorta compensated. I think it's hard for schools like Duke to predict who will and won't eventually enroll -- most people with CHYMPS offers will turn Duke down but it's hard to say who exactly will get those offers and it becomes harder to build a class around desired diversity characteristics with that kind. They certainly weren't throwing money at all women last year if I recall my sources correctly. It also seems that women have always applied to Duke a lot less than men have, I wonder if Duke has some deeper gender problems

ur in for a fun ride at grad school buddy

I'd highly recommend against getting a PhD at either of those two if you really want to work at an R1. SLACs are more lenient with where who they hire got their PhD (though largely they go for name brand schools too), but both of those schools are pretty much non-starters if you want an R1/very selective LAC job. For any school you're considering, take a hard look at their placement page and think about whether you'd be happy with the median types of jobs that their graduates land.