brownie_z

Hi! I declined an offer from McGill. Best of luck to everyone!! Xx

oh god.. i remember i was stuck in poliscirumors rut in the summer while i was studying to retake the GRE. gradcafé can be depressing as well, especially if you're going through a rough patch and forget to take everything said here with a grain of salt. i was crippled with self-doubt and people at poliscirumors made it even worse... dark, dark times! i'm happy i didn't let it bring me down too much and banned myself from ever touching that shit since around september. 

If anyone does go over to PoliSciRumors, just know that like a good 99% of the posts are trolls. When I first went over there I kinda started loosing faith in humanity. 

I just declined my offer at McGill. I don't know if they have waitlists, but if anyone is waitlisted, I hope this helps. I declined as soon as I made a decision.
Best of luck to everyone!!

I just declined my offer at McGill. I don't know if they have waitlists, but if anyone is waitlisted, I hope this helps. I declined as soon as I made a decision.
Best of luck to everyone!!

Hi there! congrats to those admitted.
I'm just gonna answer some of the questions about the program at Uoft real quick in case it helps (this is my personal view):
Departmental culture: The professors are truly amazing, same goes for the administrative staff. Historically, the department was more historical institutionalist and focused on books, which I believe is still true today, but there is also a lot of high quality quant work. There are potlucks every year for every field, with both students and professors which are super fun as well as beginning and end of term parties, and it is very easy to make friends in the department. The atmosphere betwee students is not competitive and students support and help each other.
The stipend is obviously very low considering you have to live in Toronto, which is super expensive. However, if you are eligible to apply for scholarships, this can be of great help. Also, it is usually possible to get extra TAships if wanted. Students that do not come in with a scholarship do start TAing year one, but usually for a big intro class with a TA coordinator, so most of the material is just given to you (not much prep). There are a lot of extra funds, especially for conferences. I think you get somewhere around 500$ every year for CPSA and another 300-500 for another conference (again every year), plus some other sources of funding (student union, etc.). There are also funds for fieldwork.
I think they usually take about 25 students each year. I don't know whether there are quotas for each subfield, but I would imagine so.   Overall, I think it is a truly great program with a lot of resources.

Can also anecdotally confirm @DefeatistElitist's post. Montreal is the most affordable city (also a wonderful city to spend a few years in too, FWIW). I have friends paying $800-900 Canadian for a 1 1/2 bedroom that's fairly central. It's also worth looking at how much you'll pay in taxes if you're an international student - I know Canadians studying in the US get dinged, so that may or may not be a factor for you as well.

As far as online sources are concerned I'm not sure, but I can tell you that the cost of living in Montreal is WAY cheaper than most comparably sized North American cities. I know this is anecdotal but a good friend of mine lives in a nice one-bedroom probably 3 metro stops from McGill and pays $750/month (Canadian, ~$550 US). That is probably cheaper than most you'll find but honestly not by much. Transit is also reasonably cheap in Montreal and is very reliable.

Quebec has VERY high taxes though (scholarships aren't taxed in Canada though), sales tax is like 18%. Generally speaking though, Montreal is by a large margin the most affordable major city in Canada. It's also a wonderful, incredibly fun city with A+ food.

Got an informal e-mail from Carolynn Branton that I've been accepted to U of T! Funding/official offer to come next week. Good luck, friends!

I emailed the UofT coordinator asking about an estimate for when I should expect an answer. This is what he said, hope it helps:
”I believe the first set of PhD offers are supposed to go out soon – I believe as early as today, but more than likely either Mondayor Tuesday of next week.  Note that it is a rolling process – we send out offers, and if any of them are turned down, we then move to the next person on the list.  It’s ongoing until all the spots are filled – so if you don’t receive an offer in the first set, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will not be receiving at offer at all.”

I applied to both UofT and McGill. I heard back from McGill today (im one of the posters on the results page). Comparative P subfield. Nothing from UofT yet!

As someone who has worked in graduate school admissions, and with undergraduate programs aimed at sending students to graduate school, at two tippy top schools (for all fields falling within arts and science), I can confidently say you are both overestimating the impact of math classes (for all but physical sciences, math, and economics), at least as it relates to admission to the Ph.D. You are probably also overestimating the importance of quant GRE, which is often overlooked if it meets some threshold - often around 155 - as long as some other evidence of quant skill is presented (I discuss forms this can take further down). Having a bunch of math will always look good. Still, if you have math but have difficulty forming an interesting research question, or if you're not able to elaborate at all on how that question might be answered, you will not be competitive. On the other hand, if you have almost no math (and I mean no math whatsoever in college, aside from maybe a semester of intro to stats), but you have a strong handle on how to develop and answer an interesting research question, and this comes across convincingly in your application, all things equal (GRE, GPA, letters, and sample), MOST departments, and MOST subdisciplines, will rather have you than the former. I have seen this over, and over (and over) - students accepted to all subfields of political science (and most disciplines in arts and science) at top 1-5 schools, and also at places like Caltec, MIT, NYU, WashU, etc. Still, it's important to note that it's somewhat uncommon to find someone with little math preparation (or interest) who can confidently put it all together. It's easier, probably, if you have at least a semester of calculus, and definitely you must be enthusiastic and thoughtful about methods either way. [Note: having two semesters of calc 1, earning an F the first time around and a B- the second, is not necessarily bad for your application (except for the ding to your GPA, though nobody cares much about GPA either). Tenacity is undervalued throughout most of the entries here. Like movie-goers, schools love a story about sticktoitiveness!] Doing well in a graduate methods class at a decent school, and securing from that professor a strong recommendation that compares you favorably to matriculated grad students? Now that is likely to provide you with a nice advantage, but calc 3 or even linear algebra? I haven't seen it. With regard to the GRE, it's not at all unusual to find someone scoring at or near 170 who has only had geometry. Surely those who get top scores often have more math, and that familiarity makes the test easier for them in general, but the test only actually calls upon your math knowledge up to geometry. If you're comfortable with algebra and basic geometry, studying the little idiotic tricks that the test for some reason includes could get you a long way. Finally, I do think, all else equal, great if you have a lot of math. You will be admired and dreaded all at once when you sail through math camp, and you might well be sought after as a coauthor for those of us who have pretty good questions but limited intuition when it comes to readily identifying techniques for answering them. 

Hahahahahaha, oh my God!

I would caution you from comparing yourself to others on this site....people on here tend to be extreme overachievers haha. I can guarantee people would laugh at my credentials, but I am applying anyway because I know I have a lot of strengths and want to give myself the chance. I am not very familiar with Canadian schools, but I have noticed that many people on grad cafe apply to very prestigious schools that get 300+ apps and only take like 5 people . So, if you are applying to that kind of school, then yes...I think everyone is worried and doubts their application!! However, I think you have a great gpa and outstanding GRE scores.  Having a solid year as an RA will def work in your favor...just go easy on yourself , all you can do is give it your best shot. 

Medievalmaniac, I really don't think that the SoP is the right place to explain your coursework, unless it has direct relevance to the narrative you're writing about your development. I just attached a sheet with all my applications called "Undergraduate Coursework in Literature" or "Relevant Coursework," and then divide it up into "English" and "French." Under each category, I had the course number, the actual full title, the prof, and my grade in it. That way they can cross-reference with my transcript if they want, but they have the important info that they'll really be mining my transcript for isolated for them already. And I didn't have to take up precious space in my SoP explaining them.

As for what I did in my SoP that I think worked, I have some perspective on that, having been roundly rejected two years ago and pretty decent success this round (though UVa and U Washington, what is UP?! Still waiting on them). I really think the difference between my two SoPs is the big thing that made the difference, as my numbers and other qualifications (and even most of my writing sample, though I edited it) are the same. So here's what I think made the difference, in three alliterative categories:

1. Focus. Like it or not, they want to be able to categorize you. You can have secondary interests, but they have to be clearly secondary and bear some relation to your main focus. Last time I tried to tell too many stories of my development, and there were too many directions I could go in. This was partially a reflection of where I was at the time, and honestly I think they were right to reject me straight out of undergrad - I needed some time to reflect, to think about what I actually wanted to do in the field. Now that I have, my SoP reflects that clearer sense of direction and purpose.

2. Fit. Everyone tells you this, but it's true. I spent a lot more time really researching profs on the websites, then looking up and scanning through a few key articles, and skimming through the courses they taught. It really gives you a better idea of whether their interests and methodologies ACTUALLY fit yours, or whether it just looks like that on paper. I then tailored my fit paragraph to show how multiple faculty members could support my research interests (this may be English-specific, as in other non-humanitites disciplines you are applying to work with one advisor). Also, if the department has a pet methodology, it's helpful to know that - they'll look for students who fit that bill. Interdisciplinary programs that faculty are involved in and subfield/methodologically-specific colloquia, etc. are also things to look for.

3. Future. This could vary, depending on how much of an academic past you have, but for me what helped was focusing discussing even my past towards showing how it formed a trajectory for the future. I've said in other places around here that the best advice I got for my SoP was that you should think about demonstrating that you are capable of conceiving of a larger project; whether or not you end up doing that project is irrelevant, as you probably won't and the adcomm is well aware of that - the point is that you are CAPABLE of conceiving of a future direction for yourself. I focused on telling a story (i.e. "I'm interested in the relationship to place in Modernist literature") and cutting all details of my past that didn't mesh with that. So by the end I was able to say look! What I discussed doing in paragraphs x (gloss of relevant coursework/advisors, focus), y (challenges and triumphs of writing my thesis and learning theory), and z (teaching, living different places) all feed into the project I'm proposing in this last paragraph (though the project was sufficiently broad so as not to pigeonhole me). I said that I wanted to go in certain different directions, but it was clear that it would be a continuation of my development, not starting anew. They want to see that you are capable of functioning independently as an academic (should be demonstrated by your past and by the fact that you can independently come up with good future directions), but that they have something to offer in terms of guiding you.

Hope that helps!

Good clarifying question.
Uncertainty looms large in making these predictions, and the academic and private job markets are structurally very different. Given that many people's list of preferred jobs at some point starts to mix academic and non, it can be difficult to talk about this stuff concretely.
I would be surprised to find that a student at a Top 10/12/16/ish school who did the work and the networking failed to find some decent, challenging job that pays for a middle class life in a major American city of the student's choice. Graduates who end up permanently on the VAP circuit (or the private market equivalent) from these schools either have very specific and inflexible job preferences or did something fixably wrong to end up there.
As one moves down the school ranking and down the informal ranking of students at one's own school, the likelihood that this job will be academic decreases, and the attention the student should pay to the networking section of my advice (and to developing skills needed in the government and private sectors) increases.* Pick-your-place has a lot to do with the place's opportunities, but some trade-off between prestige or ideal job duties will usually open something up. 
In general, if you have a sense of where you'd like to live and this consideration is more important than finding a prestigious or even academic job, networking in that place is totally key.
*Academia is not everyone's brass ring. Outside the obvious schools, if you prefer to work in a think-tank or NGO, networking becomes increasingly important, because there is a lot lower signal-to-noise ratio in private job markets, and fewer people will automatically know that UCLA or Duke is actually a pretty kick-ass department. 

I read this thread with a little concern and wanted to add my own perspective. I am presently in my fourth year, recently defended my dissertation prospectus, and am preparing to start gathering data. Prior to my PhD program, I worked as an attorney and taught practical courses at two law schools. In this thread, I’ve seen three related, basic concerns: job prospects, strategies for maximizing job prospects, and the work load. Take my advice as a current student with a grain of salt, but be aware that the path to success in this field is idiosyncratic enough to doubt that tenured faculty know how it works, either.
Job Prospects
BigTen is right here, and the attempt to rose-tint the job market issue by noting that an important number of tenure track positions at research universities are held by graduates from 10-25 ranked schools ignores the struggles faced by the vast majority of student from those programs. It is frankly unconscionable that faculty at 50+ ranked schools encourage graduate students to attend. I truly believe the emerging consensus that a number of graduate programs exist to fill the egotistical and labor needs of the department rather than because they provide reasonable employment opportunities to graduates. Evaluating job prospects and placements by reading placement boards provides some information. Watching your colleagues graduate and fight for positions provides another.
Attending a PhD program outside the top 10-12 is a real gamble. Most students in this range seem to place at universities or outside jobs that at least provide standard of living and a reasonable connection to the questions and research that drew you to study social science in the first place. But the plight of Visiting Assistant Professors who make minimum wage is real, and in most cases the PhD does little outside the academic/think tank world other than convince employers with no idea about the academic job market that you’d leave. After the 12-14 rank, most graduates have fewer tenure opportunities, period. They certainly face uncomfortable constraints on the region and pay they must accept for any measure of job security.
If your passion or self-assurance prompts to take the risk of attending a program outside this range, do yourself a favor and pay special attention to the advice in the following section.
Securing a Stable Job
Publishing: Ask yourself an important question over and over again (and ask your advisors): can some part of the questions that animate me be answered in a compelling, novel way with data that exists on the internet? If the answer is yes, you need to work on publishing. If the answer is no, then you need to focus on generating compelling research and data collection designs. When you graduate, hiring committees will have an opinion about whether it should have been possible to publish on your question during school, and often times the answer is. Often times (especially in comparative politics), the more promising candidates are the ones that generated awesome data sets.
Networking: I promise you this works. Every week during your first three years of graduate school, find two non-academic employers that have jobs you think you might like and be qualified for, then email a person that has 5-10 years experience in one of those jobs asking for advice. Ideally, you would get 15 minutes to speak with them about their own day-to-day (like you’re interviewing them about whether you want the job) and what skills the job takes (as though you are preparing to interview for it).
This means you send out 300 networking emails in three years. You’ll get maybe 40 people willing to speak with you and 10 that like you. Find excuses to stay in touch with those people, and 1 or 2 will have a job for you when you graduate. This job worked for young law school students I mentored and seems to be working for MA candidates I work with now.
Grants: Winning a grant is easier said than done, but it can be very beneficial. Winning a grant that pays you to research frees you from needing to work and sends a signal to future grantors and employers that you are promising and talented. Winning grants for research activities achieves the latter. 
I have not won any of the general work-replacement grants, but those I know who have burst ahead of the rest of us. They have zero distraction. This is part of why students from private schools like Harvard and Stanford outperform equally talented students at Michigan or UCLA. They work less.
I have been fortunate enough to win a couple of small but prestigious-sounding grants to fund research. It has completely altered the way senior colleagues view my work and promise.
Work Load
I think the gallows humor about reading in the shower is part of what makes for bad graduate students. It is absolutely true that you cannot read enough to stop feeling behind your classmates or (heaven forfend) the faculty teaching you. So why bother?
First the saccharine advice: if you are an interesting and curious enough person to attend a decent PhD program, there is very little in the world, and nothing at school, worth the sacrifice of five to seven years of your personal growth and exploration. I don’t care if you end up teaching at fucking Harvard, your colleagues will never look at you with the wonder your friends do when you serve them a perfectly seared scallop or play them Fur Elise on the piano after you eat someone else’s scallops. They won’t know you like your mother or your husband or your son.
Here’s an inconvenient truth: 90% of you want to go to grad school in large part because you want to feel smart. Your colleagues will rarely make you feel smart, even though you are. The whole enterprise is about identifying flaws in even the best work (in order to improve it) and on some level, this is miserable. Don’t believe me? Ask students at the schools you were admitted to how they felt about the process of drafting and defending their prospectus.**
But your friends and family will make you feel smart, especially if you turn your substantial talent to excelling in at least one thing they can relate to. You want to feel proud and useful and cherished and special? Learn to give people something that gives them instinctual pleasure. (Usually not an AJPS article.)
Now for the professional advice you won’t ignore: You will have plenty of pressure to read deeply and critically and to learn method. I don’t suggest ignoring this. But the best ideas and the best careers don’t seem based on picking apart the causal identification of a key article. Great insight requires time to rest and percolate, and inspiration comes from wondering why people haven’t solved real world problems more often than it comes from replication data.
Models don’t provide insight. They describe it.
Good ideas require some amount of travel and art and philosophy and debate and REST and EXPERIENCE and EXPOSURE. If you want to have any hope of avoiding the scholarly lament that “my research and my life talk to twelve other people” you have to set aside some time to be out of the literature and out of the methods.
I’m not suggesting you spend every Saturday smoking weed and reading Batman comics. Maybe baseball games and 30 Rock marathons are rare indulgences now. But don’t cancel your subscription to the New Yorker or stop seeing your friends, because politics is about real life and on some level no one trusts that the academic without work experience, without family, without friends, without hobbies, has any insight about what animates actual people. 
Good luck with everything.
**Setting aside the problems with political science as a science, while this process of critique and revise makes everyone feel stupid and insecure, it does help you eventually feel proud of and defend your work. But to scratch the itch of feeling competent, you’d be better off having kids and teaching them to camp or make great spaghetti sauce or something.

Dear new PhD applicants in Political Science,
 
I am writing this post to provide you with a centralized source of information to help you make decisions about where to apply. I decided to provide you with this source because this information was not available to me in any sort of organized fashion, meaning that I had to find and organize it myself. I wish a resource such as this had been available to me when I began applying.  This does not mean that you will not need to do research on the programs to which you consider applying. There is some information that I simply cannot provide you with, such as up to date data on placement rates or how well your research interests match with the departments you are considering. These are among the most important factors you will consider. While I will walk you through how one can go about making these calculations, the main point of this post is to provide you with a starting point- useful data to help you begin to make decisions about where you will apply.
 
Useful Links
 
Rankings
 
The first thing I should say about rankings are that they are only a short cut. There is a lot more noise than one would like. I encourage everyone to ensure that the department in question is placing people rather than assume it blindly because of the rankings (more on that later). There are three main rankings political scientists look at:
 
The NRC
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124714
 
Methodology: the NRC rankings use several different methodologies based on multiple objective criteria to determine their five different sets of rankings. The S-Rankings use some 20 different factors that scholars say are important such as faculty research productivity, student completion rates and funding. The Research Rankings are based on measures of the departments research productivity. The Student Rankings are based on measures of student outcomes and quality of life while in the department. The Diversity Rankings are based on measures of diversity. The R-Rankings are a regression model trying to determine the departments that look most like the departments the Scholars Model likes.
 
Pros:
A lot of objective data went into these rankings.
The multi-dimensionality of the rankings allow you to weigh the different dimensions as you see fit. EG if you care more about research productivity than student outcomes, you can look at the Research Rankings and weigh them in your decision of where to apply to.
The S-Rankings most closely resemble the 5-year placement rates I saw when deciding where to apply of any ranking is (including US News and Oprisko)
Cons
Equivocal: there is a lot of noise, and they show it to you. Programs don't have ranks, but rather rank ranges and there are five different sets of rankings.
Infrequent: this set of rankings came out in 2010, the last NRC rankings before that came out in 1998. While I do not think that these rankings are so excited old that they are not useful, a lot can change in eight years.
 
2) US News Rankings
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/political-science-rankings
 
Methodology: US News simply surveys scholars on the department reputation, asking them to rank them on a 1 to 5 scale, and ranks departments based on the results
 
Pros:
The most widely used rankings
The only rankings that take reputation into account
Cons:
Reputation is the only factor taken into account, so it could be said that the rankings are completely subjective
 
3) Oprisko
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2303567
 
Methodology: Oprisko looks at outcomes- R1 placements. He counts the number of PhDs from a given institution currently working at a PhD granting institution in Political Science. He comes up with two rankings from that- the raw total number of placements and the number of placement divided by faculty members (placement efficiency)
 
Pros
Makes student outcomes front and center
 
Cons:
Only uses R1 placements
The main rankings does not control for program size. The placement efficiency rankings, however, do.
 
Stipend Information
 
http://www.phdstipends.com
 
This website provides a searchable database of funding offers from various departments. Just search the name of a University and “Political Science” and something should come up.
 
Some of this data may be outdated, so pay attention to the year it was posted. Some schools may not have any data posted on this site. Funding offers may vary.  Better information may be available on the departments webpage. Nonetheless this is a very useful resource for information about funding.
 
When will I hear back?
 
https://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/100449-decision-timelines-for-particular-universities-and-programs-derived-from-the-gradcafe-data-gregpa-distributions/?tab=comments#comment-1058542321
 
This link shows the timeline in which decisions have been made in the past. You could also search the gradcafe results forum to get a sense for when results will come through.
 
What should my Statement of Purpose look like?
 
http://grad.berkeley.edu/admissions/apply/statement-purpose/
 
Here is some useful advice for drafting a statement of purpose. Tailor it to your specific program. Mention Professors you'd like to work with and programs/institutes that might interest you. Also edit it as much as you possibly can. I made about ten drafts before finally sending it off.

 
GRE/GPA Info
 
Here is the GRE and GPA information on every school I could find. This data either is posted on the departments website or was about six months ago when I searched for it. Use this data to strategize where to apply. If you have a 155/155, it may not be wise to only apply to Stanford, Duke, Cal, UCSD and WashU, as a safety. However, do not let minor discrepancies discourage you from applying from your dream program. These stats are a small part of a number of factors that will determine your success in the application process. Use them to give you a rough idea of how you may fare, not as an absolute predictor of your success.
 
Stanford 163 q/166 v/3.8 GPA Recommended (Rec)
Duke 163 q/163 v/3.8 GPA Average (AVG)
UC Berkeley 161 q/158 v Rec
Northwestern 148 q/160 v Rec
Kansas 148 v/156 q/ 3.5 GPA Avg
UCSD 163 q/166 v/3.9 GPA Avg
Chicago 162 q/166 v/3.8 GPA Avg
Columbia 158 q/161 v/ 3.8 GPA Avg
Penn 161 q/165 v Avg
WashU-STL 161 q/159 v/3.9 GPA Avg
Colorado State 154 q/154 v/ 3.5 GPA Rec
UNLV 148 q/160 v/3.5 GPA Rec
Emory 160 q/160 v/ B+ (or Better) GPA Avg
Princeton 160 q/160 v/3.8 GPA Rec
Notre Dame 158 q/ 165 v Avg
Colorado 154 q/160 v Avg
Oregon 300 total GRE/3.0 GPA Rec
UC Riverside 307 total GRE/3.0 GPA Minimum
Washington 314 total GRE/3.4 GPA Rec
Oklahoma 154 q/153 v Avg.
Iowa 158 q/156 v/3.3 GPA Rec
Hawaii- No GRE required
Baylor 163 q/163 v Avg
Virginia 155 q/153 v Rec
USC 158 q/ 162 v Avg
NYU 165 q/162v/ 3.5 GPA Rec
Stony Brook 163 q/157 v Rec
 
Maximum Master's/Transfer Credit Accepted (in classes)
 
This is the maximum amount of Master's/Transfer credit programs will award. Please note that it is often up to the department's discretion to award or not award people credit for some or all of these courses. These decisions are also often not made until well after you have entered the program.
 
Princeton- Dept Discretion
Columbia- Dept Discretion
UCLA- 6 Classes
Cornell- 3 Classes
Northwestern- 6 Classes
Texas- None
Emory- Start at Advanced Standing
Penn- 4 Classes
Virginia- Advanced Standing
Vanderbilt- Advanced Standing
Washington- 2 Classes
Ohio State-10 Classes
UNC- 6 Classes
Wisconsin- None
Duke- Dept. Discretion
Pitt- 8 Classes
Missouri- 8 Classes
Notre Dame- 8 Classes
UChicago- Dept Discretion
NYU- 8 Classes
UC Irvine- 6 Classes
USC- 8 Classes
Colorado- 3 Classes
 
How to Figure Out Fit
 
This is where things get somewhat subjective. Professors often move around, retire, ect, so it is not wise to attend a university where you believe that you could only work with one professor. Whether you want to apply to a program with one person who really fits your interest and one other who is less of a good fit, but not as well, is a decision you have to make. Most suggest that there should be at least two who you can work with, I applied only to programs where there was no less than three who shared my interests.
 
Go to department websites. Look at the faculty in your subfield. Look at their CVs, search them on Google Scholar. I'd suggest keeping track of them in a notebook and giving points based on how you feel about their work in relation to your own. By the end of this process, you will have a sense of departments that are good for your interests and those that are not.
 
Placement
This is a tricky thing to measure, but you should absolutely take placement into account before you apply. Some departments have very good data on placements (Michigan, WashU, Notre Dame, UNC to name a few), but you have to dig for it. What will shock some is how little the percentage of graduates placed varies from school to school based on it's rank, particularly if you take attrition into account. Based on their own data, at Michigan (USN #4), a starting PhD student has about a 40 percent chance of finishing the program and finding a Tenure Track job within five years of degree completion. At WashU (#19), a starting PhD student has about a 40 percent chance of finishing their degree and finding a Tenure Track job within five years thereafter. What about Notre Dame (#37)? A starting PhD student has about a 40 percent chance of finishing their degree and finding a Tenure Track job within five years of completion. This is not to say that placement does not vary, just that rank is not as big of a factor in whether or not you will get a job as some say.
 
APSA’s studies of placement backs me up on this one:
http://www.apsanet.org/RESOURCES/Data-on-the-Profession
 
Some years the schools in the NRC’s 20-40 and 40-60 range actually have better initial placement rates than those in the 1-20 range.
 
Where rank makes a difference, this study as well as the Oprisko data shows, is the types of institutions one gets placed at. If you absolutely need to get a job at an R1 PhD granting institution or this whole endeavor is not worth it for you, you might be best sticking to top 20 programs (but still do your homework on their placement). Otherwise, if you are fine ending up at an R3, non selective liberal arts college or a directional school, you have a lot more options.
 
So how do you determine a schools placement if this data is not readily available to you? Look on the department’s placement page. You can divide the number of total placements (TT, TT+nonTT, R1 jobs, jobs you would want to take, however you want to break it down) over a set period of time (5-7 years is advisable) and either divide it by the total number of grad students currently in the program (data which you can also usually find on the departments website) or by the planned incoming cohort multiplied by the number of years you are counting placements for (again, 5-7 is advisable). Just make sure you keep your process consistent. There will be some inevitable noise, but this should do enough to let you know what programs look good and which you should stay away from.  You may find that some 'top’ programs do a bad job of placing people, whereas some 'midteirs’ do an excellent job. If you focus on R1 placements, you will likely find that the rankings are excellent predictors.
 
Conclusion
So that just about wraps it up. I hope this advice has been useful. Best of luck to all of you.

 

I'll be applying. 
Definitely applying to: Harvard Pop Health Social Behavioral Sciences, Brown Behavioral and Social Sciences, Yale Social Behavioral Sciences (maybe Chronic Disease Epidemiology though), Michigan Health Behavior & Health Education
Maybe applying to: Columbia Sociomedical Sciences, Hopkins Social and Behavioral Sciences, Pittsburgh Behavioral Sciences, UT Austin Human Development and Family Sciences (not public health) 
Currently working on getting my GRE scores up. 
Here's to the start of a looooong process.

I just had a professor who sits on admissions committees look over my SOP.

My introduction was talking about how I liked to go to museums as a child and was fascinated by the ancient world. He said that starting out like this is a huge mistake. Obviously if you are applying to study archaeology at the graduate level, it's pretty much assumed that you're fascinated by the ancient world and probably enjoy museums. But so do lots of people. What makes you unique. Attempt to illustrate your passion for the field without really telling some kind of silly story about your childhood. This is also an approach that many people take, and if you really want a strong SOP you'll find a better, more mature, and more creative way to say it.

The next point is, whether or not to talk about the negatives on your application. I wrote mine this year mentioning them extremely briefly and moving on. My thought behind this was to simply focus heavily on all the points that make me a competitive applicant. However, some graduate programs explicitly say that your SOP is the place on your application to mention your negatives and why the committee should overlook them. Obviously, this should not be the focus of your SOP. What the committees are looking for here is growth and improvement above all. Do not make excuses for poor grades, weak GRE scores, or a spotty work record. Do, however, point out how you have grown, how the committee can see improvement, and then highlight the things that make you a fabulous candidate.

The last thing I will mention is also very important, particularly for PhDs. Make sure that you know who you are applying to study under, and what your project is. Demonstrate that you would fit into the department like a glove and that you read Dr. Octopus' latest article on the newest theory, etc. etc. etc. Also, have a concise project in mind. Remember, you're not married to this idea, but you need to show the committee that you can ask the right kind of questions concerning your proposed research and that the project is something that the faculty could help you on based off of their interests and previous work. Do not make this project a carbon-copy of something they have previously accomplished, but a project that complements the research they have already performed. It is also highly advisable, since your job as a PhD student is essentially to perform lots of independent research, to demonstrate that you are capable of performing independent research. Although you want to show that you are a good fit for the program, you do not want to appear as though your adviser will have to hold your hand for the next five years.

Hope that helps! I'm no expert, but these are simply my thoughts on the process.

First, my credentials. Well. I can spell my own name, though I don't usually know exactly how old I am. I'm within a year or two, but I'm usually wrong until I've done some subtraction. I teach composition and like to write calculus equations on the board when I take classes in poetry writing. But, here's my real credentials: consider what is written herein in conjunction with what the various instructions on SOPs that you've read have said, with the requirements the program you are applying to has put forth, and with your own experience as a writer. Do you think I know what I'm talking about? Should you pay any attention to it? Is any of it useful?
 
Second, I'm not going to give you a formula for what the standard SOP is like, or a list of things the various thousands of admissions committees will be looking for. There are plenty of prescriptions on the internet, many of them written by professors who have presumably gotten sick of badly written SOPs.
 
Third, I'm not promising that SOP writing be easier after this. It'll be harder, actually. I'm not promising that you'll get in to any place you desire, or that there is any one best thing to put in the SOP to get noticed. That would be totally impossible. Each discipline has its own needs and values, as does each university, each department, and each faculty member on the admissions committee (adcomm). There is no one size and it doesn't fit most, let alone all. There are conventions (use Standard English, for one), but other than include your research interests, I won't advocate that any one thing is strictly necessary. I leave that up to the more knowledgeable.
 
The advice:
 
First thing is to deeply understand that you should write an SOP for each program. Most people take this to mean write one master SOP and then tweak as necessary to make the one SOP applicable to each university (U of A becomes U of B, Professor X becomes Professor Y). You can do that. You can be very successful doing that. You most likely, really shouldn't do it.
 
The next thing to understand is the SOP's purpose. Why do the adcomms want to see SOPs? Shouldn't transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a writing sample do it? After all, transcripts and samples show the actual scholarship and the letters verify it. The SOP isn't for showing scholarship off, or to act like a resume, or anything. So why do the adcomms want an SOP? Why are the SOPs one of those make-it-or-fail things? What is the SOP's purpose? In job hunting terms, the SOP is like a cover letter. The cover letter is to make clear connections between the resume and the job ad. For you, its primary purpose is to make the adcomm offer you admission with full funding. For the adcomm, its primary purpose is to help them see how you would fit into their program (make connections between their program and you). By fit, I mean do they have faculty (or enough faculty) in your area of research interest that can advise, mentor, supervise, and/or committee you through the program to get your degree? Do you have the kind of understanding of the discipline, your research interests, and their program that would make you successful? Do they have something to teach you? Offer you? What can you offer them? They want to brag on you as much as you want to brag about them. If they offer you admission, will you be a good scholar? A good student? Here is the most basic question the SOP should answer: What is it about you that makes you a better prospect than everyone else who's applying?
 
Understanding the SOP's purpose, in practical terms, means that you will know what to put into it and what to leave out of it. And how to phrase it.
 
So, with the purpose in mind, there comes the question: what should you put into it and leave out of it? What format should you use? (MLA? APA? Is footnoting okay?! What about citation?!) Should I stick in a personal story that everyone seems to recommend, except for the half that don't? My research interests? The story about why I got on F in that one, very important class? I'm not going to answer those questions because I can't. Every discipline and department is different. I will give you an answer you won't like: research. Find out the requirements each program you're interested in has for the SOP, think of the SOP's purpose: and now research.
 
Research is one of the basic keys to writing an SOP. It's no different than the writing sample you'll be including in your application packet. For each program you apply to, do some research. How much research you need to do depends on a lot of things, the least of which is your personality. More research does not automatically mean a better SOP. Less research doesn't automatically mean a better one, either. What makes the right amount of research? The ability to craft an SOP that is specific for the program that you're getting into. Here's some ideas (not an exhaustive, inclusive list of what to do) on what to research:
The program itself. Look at the recent graduates and, if possible, read their theses and/or dissertations, at least in part. The acknowledgements can give you an idea about the program's culture. The introduction can give you an idea about what kind of scholarship the program produces and expects. It will also, and this is very important, give you an idea as to how the program uses language. If you speak to them in their own language, that helps your case. You've likely done this, if not, seriously, you should have done this. Look at the program's website and read it all. What kind of classes are offered for both undergrad and grad. Who are the faculty, the tenured, the assistant, the visiting, the emeritus, and the graduate students. What kind of ties to the community (both academic and their local town) do they like to talk about? Do they talk about how their graduate students are working with community partners? Do they host conferences? What happened at the last one? This gives you a taste of the program's culture. The faculty. All of them that might be on the adcomm and the ones that are relevant or somewhat relevant to your interests. Crack open JSTOR etc. and search for recent faculty publications. If you're basing your interest on a faculty member on the interests they've got listed on the site and a reference to them in an article from a decade ago, or worse, only their reputation, you don't have a strong basis to establish clear reasons why they have anything to offer you. Read their recent publications, see who they name drop in terms of theory, other faculty, and so on. Make a list of what each faculty member can offer you in terms of research, not just the ones that are directly related to it. If you're into studying apples, but Dr. V works with oranges, think about how Dr. V's work might help you out. Take notes when you research. Each program has a bunch of people, and you're likely applying to multiple programs. It's easier to refer to notes than to go back and look it up all over again. What's happening in the field with your current research interests, if necessary. This is so you can situate your research interests in the discipline, and then situation your research interests in the program. You can just tell them what you're research interests are and leave the situating to them, but you can lose that chance to sell yourself as the best amongst the rest. Research you. Yup. You. Scribble out some lists or paragraphs or whatever that inventories you. Who are your influences? Who are the theorists you keep coming back to? Who are the theorists you loathe, mock, and/or ridicule? What are your research interests in general and specifically and anywhere in between? Some SOPs will need to be more general, some will need to be more specific. Length restrictions, what you found out about the program, the faculty, the state of the discipline, and so on, can alter this for you. What kind of scholar are you? Student? What's the difference? How do you manage your time? Stress? Health? Do you expect to bring your dog? Do you have health issues? Do you have any academic things that are a negative? If you do, how negative are they? It's easy to see that as an either it's entirely bad, or it's somewhere in the huge good category, but some things are negatives that need to be addressed for certain programs, while other negatives can be ignored, or you should discuss with the one relevant letter writer so they can address it. While Sam ultimately received a C in the Research Methods course, the grade doesn't reflect the actual scholarship as Sam fell ill during the mid-term and consequently failed it; my course policies do not permit re-taking the test. What are the good things about you? Not just the grades, awards, publications, and presentations, but also the character traits. What are you weaknesses? Don't do the job interview baloney, my greatest weakness is my perfectionism. Of course, the important, probably ought to be on the SOP questions: why grad school? What will you do with the degree you want? Why are into the research you're into? Why that particular school? Why are you worth admission and funding?
 
Research the assistanceships. Some SOPs will want you to write a bit about teaching or research with assistanceships in mind. So, do a bit of research on what these entail in the programs you're looking at. What do they do and how do they get it? Have you done assistanceships in the past? If so, what were they like? Do you have a teaching philosophy? If not, make one. Have you done anything that can be discussed in terms of the assistanceship? I taught kung-fu to white belt children, so I have teaching experience. I was part of the state herpetological society and went out to help them with their field counts twice a year. I learned that licking petrie dishes is always a bad idea, no matter how much they resemble pistachio ice cream.
 
Research SOPs. You're doing that, right? Go on to forums (like this one) and read the SOPs people have posted and then read the responses. Look particularly at SOPs in your discipline or related disciplines. Psychology might look at other social sciences. Physics might tell the joke about the Higgs Boson and Sunday mass. Bear in mind that the people responding to and/or criticizing the posted SOPs are likely not on an adcomm. Some have been  or will be, but it's not likely they'll be on the adcomm you're hoping will like you best. However, you can start to get a sense of what SOPs are like. What format is it in? Does yours look like everyone else's? Do you have the exact same opening sentence as half of the people hoping to get into a program in your discipline? I've always wanted to be a librarian since those wonderful, summer days I spent in my (relative of choice)'s home library. 
 
So, to take stock. First, understand the purpose. Second, research. A lot. Let the purpose of the SOP guide your research efforts.
 
Next, get the specific requirements for the SOP from each program. Make a list of similarities. If they all ask for a statement of your research interest, score! One sentence fits most! Most of them will be of different lengths and will have different ideas of what specific information they want. Most won't tell you enough, aside from length and one or two "should have" things. They mostly won't tell you if you should use APA or if you should footnote, or how to format it. Single space? Double space? They will tell you whether it should be on paper or what kind of file format to use. I have only one suggestion: consistency. Okay, two suggestions: unless otherwise specified, don't include anything other than the SOP. No bibliography or footnotes. If you quote or paraphrase someone, cite them in the text the way they do it in the average newspaper article. As Scooby says, "Ruh-roh!"
 
Now, start writing. Create something of a master SOP, or a set of master sentences for the SOPs. Some things should be in every one of them, like what your research interests are. Because length requirements are different for each program, you should work out more than one sentence or set of sentences for each thing you plan to put into more than one SOP. Have a more detailed explanation of your research interests and a more concise one. Even though this might be central and, perhaps, most important to the SOP, you don't want most of a short SOP taken up by one thing. Make these sentences do extra duties. If they can explain not only why you're into what you're into, but also why it's significant to the discipline/program, and how the program factors into it, bonus! The more functions one sentence can serve, with clear, readable logic, the more room you have in the length requirements to bring in other things. Think of this master SOP as more of a set of sentences you can hang on the individual SOP's unique structure. A flesh and skeleton metaphor can work here. You can order all SOPs at this point, you'll probably want to put research interests in the middle or toward the end, rather than in the first sentence, but the key here is that the skeleton of the individual SOP and most of its flesh will come from the needs of the program you're writing it for, not from some predetermined formula. No generically applicable, master SOP that has a few tweaks here and there.
 
Here's the thing. The SOP is one of the most important documents you'll write in your life. It's not something that should be done in a few hours, after looking at the program website and spending some time on the net searching for a how-to-write-an-SOP-guide. It takes work backed by research. The readers can tell quite easily how much research you've done on them by the way you structure and write your SOP. They can tell if you're sending out a generic SOP to several programs because it will be too general. You can't change faculty names in and out, along with a detail or two that makes it seem tailored to the program. The individual SOP should be tailored from the beginning. Some sentences won't change much, so you can pre-write them. But how they fit into each SOP, the reasoning you'll use to try to convince the adcomm that you're the best applicant, and the perspective you'll take all the way to the words you use should be done with the program in mind. It shouldn't be generic. Even if it doesn't seem noticeably generic to you, that doesn't mean that the adcomm won't notice it. They read many, many SOPs every year. People who read SOPs develop a sense about the generic, the cut and paste work.
 
How to name drop gracefully, or bring up the theory and histories and whatnot you're working with when there's only a teeny amount of space for everything? That's a bit easier than it might seem. It's not in the explanation; it's in the usage. If you can use the relevant theories and people and methodologies correctly in a sentence, you don't have to show the adcomm that you know how to use them, or how they're related, by explaining it. Trust them to have enough education to make a few connections for themselves when it comes to the discipline. Example: Novels such as Twilight exemplify how Marxist alienation can be applied to childbirth. My research interest lies in the alienation of women from the product of delivery in Modernist American fiction, such as Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. (Huh, I wonder if that would really work?) Two sentences and I've referenced theory, period, history, relevance for today, and some methodology (it's literature, not science). Use it, don't explain it.
 
If possible, have a professor you know read the SOP to your preferred school and give you some advice. They know more than most other groups of people. If not possible, your current university's writing center can help, or other people who are familiar with the field, or with writing. Your high school English teacher or your English major buddy can probably say something about your grammar, but might not be as helpful as expected. Example, in English, the convention is to speak of historical people in present tense. Shakespeare writes, "To be or not to be," because he thinks it is the question. History has kittens. Shakespeare has been dead for centuries, he can't write! Past tense! Shakespeare wrote, "To be or not to be," because thought it was the question. Someone in the field is preferable!
 
Finally, a word about my real credentials. The adcomm is going to do to your application what you've just done with this post. They are going to judge your credentials (your ethos, trustworthiness, veracity, credibility, knowledge, and so on) based on the impressions they get of you from what you've written. So, be knowledgeable about you, your field, and the program, and use that knowledge well.