eggsalad14

In at Ohio State! Saw someone else on the survey section report a decision and checked my own.

Things like the ability to get a master's degree in xyz specialty (mostly quant things like statistics or data science but maybe also stuff like a comm master's) on the other hand, can really helping the non academic job market.

Probably not too much. You want to go somewhere strong in the fields you're interested in, and those schools are more likely to offer that certificate. But you shouldn't necessarily choose the school with the certificate if you're choosing in between two approximately strong schools in your specialties.

It's likely that that's nearly, if not all of those they'll accept (before the potential March waitlist accepts anyways). It looks like last year according to someone's post in the survey section, they had a different method of accepting people, and invited 40 to campus to interview and accepted 34. So if 30 people already received acceptances, that's likely it.

Not me, but the results look like there was at least a wave of Rice rejections sent out.

Oh cool, I didn't see that edit! Thanks for that.

The Ohio State grad school director came on here and said that they're not going to have decisions until mid late February (I think). Probably no interview requests immediately soon.

Yeah assuming your statement of purpose and LORs are fine, you're in pretty good shape for schools at that caliber. Reiterating what someone else said, schools at 20-40 would also probably be within your reachable range given your GRE and gpa. I worry about funding at the schools you've applied to. I know the new school is bad with funding usually. Plus they're all pretty small programs, which means some years they'll enroll very few (if any!) students. Hopefully things will work out for you this year, but if they don't, definitely apply more ambitiously and widely.

It's pretty obvious that the Boulder data is a lot less comprehensive (and is the result of cherry picking) than the UT data. This link is a lot more representative if what Colorado placement actually is like. Also worth noting that the one elite placement in the last few years (the uchicago guy) is in public administration and not political science, and really isn't directly comparable because almost all "top ranked" Poli sci programs are independent from the schools public administration program. https://www.colorado.edu/polisci/graduate/graduate-employment/graduate-placement?category=324

I guess I want to qualify what I first said a little bit. There are notable exceptions to this rule when a school is particularly good at one or two things and mediocre (relative to the one thing they're fantastic at) at most other things. These include: Brown for theory Notre Dame for theory Stony Brook for political psychology To an extent, Rochester for game theory For Rochester and stony Brook at least, the fact that everyone who goes there does that one topic (and does it very well) hurts them in the overall rankings, despite excellent placement. Am I trying to say that in any case your chances at a TT are better at Boulder than Austin? No. But unless there's a compelling reason such as "Boulder has the best comparitavist working on really niche topic you're interested in and is highly esteemed by all her peers" there's little reason to expect that your employment outcome coming out of Boulder with be better than from Austin.

First off, I think most political scientists will take some offense to you calling the field humanities instead of social science. We use the scientific method, we use quantitative methods of analysis, our research gets funded by the NSF. That said, if a school does interview but not systematically, the kind of student that gets admitted without an interview is one (or more) of the following 1. So good that they're sure an interview would be useless 2. The faculty member assigned to potentially interviewing doesn't want to/have time to interview 3. In rare cases, might have originally been a border reject case but the school has low yield, and gets a spot despite not being in the original accept pile 4. If interviews are used to learn more about candidates, the faculty member decides they know all they need to know about the candidate (I've heard of places only interviewing international students because their undergrad careers are harder to decipher)

Yes, 100 out of 100 times yes better rank tends to mean better placement. Can you show me what data you have that says UT has worse placent than Boulder? I have a hard time believing it and suspect data issues may be at play.

I mean I'm 100% sure you're capable of getting 165+ with enough practice, even though there is a lot of pesky stuff from high school on it. You have the time so if you're not doing too much over the summer I'd totally recommend trying it out. I found the math section really fun to study for and it sounds like it wouldn't be pure agony for you.

You're probably golden with a profile like that + RBSI + first gen minority. Especially if the articles are published in peer-reviewed journals. Like the only thing I can see you doing to make your profile even better would be to shoot for a higher Q score, but even then you've proved you can do math with your actual math classes so it's probably not that important.

I mean, it can't be a bad thing. There are basically a few cases here: 1. Worst case: They're asking for them from everybody, and just haven't updated their website in a while 2. You're a fringe case, and a strong last semester would help your case. 3. Your undergrad transcript doesn't give all the info they want about your academic background (possible because I think you were an international undergrad student), and they think they'll be able to understand more if they have that info. 4. They're seriously considering accepting you, but want more information. We can't say it's good. But it's not bad.

Thanks for the info. I was hoping Ohio State would be one of the first to notify, but I'm glad I know when to expect something instead of being a nervous wreck for a month.

It's also worth noting that a lot of schools don't do math camps, and instead throw you in a math for social scientists seminar with the rest of your cohort where you go over the traditional math camp stuff but probably in better detail

I think most places I've seen that have math camps have them for around a week, I think right before classes start.

For OSU, it seems like interviews are at the discretion of individual faculty members. That is, a number are admitted at the regular admit time (so not off some unofficial waitlist).

It's not worth emailing them unless you actually have something of value to say to them. The purpose of emailing in the sciences is that PI's lab is almost directly admitting and funding the students, and you need to make sure that the PI is indeed taking students in the next academic year. Students in political science are always funded by the institution or department. I've never heard a professor be happy about emails like "hey I applied to your University and I want to work with you." At best it's a little annoying and maybe reply with "cool, lmk if you get in, I don't sit on admissions so I can't do anything now."

That's a good change in the verbal and I'm very sure that your previous low verbal+foreign bachelor's degree was probably partly what was holding you back. AWA I've heard matters less when there are writing samples involved and tbh can easily be gamed.

Out of curiosity, were your GRE scores the same as they are now when you applied a couple years ago? Did you get feedback on why you might've been rejected the first time around? I'm sure your application is much stronger this time around, especially with a degree from an English speaking country and conference attendence and papers

Aren't most of the deadlines past due anyways (subsequently meaning that even if there were big red flag deficiencies in your profile, there'd be nothing you can do about it anyways)? Your profile looks fine and competitive enough for everywhere. If your fit is good with the faculty, your LORs say good things, and you didn't mess up badly in your statement of purpose, I'd be surprised if your didn't get in somewhere. GRE Q is good. GRE V is a little low for Harvard and MIT, but not so low that you'll get disqualified on the basis of it in the first eliminating round. GRE is much higher than average for everywhere else (maybe not Brown but that's because theorists like Brown). To me it feels odd that you don't really have anywhere in the 10-30 ranking range, which I think is the range you should be targeting. Anything in the top 10 is more or less a crapshoot for anyone, and things ranked beneath 30 or 40 might think that you're not that serious an applicant because your profile is much better than average.

A lot of schools don't match GRE scores to applications until after the deadline. I'm not sure about the exact mechanics of GRE score matching but I'd wager it's probably easier to do one data pull and one data process at once than multiple of them every day or something. Contacting will probably do more harm than good. It's not like if they did consider your app to be late, that pleading on the phone with an overworked admin assistant or an overworked grad director is going to play out that well.

I'd trust what you find on the results section more than the OP's methodology, as it's possible that there wasn't enough posted data on uchicago to get the initial (and probably largest) wave of acceptances. If they tended to come in early February they probably will come in early February. If there's demand for it, I can crawl through the results page for all the OP's schools later this week (or if someone else wants to do that that'd be cool too lol)