catchermiscount

Your job is to survive all the things that will be thrown at you. For many, the first year can be a little existential. Don't put carts before horses; it's stressful, and it's tough, but it's rewarding, so you should stay in the moment as much as possible.

This is reasonably common given APSA's timing. I've had to do it twice. Biggest lesson: make sure they know you're not the professor! And you can never go wrong listening to Penelope.

It varies, and it's the rare Americanist that has to have the all-around technical training that an economist does. You may need to know one of the tools in the kit really well, but it's unlikely that it will be the core of your training the way it is in economics. Some of it varies on what it is that you want to study within American politics. If you're interested in behavior (voting, public opinion, political psychology, etc.), then you probably won't need very much theory in your life. But people that study opinion have to be well trained in the tools for analyzing survey data. People that study political psychology generally know something about psychometrics (much of which leverages your beloved singular value decomposition). And so on. Generally, folks that apply statistical tools to substantive problems don't have to prove anything about their models, because they use off-the-shelf tools readily accessible in Stata (which is still probably the most used package for applied folks) or R with well-known properties. Now, if you're interested in institutions, you might need to pick up a bit more theory. Obviously there are plenty of empirical folks in the study of just about any institution (though straight-up empirical bureaucracy folks are somewhat rarer than others), but so too are there theory folks. Consider the study of the American congress: there are all kinds of empirical people (those ideal points are coming from somewhere and being used for something), and there are all kinds of theory people (everybody Riker and Fenno trained). All else equal, folks that apply theory probably have to act a little more rigorously than folks that apply stats. Of course, there's always the qualitative route. It seems like saying that you study "American Political Development" is insider jargon for "I'm a qualitative, history-based Americanist." There are plenty of those folks. They use remarkably few proofs ;-). As for application tactics...well, let's jump off that bridge when we get to it.

And even if faculty members aren't active gradcafe participants, they often ask CERTAIN GRADUATE STUDENTS THAT THEY KNOW ARE FLIBBERTIGIBBETS for any information they may have uncovered on gradcafe. Of course, I'm not naming names.

Niemi and Weisberg also have a series of "Controversies in Voting Behavior" books with excerpts from bigger debates in the field. Obviously you'll eventually want to read the entire articles, but it's well collected. I think there's also a "Classics" series.

Regions? We don't need no regions! I DON'T HAVE TO SHOW YOU ANY STINKIN' REGIONS!!!

I'm not an Americanist, but my sense is that you can't go wrong with: (1) The American Voter (2) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (3) Voice and Equality That's a lot to chew on.

We have seven coming in. How to best classify them is anybody's guess.

I should clarify. My transfer was generally an upgrade, though there are areas of expertise where my first department is stronger than my second department. I transferred to a very small department known for a strong placement record, though the past few years have been rough (on everybody). At face value, my job prospects have probably improved (though with my own intellectual limitations, the difference between one and the other is probably nil). But most importantly, I do feel like I'm a much better political scientist than I would have been if I stayed. So too would my job prospects improved (under the same disclaimer) had I made a lateral move to a place with a better substantive fit. Think of it this way. I was transferring from a top 30-ish department with little presence at the time in IR/conflict, and I was interested in methods and (formal) theory. Had I made the something-close-to-lateral move to a top 30ish department with strengths in that kind of work (say, Rice), my job prospects would have improved if only because I would have gotten more training in what I wanted to study. It is easy to oversimplify things and say "all Berkeley people must be somewhat homogenous and all Harvard people must be somewhat homogenous and...." And obviously the school you go to matters on the job market, because overworked search committees need to use SOMETHING to simplify their complicated task. But you're still YOU. You want to be the best version of you. Transferring to Caltech or Rochester or some other program that did (surprisingly) well on that placement ranking isn't going to help your shot at a job very much if you're not interested in formal theory. One reason that those schools place well is that they train folks well in formal theory---so, if you're not going to be taking advantage of the value-add, why bother? There are times that you go to a job talk and ask yourself after: "how the hell did that person get into such a prestigious, competitive graduate program?" And it's because, for all the prestige of the university that adorns their PhD, they're still just themselves---a different, post-training version of themselves, but themselves nonetheless. All this should be taken for what it's worth. I've never landed a job (though I haven't tried just yet).

It was (much) harder. I pretty much thought I was hot feces---I had gotten all As in my methods classes at my first place and got 3 A-plusses at ICPSR in one semester and I pretty much thought taking another year of methods would be superfluous. The DGS at my new places was like "oh, well, how's about you just give it a try and we'll see about it later." Second class of the methods class, the prof walks in and is like "so what do you jokers know about sigma algebras?" I didn't ask about skipping classes any more after that. Note also that it wasn't just narrow-mindedness on my old department's place. They weren't being narrow-minded at all. When I emailed professors at other places prior to applying, many faculty said "look, you have a good reason here, but I don't want to be 'poaching' graduate students." Again, none of this is to say that you ought not transfer if it's what's best. I just think it's something only to be considered if necessary, though I am loyal to a fault.

It was (temporarily) dire because the only IR/conflict person on the faculty left for elsewhere. So, nobody to work with at all, unless I wanted to become an Americanist. As you might imagine, people were very understanding of my decision to leave...at least the faculty. I lost a few friends, and had to rebuild some other relationships. Then comes applying. You say to yourself "self, if I try to apply to transfer and don't get in anywhere, then I am going to be coming back here with my tail between by legs." And that's not fun. So, you don't just apply to places "above" where you were. You apply to peer institutions or better-fitting schools that might be ranked a bit lower. And then after all that, you get to be a first year again. And the whole "break them down so you can build them up" thing built into a first year---the thing that you're only supposed to go through once so that you come through humble but confident---is way worse the second time. So, yeah. I love where I am, and it's a much better professional fit for me, but I deeply regretting hurting friends and burning a few bridges with faculty, and the process itself was much more stressful than it was the first time around even though I was much better prepared for it. And my experience was one of the smoother ones---I've heard my share of horror stories of people asking for letters of recommendation to transfer only to hear "why do you want to transfer when you can work with me?" in some (angry) incarnation.

Indeed, International Security is a very strong, very good signal, but it's also a very specific signal. As the Rigor crowd and the Rigor Mortis crowd have established their detente, IS has kind of fallen off the map of folks that do "mainstream" IR scholarship. So, for a place like MIT, it is a very, very strong signal that you are an excellent fit. For a place like Rochester, it's still positive, but you'd need to show evidence that qualitative security studies aren't your intended bread and butter.

Unless you're "planning" on an advisor leaving or something like that, "planning" on transferring isn't the best idea. It's a truly un-fun process even if you have a good explanation as to why you want (really, need) to transfer. It's also inefficient. The reason that you transfer from school X to school Y is to be more like somebody that went to school Y than school X. Which is to say: you'll probably want to take as many classes as you can to get the value-add of school Y. You're starting a fresh start of relationships---not only with faculty, but also with grad students, who teach you as much as faculty do. If a given department has a "brand," then it takes time to be the sort of person that represents the brand. I absolutely would transfer again, and I'd pick the place I transferred to. I also would take the whole courseload again (which I did). But that doesn't mean it's been all smiles, and if the situation at my former home hadn't been so dire, I might not be so pleased with my decision.

Thankfully, your files will be read by human beings and not by robots. Human beings---especially those that are smart and critical enough to land jobs at PhD-granting institutions---typically have some amount of judgment, and they'd much rather read a 21 page with the list of references than a 20 page paper not knowing who got cited. In my department (and at many others), the admission committee sends around a short paragraph about each of the admitted applicants to prepare us for interactions. This year, half of the blurbs made mention of the writing sample. Of those, over half made mention of the kind of analysis in the writing sample (formal theory, large-N empirical, whatever). This is typical for our annual blurbs. So, the writing sample at least registers enough to be mentioned in something like that. Our department is weird in a lot of ways, but I think that's probably similar across departments. For those of you that want to do what might be called orthodox, modern, non-philosophical work (that is, that want to do data analysis or formal theory or something else along those lines), using technique in your writing sample is neither necessary nor sufficient for admission, but it does send a signal that you have some sense of what you're getting yourself into. Now, the best you can do is act on an expectation about a committee's relative weighting of things in your profile. As an extreme example, one of the professors with whom I'm close here doesn't care very much about the SoP, because a vast majority of incoming students have no idea what the business really looks like or what they really want to study. If your dissertation ends up looking like what you mentioned in your SoP, then either (1) you got lucky, or (2) you didn't get a whole lot of value added out of your graduate training. So, the professor looks at the writing sample hard to see whether you can write, can think critically, can thoughtfully apply technique to an interesting question. This professor is an outlier, and I'm NOT advocating any given strategy. On subject: the writing sample is a chance to do a number of things. One thing might be to demonstrate that you have a relatively thorough understanding of an orthodox literature in political science. Another might be that you can come up with novel things. Those are both good goals, and sometimes they work against one another. That's fine. The most important thing is to demonstrate that you can think and write. One of our admitted applicants this year hadn't ever taken political science and had advanced degrees in hard sciences. The writing sample was about hard science. So, yeah. On a completely trivial note: it's never too early to work on LaTeXing your writing sample. It sends a weakly positive signal.

Well then yes, wish away like it's going out of style.

Don't wish away your summers, kiddies. I know it's hard and you're excited. But, trust me, there are plenty of us that would kill to be able to spend time with family and friends the way that many folks get to the summer before grad school.

Jazzrap is right to mention that theory isn't just about math. It's very much a way of thinking about things. But, many theory classes are all about math, be they "how to do theory" or "how to read important theory papers." I am a student at one of the schools jazzrap enumerated, and we don't have any mathematical prerequisites for our theory sequence. We've got a two-week math boot camp that brings you up to speed on basics like sets, functions, sequences and series, continuity, and derivatives and integrals. The theory sequence itself starts with a few weeks of formal logic and builds up from there. Think of it this way. If you read Simon and Blume's textbook, Mathematics for Economists, they refer to the chapters on optimization as the heart of the book. After all, it's the heart of theory---people are maximizing something more often than not. To understand optimization, you need to understand functions, continuity, and enough calculus to get first- and second-order conditions (derivatives, understanding Hessians and so on). You might also need to know something about concavity and quasi-concavity for basic programming issues. But no class I can think of takes that kind of knowledge as given. The point of graduate training is...you know...training. Now, if you intend to be a capital-T Theorist, you might come in with more knowledge. But the average applied user can certainly pick that much up while being trained. How well you can balance that with design at once...who knows. We take four classes per semester in the first year---one methods, one theory, one philosophy or research design, and one substantive. It can be a bit of a time crunch, to be sure. You might not want to self-inflict that much work.

And to answer your question: you can do design, stats, and theory in one semester, though it'd be pretty tough.

Don't listen to anything in this thread so far. Formal modeling is when you create and analyze a mathematical model of behavior of some kind. It need not be game theoretic or social choice theoretic, though those are both very prominent in the business. It could be something as simple as the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a 2 by 2 strategic form game that most incoming students have heard of. The Prisoner's Dilemma, despite being really simple, can be used to develop all sorts of insights about public good provision, and more complicated models of public good provision often boil down to Prisoner's Dilemma logic. And so on. A formal model, naively, has nothing to do with statistics. People start seeing Greek letters and they figure "oh, quantitative is quantitative." Not so. Consider the social choice literature best represented by its exemplar, Arrow's Theorem. Arrow's Theorem has nothing to do with the "real world." It's not an empirical model at all. There is no "testing" it to see whether or not it comports with the real world, because it isn't meant to and doesn't generate testable hypotheses. Now, many people in political science would say that this means that Arrow's Theorem is flawed in that it doesn't tell us anything about the real world. You might have seen arguments like that in your undergraduate courses---there's a well known book entitled Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory that goes into it in great detail. Note also that not all quantitative analysis is alike: Don Green, one of the authors of PRCT, has been highly influential by promoting field experiments and other causal research designs, and many of his influential papers are free of regression analysis. After all, randomization does a lot of work if you let it. Of course, not all formal models are like Arrow's Theorem (if only!). For starters, Arrow's Theorem isn't game theoretic, and most applications of formal theory in political science are in fact game theoretic. Not all of these are testable, either. For example, James Fearon famously uses game theory to tease out three "Rationalist Explanations for War." Very simple bargaining models, but certainly game theoretic. He uses them to keep his logic tight and to facilitate the exposition---it's not like he gives us "Fearon's Theorem" out of it. Some folks have tried testing Fearon's arguments, but it's hard to say "oh man, I just read Fearon's paper, and I got these hypotheses out of it." In the study of American politics, you get a similar feel from the work of Riker, Shepsle, Ordeshook, Schofield, Calvert, McKevley, and so many others. They're using formal models to describe and explain. Often what they're doing interfaces with political philosophy as much as it does with "modern," empirical social science. So, formal models are not necessarily empirical, and not all Greek letters are the same. One question that the business is grappling with is how formal theory informs empirical analysis. You may have heard of the EITM (Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models) project, which offers summer courses and support. While much of that is just dedicated toward good formal modeling, the name of the project itself should tell you what the idea is: develop a formal model, derive testable empirical hypotheses, and test those assumptions. For example, you might solve a model to determine the equilibrium expression of one parameter as a function of other parameters. Then you can take a partial derivative of that function and determine whether it is positive or negative, which is an empirical hypothesis that can be tested in a regression setting. With apologies, some of the people that have taught me don't like that idea very much. You might look into their book, which is entitled A Model Discipline. One might also wonder how formal models can inform causal empirical models, which is a very difficult question to answer (and one I've been chewing on for a while---the answer gets messy in a hurry). The use of such models in economics is pretty much unquestioned. You don't have to be a super duper technician to be able to use or create basic models. Hell, deriving a demand function is formal modeling. Many famous economists use relatively simple formal models to make very sophisticated arguments. Stiglitz comes immediately to mind. Mancur Olson kinda sorta used formal models, though his arguments inspired many formal modelers. For a really cool paper in that vein, you might look for Esteban and Ray's "The Group Size Paradox Revisited," which is kind of microeconomic theory and kind of game theory. OK, that's more answer than you wanted, but this is a hobby horse of mine and I'm sitting around convalescing after surgery anyway. If you're looking to read some formal work, you might look into some basic social choice stuff (even though it isn't all that applicable now). Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values, Riker's Liberalism versus Populism, and Ordeshook's Game Theory and Political Theory are nice books. To see a very direct interface between formal theory and political philosophy, you might read some of Sen's Rationality and Freedom. Or even more directly, you might skim some (deep, technical) work by John Harsanyi, who basically developed models aimed at getting after Rawls' initial position. Fearon's famous "Rationalist Explanations for War" is an amazing paper always worth reading, and again, you'll note that it interfaces with qualitative work---this time history. Many, many formal folks in IR and comparative have done similar things with history or qualitative security studies; many of them cite Schelling or Clausewitz or Waltz. Indeed, two of the most prominent formal modelers in IR---James Fearon and Robert Powell---were Waltz students. To see some argumentation and testing, you might look at Krehbiel's Pivotal Politics versus Cox and McCubbin's Legislative Leviathan. Those guys disagree about how to model Congress, and as such disagree about predictions, and as such disagree about empirics. If you have more specific questions, feel free to IM with the sort of things you like reading and I'll see what I can come up with.

If you can get away with substitution, you might prefer formal theory to statistical methods. Given your interests, you'll probably get more use out of Arrow's Theorem or McKelvey's Chaos Theorem or whatever than you will out of diagnosing and modeling heteroskedasticity. If you're interested in reading some more formal-theory-as-political-philosophy stuff, feel free to IM me with your more specific interests and I'll see if I can scrounge anything good up.

Ha, well, you quickly learn that you don't \emph{have} to do anything. If you \emph{want} to learn LaTeX, it's not that hard. In general, it's much easier to demonstrate craftsmanship with the more flexible tool. How much you value craftsmanship is a function of your own subjective taste parameters; the same goes for your willingness to take on costs of learning. The same will go for learning techniques not explicitly taught in classes, learning a given literature more thoroughly than one does in any given class, and so on. You're right in general, though: LaTeX's advantages aren't going to be on things like ease of use or "hot-key"-ability. But that doesn't mean it isn't faster a lot of the time. Here is a quick example of a situation where using LaTeX is preferable, and here is the TeX file I used to make it. There are other benefits. It's easier to manage very large documents (like if you're writing a dissertation or a book). It's easier to make high-quality presentation slides through the Beamer environment. It encourages a more structured writing process. It gets theorem, propositions, and lemmata right. You can embed vector graphics with ease. It's much easier to get bibliographies right with BiBTeX. You can use fancy, high quality fonts with XeTeX. It gets ligatures right. And so on. So, while you lose a lot of the front-end ease, you get a lot of value on the back end.

This is not embarrassing at all. LaTeX (pronounced LAY-teck) is a document preparation system that builds on the old TeX type setting program developed by Donald Knuth (a giant in computer science). Many folks in the field---but definitely not all---use it for their papers. There's a bit of a learning curve, as it isn't WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) like, say, MS Word is. So, instead of sitting and typing in what you'd like to write, there's a bit of technical formatting going on. For example, suppose that you wanted to italicize a word. In MS Word, you'd type the word, highlight it, and click a button. In LaTeX, you just type \emph{word}. And then you have it compile and it spits out a .dvi or a .pdf or whatever. It produces beautiful documents, and once you get over the learning curve, it's a lot easier for writing papers that involve any amount of mathematical notation. As such it's become something of a signal among folks that do technical work---if it's not in LaTeX, it must be dumb. Yet, some of the very smartest technicians still use MS Word, so it shouldn't be taken TOO seriously. It is also possible to incorporate your LaTeX code and your R code with one another so that you dynamically update your documents as results change. That comes from a package called Sweave. To use LaTeX, you'll need to download a distribution (e.g. MiKTeX). You'll also probably want to get a text editor (e.g. WinEdt or the cult favorite, emacs). We teach LaTeX to the first years through our computing lab. You can find old lecture notes here.

So long as by "laying around the house watching sports" you mean "watching Sid raise the cup" and "watching Taillon and Cole take us to the promised land," it sounds like we're simpatico.

Congratulations on graduating. For starters, this summer should generally be spent doing all that you can to be in a happy, healthy initial position for graduate school. Many people are excited to begin, but graduate studies are best handled in graduate school. You need not arrive at your campus with an exhaustive list of research questions and interests. The point of sitting in seminars is to learn from and be influenced by your professors and fellow graduate students (likewise, you're supposed to help teach them as well!). You don't have to know everything in every journal in question. It sounds like you're already quite familiar with some of the literatures in the field, which is a very good start. Few articles feature a full, inclusive literature review with critical thoughts---you just cite the stuff you need to cite and then mention the gap that you're trying to fill. So, for a favorite article, go back and look at all of the articles it cites in the lit review. Surely you can add your own thoughts to the whole thing. If you wonder which journals are most important in IR...for starters, the top three general journals (American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics) all have IR articles, though the Journal of Politics tends to be the least "generalist" of the general journals. International Organization is clearly the leading IR specialty journal, and it features articles on both conflict and IPE. The flavor has been especially IPEish of late. International Studies Quarterly is a step down from IO. The Journal of Conflict Resolution is roughly on par with ISQ and mostly features articles that study conflict using statistical techniques, though the occasional formal theory paper slips in. If you stick to that set of journals, you'll have plenty of high-quality research to read. If you're so inclined, you might pick up Jeff Gill's book on math for political science, the Simon and Blume book on math for economics, or some other foundational math book. Also if you're so inclined, you might download R (it's free) and work through some tutorials. Also if you're so inclined, you might learn a little bit about typesetting in LaTeX (it's free). But mostly, enjoy the people you care about and have fun. Read some fiction or interesting non-fiction. You'll miss the chance to do so soon enough.

That sounds about right---I would also suggest rounding up ;-).