munch22

No decisions would have been made at this point. Two years of no cohort would really throw a program off so I doubt this will happen again.

I apologize - I missed your last sentence there. I do want to focus on your last point though, because it is a serious problem with applicants and academia in general: students should not feel bad getting paid more. Would you say the same thing to someone asking for a raise in the private sector? Many PhD applicants are so grateful to have funding, they accept extremely low offers. Getting rid of the stigma in grad school about asking for more funding is really important. The real value of grad wages has gone down significantly over the last 20 years. Applicants should feel comfortable asking for money, even if they don’t “need it”.

This isn’t how department funding works. In no world is someone denied promotions or administrative staff are not laid off so a grad student can come to a school with a few thousand dollars more. I don’t think there is any downside to list other schools. And you should use these other offers to leverage more funding (in a respectful way of course). Letting them know you are applying to other schools is beneficial in this process.

They just want you to focus mainly on yourself. Talk about your own work and what you are interested and how that fits within the broader department strengths. There is no need to talk about historical components.

These jobs do exist. I worked in one. They will not be posted every second of everyday, but they are out there and plentiful. They just take a little bit of digging. I don’t think you should be so dismissive. OP’s original question was “what more can I do to become a more competitive applicant”. Industry is a great path for some people, but for many, especially someone who studied outside the US, developing a network and working with known quantities is one of the most beneficial things you can do. Hence why I am recommending work at an academic institution over industry. The faculty and work you do will be much more known among those on admissions committees. Further, I think you need to drop the notion of what you think an RA is. Yes, undergrad RAs do menial data collection most of the time. A full time job at one of these academic roles are way more involved and generally can pay similarly to some roles in industry. I think you just need to chill out with your responses a little bit. I am not trying to bash on industry because I don’t have personal experience with it. Rather I’m just trying to explain the benefits of working full time at a research institution. Don’t bash it or dismiss my points because you have no familiarity with a different path you didn’t take.

With admissions getting more and more competitive, yes research experience or an MA will become the norm, but the more the better. There is an added benefit of more research experience, both in terms of having a better substantive knowledge base, being more competitive for admissions, and more prepared for research once arriving. The more research experience, the better. The number of admitted students to top 20 programs is probably going to be cut in half over these couple of years. The places I was suggesting are those such as Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences or Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. There are numerous other institutes of this kind across the country that have large scale research projects on grants requiring full time employees doing research related work.

I strongly disagree with this. First, there are plenty of RA or research related roles at a number of universities that are not specifically working for professors. Look at different universities that have social science research institutes. Even if it is not in political science explicitly, learning something substantive about another area is really useful and will give you great research experience. Second, there was some discussion on academic twitter yesterday about the increasing importance of research in PhD applications. The application process is going to get significantly more competitive these next couple of years. As mentioned by a few (see below), having significant research experience is becoming the norm. You and other should focus on getting research experience in an academic setting as an RA even if it not for a faculty member directly.

Can you send a link? I haven’t seen anything on this and don’t think it’s correct given they didn’t have a cohort last year.

I disagree. Yes, 165 is a great score. but I think the likelihood of benefiting from your quant score is lower than the likelihood of being dinged for a low verbal score. In most years, yes a good quant score is important. But this year is different in that you have the opportunity to not send anything. In my opinion, the risk outweighs the reward, especially as an international student.

This is such a weird year, I think the only people who will be able to tell you that are faculty on the committee after the fact. If you have above average scores for that school, definitely send them. If not, it’s really hard to know. I don’t think anyone on here actually has an answer.

If it doesn’t soecify length, 2 pages/1000 words is generally what people consider the maximum (single spaced). Most political science PhD programs will specify that so I think it’s a good guide to go by if there is no listed maximum. I agree concise is better, but I disagree with the notion that shorter is always better. You need to be able to convey your research interests, fit, etc. Thats hard (if not impossible) to do in fewer than 500 words with a high level of detail.

Short answer: don’t do it. These programs don’t provide much in way of experience/learning and are mostly cash draws for these schools. It just adds a year or two that you are in school. Go out and try to build some knowledge in something related to your research interests. Something people don’t talk about before applying is how important it is to have some sort of outside expertise or knowledge that can help inform your research. If you don’t get in this cycle and know research/phd, this is a great way to spend a gap year.

Applications open at the graduate school level. Decisions on admissions/how many to take For each subfield/whether to take students are all at the department level. The two may not happen at the same time. Pretty sure Duke made the decision last year in October.

The gpa cutoff is not that high (if there is one at all). They’ll look at both the number and contextualize it based on classes taken.

It has less to do with endowments and more to do with the impending issue of current students going on the academic job market that is now virtually non existent. Schools are suspending admissions to provide further funding for current students in many cases, although budget issues are making this problem even worse. And more programs will be coming with suspending admissions. Almost all will be cutting cohort sizes. Departments are presumably still make decisions on this and well have a better picture come late October.