irinmn

I used to live in the East Bay near Berkeley. This is accurate. One of the more affordable cities in the East Bay is Vallejo, just north of Berkeley. East of Vallejo, a lot of Berkeley grad students live in Fairfield and Davis, and my brother actually had grad TA's several times who were UC Davis students. I'm not sure how it works but I guess UC Davis students can accept TAships at Cal during the summer terms and they sometimes do and just commute every day on the Amtrak commuter. Davis is a lot closer than Sacramento and would at least put you in another college town. Also, if you're having trouble finding housing, consider International House. It's a bit more affordable and flexible housing than the grad student housing and it's on the Berkeley campus, next to the football stadium.

Understand completely. I have an old undergrad classmate from a small farm town in the middle of the valley that was something like 86% Hispanic. I went home with him one weekend and there were people in his town who had never met an Asian in person. I only lived in LA and the Bay Area, which really are very diverse. There are towns in both areas where African Americans are the majority of the population. Rev. King actually spoke on the Berkeley campus about a year after the Black Panther Party was formed in neighboring Oakland. Even the Black Panther movie had Oakland Easter eggs all over the place! I'm sure you already know all of this so I don't mean this in a daft way, I'm just saying, give the Bay Area a chance again if you can

You're right about everything you are saying. Just curious, why apply to Concordia? I don't think it's ranked better than in the 600's in world rankings. It's not even in the top 5 polisci PhD programs in Canada in rankings.

I understand, no worries! Where are you on the west coast? I'm Asian and I guess I don't really feel that but if you're somewhere like eastern Oregon then I understand. I'm surprised though to hear you say that given that LA and the East Bay have large black populations.

Respectfully, it is overpriced but Berkeley is anything but a "garbage town". I've got family that went to Cal and I grew up near there. It's a great city/area. The food, the bars, the nightlife, the proximity to everything else the Bay Area has to offer, the great public transportation, the redwood covered hills directly behind the campus. It's not Palo Alto but it sure is a beautiful place, and on most days from most of the eastern part of the campus, you've got a panoramic view of the Bay Area including downtown San Francisco, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a beautiful place. I'm sorry for the folks that didn't get in, but no need to denigrate a great city.

@BrownSugar I'll probably get trolled pretty bad on here for saying this but I think you should go to USC. Based on your stated goals, you don't really plan on trying for a TT job in the USA anyway, so ranking and networking/connections aren't nearly as important as it might otherwise be. Yes, Chicago is higher ranked by everyone in just about every metric. With that said, USC is no slouch. It's not like it's a bad school. You know what else? This is 5 years of your life that you'll never get back. It's a huge investment in time. Quality of life is so important. Chicago is a beautiful, great city, but it can't match the quality of life of Southern California. You'll never have to shovel snow in the winter or worry about slipping on ice covered streets, you can spend your Christmas break a few miles from the USC campus at the beach in Santa Monica or Malibu, and you'll be able to see palm trees from your classroom. You'll be living in a place where you can go skiing/snowboarding and surfing in the same day this time of year. You can't do either in a day anywhere near Chicago most of the time. I'm not trying to take away from what everyone else is saying on here because they're right. Chicago is the best choice if you plan on staying here and going into academia. If you don't, choose the place you want to spend 5 years of your life in the most.

Yeah I'm thinking I'll stick with the MPP being more marketable right now bit. Say whatever you want. If you come from an ivy or somewhere like Michigan or Berkeley, in this economy and with the surplus of MBA's, I'd still rather have an MPP. As far as the research bit, I guess some are, some are not. Seems pretty clear that some are explicitly calling themselves research degrees. This entire discussion has gone way beyond what I intended, which was to say that an MPP from UCSD is a great option to have and I'd rather be doing that than going through an MBA, law school or some other kind of terminal professional degree.

1. My brother went to the Goldman school at UC Berkeley for his MPP and it was a 2-year research based degree that prepared him for policy PhD's. I'm sorry if I used a brush that was too broad with regards to the MPP but I noted that with the top schools, it's research based. I was basing that on Cal. This doesn't make what I said wrong. 2. So much of what you say in #2 is subjective, wrong and misleading. MBA's aren't exactly in high demand right now. From what I've seen in the private sector, MPP's are.

You just made my night with that...

@BrownSugar congratulations again on USC. I was actually born at USC Medical Center and grew up not far from the campus. It's a beautiful school in a beautiful city. You can't quite beat the quality of life there combined with SC's academic reputation. If you have any questions about the area, let me know

Hey everybody. Echoing what others ave said on here, it's really important to recognize how stressful this time is and to find ways to cope with anxiety and nerves in a healthy way if possible. We're all stressed. Some of us have family members dying or recently passed that we're grieving on top of having to deal with the emotions of getting admissions decisions or waiting. Everyone on here is human (except for the bots). Unless you're a bot, please, take care of yourself and let's all treat each other with respect and dignity on here.

+1. My brother has an MPP. If you get it from a good department in the US, it's worth a lot. Most top-tier American MPP's are 2-year research degrees, they are not professional "terminal" degrees. An MPP is like a research based master's degree but worth so much more because the professional world (particularly civil service, consulting and corporations) view MPP's significantly more favorably than an MA/MS degree. When everything else is equal, MPP's are actually becoming more valuable than MBA's. In your case @soep13 you should seriously consider this. UCSD is excellent both academically and in terms of quality of life (hello La Jolla). Getting an MPP there will allow you to network and make contacts if you want to try again for the PhD, and an MPP specifically will gear you towards pure public policy PhD's as well as polisci/government PhD's. I try to tell everyone to get an MPP over an MS in Political Science because at least with an MPP you can get a job easily if you don't stay in academia.

Understand your point of view because none of us want to see schools we applied to sending out notifications without us receiving anything, but with that said, we are in unprecedented times so I'm not sure using the timelines from previous admissions cycles is as valid this year. Even this time last year when COVID was just coming on the radar, there were multiple examples of schools either admitting earlier or later than previous years. The school I did my master's at sent out its first batch of PhD acceptances a full month early last year. With several people on here confirming they received the aforementioned acceptance/denial decisions, I'd lean against calling today's grad cafe decisions 'spam'.

Not sure where you heard/read that there are fewer applications but this would contradict history. Applications usually increase during recessions and decrease when the economy is good. See: https://news.stanford.edu/2015/03/06/higher-ed-hoxby-030615/ Not sure why it would be any different this time. The exception is if the most optimistic of economic forecasts is accurate and we have a fast recovery.

During the last recession, applications rose. There is a wealth of material online on the effects of the last recession on academia. An economist at Stanford, Caroline Hoxby, is probably my favourite researcher on this. (https://news.stanford.edu/2015/03/06/higher-ed-hoxby-030615/) If anyone wants some insight into how similar things were here for PhD applicants during the last recession in 2008, read this: