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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:

I'm not at UNC but I think this will be a continuing possibility for multiple programs/departments/schools. No one knows what is ahead right now. Even with the vaccine, the economic forecast seems to be ranging from a partial recovery beginning in 2021 to a prolonged and worsening recession that could last for years. Most schools will hedge their bets. I would imagine that many will focus on professional/terminal degrees in the short term. Professional programs are unpopular when the economy is doing well but they are cash cows when there's an economic downturn; everyone wants to be a lawyer or an MBA when the job market sucks, even if it's a $200k investment that won't pay off. Not trying to fear monger or scare anyone off, just remembering what happened during the last recession.

I'll preface my answers by saying that I came into the experience at Cambridge expecting it to be very intellectually rigorous, and I went to an undergraduate institution notorious for grade deflation and student suicides/mental health issues, so I expected more of that at Cam. I also think the answer to your questions very much depends on what you are used to in terms of workload, grading and atmosphere, as well as how quickly/easily you adjust to British-style education and being overseas (if you're American specifically). So with all of that said, I found Cam to be easier overall than my undergrad institution in terms of grading and workload, but also very different. There was quite a bit of reading but most of the substantive coursework was just attending lectures without much actual work (other than reading assignments) until the end of each term. I don't think I had a single lecture course that included attendance as part of the course grade, and I don't recall any profs/instructors ever actually taking attendance. In some ways this is great because they treat you like an adult, unlike my undergrad U.S. institution, where each prof/instructor micromanaged everything and attendance was always mandatory. At Cam, you are definitely in control of your own destiny. If you don't want to go to lectures, don't. If you want to hang out in the pub at your residential college all day and become a residential alcoholic, cool. I might have "read" (majored in) Politics & International Studies but I am pretty sure I minored in drinking room temperature beer and pub crawls for 9 months. And by the way, most residential colleges have their own on-site pub, and most of them are fantastic. The downside to all of this is it is sink or swim at exam time. If you aren't self disciplined, it's going to hurt, and not to be too cliche, but you absolutely get out of it what you put into it. If you take advantage of all of the resources including the fantastic libraries and scholars, attend the lectures, do the reading, etc., I think you'll learn a lot and get a lot out of it. If you don't but you happen to be very intelligent or good at BSing, the beauty of Cam (and Oxford from what I hear) is that you can fake it until you make it and basically just show up for exams and write a thesis. As far as length, for the MPhil I think the average for POLIS was 10,000-15,000 words, so not at all difficult considering the max for PhD's is 80,000 words and people routinely get close to that. It's definitely a qualitative program, not a quantitative program, but then again, I think that's the case for most British grad polisci programs. It was a great experience and a lot of fun to spend a year there, but I'd never get a PhD there.

I got my MPhil in POLIS at Clare College, Cambridge. Good news and bad news. The good news is, Cambridge is an awesome place. Great town, breathtakingly beautiful school/campus, and the residential college system there is just fantastic, even for grad students. Also, the MPhil program is significantly easier to get into than the PhD at POLIS at least. The bad news is that the POLIS department puts overwhelming emphasis on undergraduate GPA during the application process. I don't know what their official GPA average is, but for Americans I was told the minimum cutoff to be considered was a 3.7 UGPA. Most of the people I knew in my mphil program who were Americans were closer to 3.9/4.0 UGPA's from US T20 schools, including the a few ivies, Cal/UCLA and Michigan. A few other cons: the faculty are primarily focused on their PhD students so you won't get much attention, which is great for self starters but not so much if you need help. Do not expect a close relationship with your advisor. The tuition is high even if you, as you say, are a UK citizen. POLIS MPhil tuition (including the maintenance fee) for UK "Home" citizens is 30,000 GBP for the full year. If you don't have it and don't want to take out student loans, the Cambridge Trust, Fulbright and Gates scholarships are possibilities but also not easy to get. Occasionally there will also be scholarships available from your specific residential college. If you're a UK citizen, I don't think you're eligible for the Fulbright for a UK school. Anyway, unlike most US polisci graduate programs, do not expect funding from the department, especially if you have less than a 3.7 UGPA. Departmental funding in the form of Cambridge Trust money for master's students is prioritized typically by GPA and few people get funded by that. If you're interested in US style quant analysis, you also won't get much of that at Cambridge, or (from what I've heard) at Oxford. There's a few classes you can take but have no illusions, there is no quant rigor in a one year MPhil at Cambridge at least, and that might put you at a disadvantage in the long run if you're competing for positions with people who have strong quantitative research backgrounds/skills from other schools. To answer your other questions, if you want to teach and do research on the continent or in the UK, and you want to do it at a major school in a permanent/tenure track style type of job, you will need to get a PhD. I do NOT recommend getting your PhD in the UK if you can help it. UK polisci PhD's are ok if you want to stay in the UK but otherwise you might want to go somewhere with more quantitative rigor. Depending on what specific subfields you're interested in, and if you have your heart set on studying in Europe rather than the US, consider English language PhD programs in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands (among others). Tuition is usually free or very cheap and they tend to at least have more quant requirements than UK schools, maybe with the exception of LSE. Work experience is always a good thing, and it will help at least with the argument that you aren't just indecisive and/or giving up on law right after getting a JD. The JD itself will probably hold you back at Oxbridge unfortunately; they don't really care that US law schools grade on a B curve, they don't care about the socratic method, and they don't care about how competitive US law schools are. They just care about your law school GPA, and if it isn't impressive, it will hinder you rather than help you. Doesn't mean you can't get into Oxbridge, but if your law school GPA was particularly low (below a 3.3/4.0), you should probably pad your CV with as much as you can, including work experience and publications. The unfortunate reality of Oxbridge is that they are snobby, and they can afford to be extraordinarily selective in terms of applicants and grades. They do not employ "holistic" admissions like the top US schools; they don't require GRE's and they don't emphasize anything as much as grades and GPA history. CV, EC's, essay and references do make a difference, but not they are not given the same weight as your grades by the department. Good luck!

^^^^^ this!

This place is really starting to feel like PSR...