Bosox

Just got extended waitlist offers by Harvard and UCSD… anybody got off waitlist at Princeton? 
 
Good luck to all! There will be lots of movements these two days. Fingers crossed for everyone and never lose hope!

Just got told I'd be extended an offer from the University of Virginia after 2.5 months on the waitlist. I am thrilled as I had not been accepted to any PhD programs and was ready to shell out for one of the two masters' programs I had been accepted to. This process has been beyond stressful, so I am sending love and strength to anyone else still holding out in these last few days. All the best, I'm out.

Dear all,
I was off waitlist and got admitted to TAMU with full funding yesterday. Thrilled ! For anyone who is on the waitlist and still waiting for good news, I hope my case can give you some hope.
 
 

Claiming an acceptance to UMD off the waitlist. Good luck hearing back– I hope you get into a school you want to go to!

Hi! I will likely be declining CUNY within the next week. My offer had funding, so I hope it can be of help to someone else. My field was IR.

I'm gonna echo what the previous comments have relayed. Don't get me wrong I struggle heavily with math and quant as well,
and I took the exam 3 times solely because of quant. The advice I received from professors and other grad students was that the GRE exists
basically as a threshold. So, no applicant will be admitted definitively just because of their GRE scores, but on the flip side, their package will
indeed likely be thrown out if the scores don't break a department-set figure which often sits at least within the 155-158 range I would guess.
For me, I enrolled in a Magoosh package that had a bevy of practice exams and problems with specific short clips catered to each problem.
Finally, are there no tangible options for you to apply to schools within the UK? In my case, I found several professors at UK politics and IR/IS
departments who literally did not care at all about the GRE score. I hope this helps!!!

I second this...
One more thing...from your Q scores I guess you are not very into quant stuff. If that is the case, you might want to consider try harder on those programs where qualitative approaches or other "alternative" interdiscplinary approach (as opposed to more popular interdisciplinary approaches like political economy or computational political science) are highlighted. You might wanna consider UCSC for your next round (if you are still interested). They dinstinguish themselves from other US political science departments by doing studies of "politics" rather than poltiical "science". Applying to PhD in History, East Asia Studies, or antropology may also be a way out for you.

You have got to get that quant score up. 145 corresponds roughly to the 18th percentile and adcoms must think you'd have a hard time getting through the required methods courses and be successful in your study. It's a fair worry. I think without a quant score in the mid-to-upper 150s your chance will be low at any top-50 program. Your other stats are OK (in my view) but I think they highlight the importance of raising your GRE scores - also the verbal.
You can do it though - even if it will take you another year. Hang in there!

Hey y'all, I randomly checked my UCLA portal right now and saw that my decision letter was posted. It's dated for tomorrow though so I'm guessing it'll be another day until I get the notification email. If any of y'all are still waiting on UCLA as well, it might be up on the portal!

Hello everyone, firstly congrats on your acceptances! You deserve them.
I have been waitlisted (unofficially) by McGill, so if anyone wishes to not take up their offer, please let them know.
It is my second cycle and I do not have any offers currently. Hoping against hope that something comes up. ?

I sent an email and was told that I should hear back by this week, so I'm hoping we'll get updates in the next few days!

I just received a letter that USC is sending out decisions to those who haven't heard from them in 48-72 hours. 
I hope this message works for those awaiting! 

With a presumed rejection from USC and an unfunded acceptance from University of Kansas, my cycle has come to an end. I have decided to accept the offer from University of Cincinnati, and I'm so excited to move to a whole new country, meet new people and begin the long journey towards a PhD.
 
It's been such a great pleasure keeping the vigil with you guys here. For those of you who have received offers, congratulations! For those who haven't yet, keep up the hope till the very end. And for those who have received all rejection, just remember that this is not the end of the road. As one of my favourite songs goes, At the end of the storm, there's a golden sky, and the sweet silver song of a lark. 
 
This is probably going to be my last post on this Forum. Although it would most likely not be possible, I do hope to keep in touch with you guys. For those of you who feel comfortable adding me on LinkedIn, send me a message! For everyone else, I hope we meet again some day! Best of luck, and have an awesome life!

Nevermind, I just heard back and have been accepted. 

Here's advice I've gotten from people who have already gone through this process:
Get a clear sense of your financial package. (Guaranteed funding for 5 years? TA/RA strings attached? Is 6th year funding possible? Health care provided?). Make sure to compare financial package with cost of living. Get a sense of the faculty members, research groups, or labs that you could work with. Ask yourself: Do they form a supportive community for you to do your best work? Ask about graduate placement if they don't already have that information published. If graduate placement is published, I would still investigate more (look at CVs, reach out to recent grads, etc.). Some placement documents I've seen won't differentiate between post-doc, TT, or adjunct jobs which can be very misleading. What is the program/cohort like? What proportion of admitted students finish their PhD? How many years is the typical student taking to complete their PhD? Will you get a lot of individual attention as a grad student, or will you be working more on your own? Pick a program that aligns with how you like to work. I've heard UC schools are usually more of the "fend for yourself" variety, but I could be wrong. If you are planning on a career outside of academia: will faculty be willing to help you with your career goals? Is there a stigma associated with students who pursue non-academic careers? (I probably wouldn't ask this outright, unless you're sure you want to work outside of academia in which case it might be good to bring up early.) Reach out to PhD students currently in the program. Are they happy? Idk if this is true, but someone told me that if they are too happy expectations might be too low. Obviously if they're miserable you have to decide if you want to submit yourself to that for the next 5+ years Hope this helps!

Hey folks! I emailed UPenn today to ask when the decision is projected to come out. They told me “We expect to notify all applicants of our admissions decisions by end of month.” Fingers crossed y’all! 

Hi lovelies! I just asked Georgetown to take me off their waitlist! Didn't want to keep those waiting to hear from them hanging. Good luck to y'all! My subfield was CP/methods so fingers crossed for all the CP applicants waiting for their decision from them. I'm rooting for you guys.

Sorry for the late read; totally missed the notification here.
I received an offer from UChicago (IR), and I did my best to politely inform the two schools that I was extremely grateful for their time and consideration of my application, but that I had decided to decline my offer/ask for my name to be taken off the waiting list. Both schools came back with very cordial responses that they appreciated the early notification and that they wished me the best in my future graduate studies. Hope this helps!

Seconding @CapTipps, I also had a nice conversation with a POI. He knew I had acceptances at higher-ranked schools and basically tried to show me the benefits of a smaller program, where I could more easily get faculty attention etc. I recommend you go in with some questions prepared.

I had. It was very nice, welcoming and informal. It was more of a "we really want/expect you to come", talking about the department, opportunities, and even about the city/life in general, and answering questions. We only briefly talked about research interests and research questions. But I think it really depends on what kind of things you are most concerned with. As for the part of POIs, they are usually as excited as you are about the admission, so they want to show off support and recruit you to the program--My thoughts.

Hope everyone gets some good news this week! Good luck to everyone as we go into Monday

Happy Sunday, people! Finally, a day to not worry about getting results, and to rest. The week ahead is going to be very busy, so don't forget to recharge yourselves. 

@mdalt21I think we accidentally created two discord links, but let's just merge into the new one (it's much more organized?). Thanks for the effort!!!
This is the old link from yesterday: https://discord.gg/peQJtCxM
This is the new discord link created by @mdalt21: https://discord.gg/cWENytFv
 

Last year, I applied as a senior in undergrad and got rejected from all the programs I applied to. It was devastating! What really helped me was deciding that I really want to do a PhD and taking positive steps that will enhance my application for the next cycle. What I did first was secure a research job after graduation. I was able to get in on a project led by an econ professor at my institution and that really helped. The project is a large, research effort that involves fieldwork and a collaboration with big organizations like the World Bank. That really made my CV look better. It is also important to mention that my involvement in the project signals a willingness and a desire to learn research methods I was not familiar with like survey research, RCT, and generally, research that involves fieldwork. That really complemented my relative strengths on data analysis, regressions, text analysis and so on which they could observe from my CV, transcript and writing sample. 
The other thing I did is edit and enhance my SOP substantially. I can't stress enough how important this is and how hard I worked on it to make it better. I removed and added a lot of stuff that the SOP that looked well last cycle became really really good for the current cycle. It had to go through multiple revisions and feedback from my mentors and recommenders really helped. 
But, the biggest improvement I made was on my writing sample. I used a senior thesis I wrote for graduation at my undergrad institution. Last cycle, by the December deadline, the thesis was barely a large research proposal. By the time I graduated, it was very developed and looked entirely different. The data analysis was complete, the plots, graphs and figures were all in a good shape. To make it the best writing sample it could be, I asked for more feedback on it after I graduated (around October, November last year) and that really helped reorganize it better and make the writing more nuanced. Given most of the project was done in 2021, after last cycle's deadlines had already passed, it looked significantly different. In one of my interviews, the POI who interviewed me indicated that he was most impressed by the writing sample. It is the biggest improvement on my application from last year and it really has paid off. 
I would recommend working on your files as much as you could to get them into the best shape they could be in. If you think you would benefit from a more involved research experience, that would also really help and make your CV better for a PhD applicant. Hope this helps! 

Hi, everyone!
A long lurker to the forum and results page.
I've notified the University of Minnesota that I'll be declining my offer and the University of Virginia that I'd like to be taken off of the waiting list (IR for both).
Hope this helps substantively and intangibly for those in the waiting game. Hang in there!