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Muan1

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Everything posted by Muan1

  1. Yes, depending on your research interests, Oxford might be a better place to study, and you could easily stay on via the DPhil. Although the funding is in general a ton iffier than in the states, however the importance of this really depends upon the person.
  2. Right, you correctly identified a possible complication: next year's admissions prospects might even get worse. But it also might get better. But the fact that this is an uncertainty should convince you about why it might be incorrect in not entering a PhD program this year on the off (maybe off-off-off) chance you get into Harvard the next year. Moreover, plenty of folks who get waitlisted from a top program one year when reapplying the next year do not get in. Perhaps the faculty on adcom reading theory apps won't be the same next year, or perhaps there might be a candidate next year whom they prefer more. Who knows? Your safest best is to go with Northwestern in the here and now. Yes, of course the Harvard name brand carries some weight when it comes to hiring decisions, but Northwestern is not chopped liver, and what is more decisive is the quality of your research and the strength of your mentorship relationship (not to mention the reputation of the mentor itself). NW does not lack on any of these fronts: depending on what your interests are, plenty of great theorists to work with at Northwestern. Monoson and Dietz immediately pop up in my mind, and Monoson as I understand has a lot of diverse eclectic interests that span the history of political thought. I'm sorry for the aporetic quality of my advice. But these are the questions that I genuinely would be thinking about if I were lucky enough to be in your position. Hope this helped -- best wishes.
  3. Go to Northwestern. You really don't want to miss out on that opportunity based upon the possible but by no means guaranteed chance you'd get into Harvard in a normal year. Certainly, there is no harm in hoping you'd get off the waitlist this year (who knows what would happen? And I presume your chances of getting off the waitlist is greater than the initial chance of even getting on the waitlist). But Northwestern is a very good program, especially for theory, that consistently places its students in great TT positions after graduation. Also would you be commuting to Evanston from Chicago? If I recall correctly, Evanston is an hour from Chicago proper, so the vibes would probably be quite different.
  4. out of curiosity -- how did the cornell rejection read?
  5. I've heard great things about the MA program in security studies at Georgetown: it's great for people who are considering either transitioning into government-work (also being in DC it's quite an advantage), or the PhD/academic pipeline. If you are interested in a PhD program with a dedicated group of scholars invested in security studies (not just tangentially, but explicitly and primarily), then UChicago is definitely somewhere to consider. Folks like Mearsheimer are still advising students, and there's a new crop of associate professors there that are ready to take up the mantle.
  6. It suggests that they are admitting students one by one, as opposed to a massive email dump. The hope is that personalized emails imply that not all acceptances happen at a single time, which implies that if you haven't heard anything yet you still might. Hope that helps.
  7. Just a friendly suggestion: try not to get tunnel vision just because you didn't happen to get into a particular school, whether that be Princeton or whatnot. For many of us, we still have yet to hear from a ton of schools, and how one school decides is quite different from another. Also a nice excerpted thought by Henry James: “Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."
  8. Fiat lux, said Cal, showering the night sky with a million acceptances.
  9. What's going on at Berkeley? Anyone hear anything?
  10. Best wishes. I saw on the results thread that one year they were getting back to applicants on Sunday. So who really knows. Admittedly right now I'm enjoying riding out this Schroedingerian moment of uncertainty. I certainly would rather be hopefully waiting for good news than feeling sad because I was rejected. Strange how the mind works.
  11. Any chance Cal gets back today, though? What was their original timeline as stated in the Zoom call?
  12. If we haven't heard anything from Wisconsin, is it safe to assume a rejection?
  13. I just have no idea what type of person would do this. Adding gasoline to the collective bonfire of grad application anxiety. On another note, I'm totally fine with being rejected from Princeton. I just don't want my cycle to start with an L.
  14. And now someone's claiming a rejection on the results page. Which makes no sense, considering how there's a week delay between admits and rejects. The rejection post also said they checked the program website where it was said there was an "update" to their application, and they found out that they were rejected.
  15. I think the Princeton results might be fake. For one thing, decisions from them have never been released this early. According to my friend, last time it was on a Wednesday. Second, and more importantly, nobody on this forum claimed an acceptance. In past years, plenty of folks on this forum claim their acceptance on the thread. Plenty of people this year have been claiming acceptances from schools on the thread -- no reason to believe that that would stop with Princeton. Tldr: it's probably a troll, we wait more.
  16. Yes, but apparently graduate programs are going to do what's convenient for them. Some might object to this justification by reminding us that just because we are predisposed to doing what we find pleasant or convenient for us doesn't mean that we ought not care about the interests of others. Oh well!
  17. Very good point! Wow, hadn't really thought about it along those lines.
  18. And to be honest, psychologically, I feel like sending rejections first (on one day), admits second (on another day) is the way to go. Suppose that the opposite method were employed (like Princeton): people are posting acceptances, and now you are spending the whole day anxious over whether you will get one, too. Then suppose that you don't, and now you're just left feeling disconsolate expecting an imminent rejection email the next week. Using the first method, you're not anxiously awaiting any emails on the day rejections are meant to be sent. And when you don't get any news, you're automatically elated because you know you're going to get an acceptance email the second round. This of course presupposes that each subfield would release results in a synchronized method: rejects the same day, admits the other. It's unfortunate this system isn't employed. I feel like graduate programs would do their applicants many favors (and preempt many endless inquiries) by simply announcing a date for admissions and a date for rejections, much like undergraduate colleges. Wondering what you guys think.
  19. Saw that some rejections from Boston College were posted on the results list today. I know that there was one acceptance posted for IR a few days ago (though nobody's claimed anything in the forum). Do they usually send rejections before acceptances? Does it vary by sub-field? What do people think? It seems uncharacteristically early for any news -- in past years most action seems to happen around early-mid Feb for BC.
  20. As a compensation UT will give you free meals in the prytaneum.
  21. And to gain acceptance you must communicate in your SOP that you will refuse any stipend/funding, because otherwise you're just a social scientist allegiant to biological necessity.
  22. Perhaps the theory admits have also communicated that they have been accepted. But, true to the Straussian principles of Austin, they've coded their acceptance to be comprehensible only to those who know...
  23. I second the kind words above. Remarkable how months and large tracts of time can pass, but as we approach event horizon, time seems to stop and feel much longer and more treacherous, and we begin to perseverate over every new update happening to others while we have no news ourselves. It's difficult, and very easy to succumb to tunnel vision. PhD is not the be all end all of life. We must learn to find happiness in other things. No wonder why so many people in academia suffer from all kinds of mental illnesses.
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