technocat

Word on the street is that Yale will send out (some?) decisions early next week.

Another theory applicant here. Expanding our ranks to 3.

I applied for it. Haven't heard anything back yet. In past years, some winners have complained of getting very little actual money (a couple thousand), but I would be pleased with any extra dollars at this point.

Synthla, thanks much. Sounds manageable. [quote name="Louiselab

Synthla, can you say anything about what the interview was like at all? What did you talk about--your interests, your qualifications, the school in general? I have an informal telephone interview scheduled with a potential advisor that I wasn't expecting and just want to get an idea of what I'm in for.

Reading War and Peace specifically to kill time until March. It's working remarkably well.

Heclo is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, that bastion of arch-conservatism. I also fail to what's so horrible about this column.

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Do you know if this is true of Chicago's polsci dept this year as well--that they'll be cutting the number of admitted students?

I've also seen this happen every year at my alma mater, which is a top 10 program for polisci. Not everyone who's accepted back enrolls, often because they themselves feel like they've exhausted the program as undergrads, but they do accept their own. Some grad schools also waive the application fee for alumni of their own school, so if there is discouragement of 'academic inbreeding,' it doesn't seem to be evident at the institutional level.

gtown took a few weeks to process all my documents too. but they got in.

Mmm, ok, I'll bite. I'm applying for a PhD in political theory. Did my undergrad at a top 20 school, 3.8 GPA. Took some time off to work in media/politics. Applying to: Texas, Chicago, Georgetown, Notre Dame plus some other schools in related disciplines. How about you, OP?

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um, everyone?

i'm using interfolio and ignoring the cover sheet business because it would require going back to all my recommenders with stamped envelopes, etc. and it's just too late for that right now. i can let you know in april if that turns out to be a fatal decision. i know for sure that there are several schools that don't care at all how you submit recs, but now i can't recall which ones.

At livejournal, you can lock your post so that only members of the community will see it and it won't come up in search engines.

True. I focused on what I assumed would be my weakness--math--and ignored writing. Alas.

I've seen "real life" good writers get 6's, and real life bad writers get 6's. I'm sort of curious about what makes the difference, but not too curious. My sense is that the writing component is the easiest to compensate for in the actual application--they will have an SOP, a writing sample, plus a resume that demonstrates you have somehow managed to publish your supposedly atrocious writing professionally. It's much harder to compensate for a terrible math score, for example, unless your transcript is replete w/ advanced math courses in which you got A's, which is probably not going to be the case for most social science and humanities students.

This is totally awesome (as in the outrageous thing that I would never do but would love to hear about). Please tell us how it turns out!

I had a similar situation--99th percentile verbal, suckface writing. I write and edit professionally. It's possible that I'm totally incompetent at and unsuited for my job and I just didn't know it until the GRE illuminated this fact for me, but I'm going to go with no, whatever, and submit the scores as they stand.

That sounds like law school or med school app stuff. I'm pretty sure the best childhood qualification most successful PhD applicants have going for them is that they were dweebs and played with lightsabers. I think the vast majority of statements of purpose skip childhood entirely, since typically, 7-year-olds do not do relevant research, work with professors, or present conference papers. Standing out by being insane is probably overrated.

http://www.yuster.com/ Self-reported and hard to navigate, but take it for what it's worth.

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What is the deal w/ interfolio? My college recommended it for storing recommendations during time off b/w undergrad and grad, but now I'm finding that most of the schools want a cover letter or online submissions process for their recommendations, which interfolio obvs doesn't provide. Would it be a problem to just ignore that cover letter deal and submit the recs straight through interfolio to the department?

What ARE some good fully-funded MA programs?