jhm37

PROFILE Type of Undergrad Institution: Large state school in the Southeast, USA Major(s)/Minor(s): Political Science, Philosophy/Spanish, Legal Studies Undergrad GPA: 3.92 Type of Grad: N/A Grad GPA: N/A GRE (Q/V/W): 163/166/6.0 Any Special Courses: Quant. Methods in Political Science Letters of Recommendation: 3 tenured professors I was close to at my state school Teaching Experience: TA position during my undergraduate, High School teaching experience in the Peace Corps (but about financial education, not Political Science) Research Experience: Undergraduate thesis and poster presentation at MPSA using R Other: Peace Corps tour in my region-of-interest, various leadership positions and awards within my undergraduate university RESULTS Acceptances: UChicago (PhD); UC San Diego (Masters - GPS MIA, $ pending) Rejections: Yale, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt (assume), MIT, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UT Austin, NYU (assumed), Cornell, WUSTL, Noerthwestern, Georgetown, Duke Pending: Going to: UChicago LESSONS LEARNED: Keeping with @NeedaMormon's example above, I will be interspersing McElroy gifs throughout when appropriate. 1 - Talk to your contacts in the field frankly, often, and in-depth. These probably would be the professors who are writing your Letters of Recommendation, but they could also be current or recent graduates from PhD programs. Be blunt and ask them to do the same. Have them critique your SoP as harshly as possible. Clearly articulate to them why you want to pursue a PhD, and press them for as many details as possible about the process or for any advice they have, since they are much more knowledgeable about the field than you. As long as you are a decent person about it, the worst they would say is "I am busy right now," but I found most people are happy to help and even happier to talk about their own experiences. This has the added benefit of helping to cultivate a more detailed relationship with the people writing your Letters of Recommendations. Basically: 2 - To echo what NeedaMormon and many others have said, most people need to be both good and lucky to receive an offer. I have heard this from multiple admitted students and professors: PhD admissions programs are so idiosyncratic that, as an applicant, one can never really have a strong degree of certainty about one's admissions chances. Perhaps the professors you mention in your SoP are on leave, moved schools, or retired. Perhaps they are already at capacity with their PhD mentees, or perhaps they have decided to pivot their research into another area not related to your interests. The decision process is very much a black box. 3 - Based on the feedback I received from the professors who read my application, "fit" is still the most important aspect of your application. I was admitted, in large part, because my stated interests in my SoP and undergraduate thesis were interesting to the reviewers and closely aligned to both the regional expertise of the university as well as their substantive focus on democratization and authoritarianism. 4- Apply to many places! While this seemingly contradicts the previous point regarding "fit", it is necessary due to the 1st point regarding the idiosyncrasy of admissions decisions. I applied to 16 programs (17, including the referral to UC SD's GPS Masters program) and was rejected from all PhD programs but one. As a rough rule of thumb, almost everyone I have interacted with applied to more than 10 programs, with most applying to ~15 or so. This is frustrating and incredibly labor-intensive, since, even though you are applying to over a dozen locations, you need to think of each application as if it was the only place you are applying while writing that application. It's a grind. 5 - Put time and effort into crafting a specific pitch in your SoP for "why I would fit into your program," while giving evidence than you could succeed at a PhD level. There really is no shortcutting here. For example, for each school, I went through the listed profiles of each individual in my subfield and each person (including those outside of my subfield) who touched on my region of interest and reviewed their CVs for recent and not-so-recent publications related what I was interested in, writing a few notes on each person who most closely related to my interests. I then looked into other programs and resources the school could offer which related to my interests and balanced how/if those were closely-enough related to mention in my SoP, doing more research into it if it did (e.g.- I want to do work on Democratization and they have an interdisciplinary Center on democracies around the world; Many times, universities have regionally focused "Centers"). I then wrote my final paragraph on each statement from scratch, working in what I thought were the most important aspects of the research mentioned above to show my "fit" for the program. 6 - If applicable, be sure to reach out *early* in the process to ask for fee waivers since some schools have a limited number while others require an additional small application which takes time to process. 7 - Consider the prestige of the places you are applying, and why you are applying to lower tiers of schools. This calculation will be different for everyone. For me at least, I did not apply to schools with a lower (over-20th) USNWR ranking unless I had a very specific interest in the specialization of that school. For example, I am interested in surveys on democracy in Latin America, and Vanderbilt runs the preeminent survey on that topic, so I applied to Vanderbilt as well. In the end, I would suggest that one needs to recognize that political science as a scholarly profession is a relatively elitist field, and it is simply *much* more difficult to break into the field coming from a lower ranked program in terms of getting traction on papers or getting teaching positions after completing one's PhD. I was going to say "for better or for worse" about this reality, but... nah that's just unequivocally for worse. But! If you are not looking to get a PhD to go into academia or want to pursue opportunities outside of the US, I have seen many arguments on this forum about how this is much less of a concern. I should also mention that my opinion here is not a settled matter -- Look through the 2020-2021 Application Thread for a lot more discussion, and people generally have a lot of thoughts about this anywhere you go on here. 8 - After submitting applications, the period of time waiting for responses is AWFUL. Expect to be stressed and unfocused day after day. Try not to expect too much of yourself. I cannot speak to next year's posters, but this year's forum was incredibly helpful and positive. However, it may be worth it to simply avoid all discussion of applications and never check this forum, since that just adds stress to some others. Had me feelin like 9 - The 2020-2021 admission cycle was brutal (see "It's Trash" gif above), which caught me off guard as all of my professors and current candidates I talked to thought I was a strong candidate. Hopefully it will not be so terrible in the upcoming years, but I honestly do not expect it to change very much. This may be a very cynical take, but I expect that many departments will keep the Covid cuts long-term, since that frees up resources to focus on their current students and activities in the increasingly austerity-prone world of academia. There are already too many PhD graduates looking for work in the field, and so for many years pre-Covid, departments were considering cutting spots as part of a general trend to cut back. This offers a great opportunity to do so while providing the political cover to say this was due to Covid. Once the spots are cut, keeping them that way is much easier than justifying increasing funding again. Hopefully I am missing something important, and we return to a world with more reasonable chances of acceptances (5-10% rates instead of the 1.5-2.5% rates we had this year). 10 - Miscellaneous final thoughts, echoing things above: Quant skills are more and more important in all subfields (except maybe theory? But I am not in that field and have no direct information there). I did NOT reach out to POIs during the process. This Twitter thread from a professor at Princeton gives a good indication about many professors' opinions on the topic (tldr - it's negative). If you DO feel you NEED to reach out to a professor, be sure it is to ask about something you could not find out online and generally be respectful of their time. I assume most professors have training on how to compensate for biases in research, and so simply talking to someone probably does not dramatically increase one's chances of getting in to a program. I'm out

Claiming U Chicago admit via email, CP Subfield. Full funding. They said "Please note that since the administration is still reviewing our recommendations, you cannot present this letter as documentation of admission or as a guarantee of support: soon you will receive an official letter of admission", which I hope is just a formality and not an indication of COVID funding issues. As a longtime lurker on this forum, thank you all who have been so positive and helpful parsing through the various nonsense and rejections along the way! 1a/3r/12p