Senochka

In the same boat w/ UMN, want to remain on the positive side, but my Maryland rejection came a week later than the majority, so...

Last year, Weisiger told me that only 1/3 of their original admission recommendation list had been approved by the graduate school. However, this year we saw dramatic procedural changes to many schools' processes. For example, some schools that historically did not conduct pre-admission interviews started to do so, some schools that released all decisions on the same day turned to a batch system, and ones that were already using a batch system turned to releasing decisions on a rolling basis. So, can go either way.

I think no rejection from one school is indicative of a rejection to come from other schools in its tier granted that you do not have a fundamental problem with your application like unusually low GPA or test scores, missing required materials etc. So, no need to worry.

Yay, I'm in good company! Also, Congrats!!! I have 4 rejections, including two soft rejections, and nothing else so far. I mean, I applied to some niche-interdisciplinary programs and got rejections from them too, but they were meant as an experiment mostly, and unlike my polisci apps, I didn't pay anything to apply to them, so it's tit for a tat to the schools. I see that we are a particularly grudge-holding bunch this year, some angry result reports feel like looking at a mirror and others make me laugh. There is a potential UNABOMBER energy in our ranks, like the rage is REAL. Dear FBI, this is a joke, thank you. Also, can you tap the phones of the DGS at Emory and Boulder pretty please? They are way, way behind their usual schedules this year...

I love the fact that schools to which I applied are taking their sweet, sweet time this cycle. The cycle is over for many, and I didn'T hear back more than half of my schools (neither did anyone else, so not counting silent rejections.) Anyways, anyone want to go to a husky screaming party with me?

I read your profile in awe till I got halfway through. Regardless of the point I am going to raise after this, your qualifications are solid. It is visible that you are serious about and committed to your subject, you already started to contribute to the field, you have a good network. But, there are two things that might and that WILL put you at serious disadvantage. The one that "might" be a disadvantage for you... is the originality of your research topic. Seriously. Schools will invest 5-7 years in material and immaterial resources into the admitted/matriculated students, and they are more inclined to take the safer bets for that. It sounds counterintuitive, but it is true. A sure, highly legible small contribution to the field fares way better than a high risk, high reward novelty project. Also, to be completely honest, professors generally deem students not ready for such innovations. The other side of the same coin; the professors are not ready to advise such innovations.If you want to propose an innovative/novel project, propose it to the 30-50 range. They are growing, and as they go, they are hiring new, younger faculty who can understand what you are trying to do better. Tenured professorships are lifelong appointments, and much like Supreme Court justices' lifelong appointments, this creates a huge clog and slow, very slow transformation capacity for many top 20 schools that tend to employ oldies but goldies. However, this would not have been a huge problem if your GRE scores were significantly better. Topical traditionalism aside, the professors at these schools are some of the smartest people in the field, they can adapt if you know the way by heart, and they will follow to assist you, because a good portion of these people are humble too. Your GRE scores, on the other hand, would be considered acceptable only in the 40-50 range, with no guarantees. It is true that the GRE is only a part of your otherwise shining profile, but it is not as unimportant as schools advertise. MIT and Columbia have quant cutoffs and anyone under the threshold gets a desk rejection. Even at some GRE optional schools, the lack of scores, or unusually low scores put you at serious risk. Despite this, I see that you have applied to a lot of test-requiring and quant-heavy programs. These people want proof of familiarity or proof of ability to conquer them in no time. Also, I don't know what your topic is, but it cannot be a good fit for all of the T20. These schools have vastly different faculty makeups. Yale is stronger in AP and CP, Berkeley offers more breadth but their IR people are more focused on civil war, crisis mediation, MIT has an undisputed edge in security and nuclear. Princeton Politics is more lenient towards projects with a theory core than its peers etc. So, in reality, only a handful of these are actually good fits for you. I understand the motivation and post-graduation considerations in applying to T20, but applying based on name and not fit is the wrong strategy. You need to have range, I have seen profiles way better than mine apply to Missouri, Cincinnati, Virginia Tech, North Dakota, because evem the best candidates receive 3-4 acceptances and 1-3 waitlists with no conversion AT MOST. This is a gamble and we should run the game with strategy, not desire or hope. I am saying none of these to demoralize you, we have similar profiles, and I have over 90th percentile in both verbal and aw, but my quant is lower, and my advisor told me, unless you pull it up above at least 75th, ideally 80th percentile, you will have no chance at T20, and he was right. I failed so much at this that I know when I see my past mistakes, but I am still unable to prevent my present ones like submitting a novelty project this year... Good luck to us both, and if you have to do another cycle, you can read the "Lessons Learned" thread, some good stuff there. All the best...

Anyone who's been contacted by Harvard HoS? I saw a waitlist on the results page.

Oh man, last year, we waited for Penn to release rejections for over a month. I asked them why they weren't showing the decency to inform all students at once since an electronic signature pasted by an administrative assistant is all it takes, and got a very sincere response about the painful back and forth between the faculty and the grad school. Although I have synpathy for their struggles, a giant institution in 2026 should be able to streamline this.

In some years, rejections follow right after while in others they are stuck at an administrative bottleneck, sadly, I don't think this year's pattern is a sign of a "hold pile" or anything. Someone who said that they were from the department posted a while ago and told all acceptance/waitlist results have been communicated.

@PoliSci2026 Hi! I do not want to give you false hope, but you may cautiously interpret this as a positive sign. So, most graduate admissions committees are actually "bicameral", haha, dry jokes aside, there is either a prelim. faculty committee that reviews applications first based on their general merit, and sends a shortlist to the academics who are available for supervision that year. Alternatively, a select committee from the faculty, still mostly involving but not exclusive to members available for supervision, reads applications and comes up with a shortlist. Then, this shortlist is sent to the graduate school's approval. Based on budgetary considerations and a multitude of other factors, the graduate school either accepts the list as is, or sends it back for further trimming. Now, the reason I am saying "false hope" is that, in the current environment, those lists are trimmed a good deal. But, you can at least interpret this as a silent waitlist, and be content that the game is still on for you. Hope you get good news soon!

Ah, I am so sad that I did not see this earlier as, by now, you probably completed your applications. You can shoot for the highest tier no problem, if you select the correct set of schools. It is true that your GRE Q could have been better, and I don't know if you retook it, but there are top-tier programs that offer a balanced methodological training and value qualitative strengths, as well as some that place much less weight on the GRE than their peers. UChicago, OSU, Cornell, and Northwestern (strong AP bench, good comp.) are some I can think of, also; University of Virginia, UNC, and UMN are more lenient with both quant. experience and the GRE. On the other hand, MIT, Stanford, Vanderbilt, UPenn, Michigan, and Columbia would be higher risk choices. Also in the top tier, albeit with less immediate bran recognition, Pitt. and Rochester would have received your score well, I think. I personally think even Harvard is not that quantitatively-oriented, reading the works of some of their alums and current students, but I cannot say anything about what they weigh more for it's a true coin toss at Harvard, more so than its Ivy or non-Ivy peers. Hope some of these schools were in your list and best of luck!

Hey there, Most US schools have grade inflation, so extremely rare CGPAs like 3.7+ - esp. in tough subjects like economics - are quite common in the U.S. So, make sure that one of your recommenders is from your undergraduate institution, and make sure that they attest to the sheer rarity of such a GPA in a subject like econ. in Turkey, in their letter. It would serve you best if this person taught you 2+ courses, was your academic advisor, or thesis advisor if you wrote a BA thesis. Top econ. programs in Turkey take in the top 1-3% of over two million students taking the national entrance exam in what is called the "EA" category in Turkey. If you ranked anywhere near that, mention it in your CV or SoP. It will shine a different light on your GPA. Despite the harsher grading in TUR though, there are some barriers a 3.2 GPA cannot jump over as some state schools have application cutoffs between 3.0 and 3.5 (Uni. of California system, UT Austin, Maryland, UIUC are a few that comes to my mind.) So it is imperative that your master's GPA is higher than 3.5, and is ideal if it is over 3.7. 1-year master's programs are fast, and it is hard to build solid relationships with faculty in that time. But two of your LoRs will come from them (one from your thesis or capstone project advisor and one from another prof.) Make sure to build and maintain good relationships with them without being suffocating. As per your GRE scores, your quant score is good as is, but regardless of how quantitative-leaning a political science or econ. PhD program is, a verbal of 137 is unacceptable. At the level of schools your are mentioning, anything below a 155 is a huge red flag, but in order for you to be considered seriously, you should aim for at least 159. The truth is, anything below a 149-152 does not hold even in good engineering programs, and despite the departments' methodological preferences, political science and economics are still social science disciplines, and hence, they still require excellent English comprehension and writing skills. Memorize as many GRE words as you can, as the vocab. questions are the lowest-hanging fruits in the entire test. Buy a year-long Khan Academy subscription or couple Princeton Review/Kaplan prep. books and focus on question types. Start doing a timed AW exercise once a week three months before your exam. One last thing I want to say, or one notion that I see recurrently in especially international students' posts; DO NOT assume you have "safe" or even "safer" bets. This is PhD territory, so even the schools with quite modest entrance requirements at undergrad level become BRUTAL. No T30 has an acceptance rate over 8%, and only a few in the T50 have a rate over 12%. This is especially true for OSU (it's a top 25 program.), but still holds true for Rice and UNC, among the ones you mentioned. That said, your GRE quantitative strength is promising, and if you can bring your verbal score on par, and complete your master's degree successfully - which I'm sure you will - you will have the odds on your side. Best of luck!

Hey there, doing a Grad Cafe sweep for no valid reason other than I am bored. The topic is rather old, and maybe you already got your answers. But I am blind, so am qualified to chime in ahahah. First and foremost, I am sorry that some of the responses you received were off-putting in nature. I am not as competitive as either of you guys, so I know for a fact that I got rejected when I did and from where I did based on merit and not my disability. But I also know for a fact that a negative outlook on certain disabilities exists at top schools. How do I know that? Through experience. I am the alumna of one of these top schools, and I can firmly say that accessibility services SUCK at most top tier institutions. Although this is not reflective of any committee's treatment of disabled candidates, I believe it is reflective of the institution's general disposition towards disabled candidates and students. For this reason, when I was building my school list, I emailed each and every school on my provisional list and asked for pre-submission walkthrough and personal post-submission assistance. I did not apply to any school that said no or made me play pinball between different departments regardless of how much I wanted to apply to that school or how good my fit was. In my experience lower Top 30 and 30-50 were the most responsive. I believe that is because these schools have a stronger interest in treating applicants and students better as they want to climb higher on the ranking ladder, and part of it is to receive more applications. In contrast, at HYPSM, you are lucky if they throw a glance your way. So, it is no surprise that they are less interested in ensuring that the students can navigate the system comfortably. Another thing I did not do for my grad cycles but did do for my undergrad cycle was to contact student disability offices and ask for a copy of their policies, if they go, "ADA.", skip. If they are responsive and delineate their processes for you, give that school a chance. Also, contact DHS well in advance, and ask whether they had any severely disabled students in the past, and they would be willing to talk to you about their experience. Sometimes, what we interpret as bias is the fear of "handling it wrong", and people find staying away a safer option than trying their best. So, if a department has experience working with disabled students, great! I remember the time I asked a department about their experience with and policies on disabled students, and they proudly told me that they had a "talking elevator" in their building. So, I believe what you think is there, is there, but I am not sure if it has enough weight to tip the scales from "nope" to "come on in" or vice versa. I am blind and ı got into the terminal master's program of my school with a generous aid package, I am blind and I would be shooed away if I applied to the same school for a PhD. Best of luck!

Hey there, Fellow Turkish national here. Although I am not doing political Econ., I have completed a degree in the U.S. and am very familiar with the system and the current state of the U.S. higher education, as well as how Turkish profiles are assessed here. If your institutions are any two of Bilkent, BOUN, Koc, you are lucky. There is a well-established network of graduates of these institutions in American higher education. Both former admits and possibly faculty will help shedding positive light on your profile. Your GPAs are near-perfect and your GRE score is very solid, making you competitive for top tier programs. However, I am afraid your school list will limit the return on your six-year investment. First and foremost, PhD admissions are not like undergraduate admissions. There is no concept of a "safety school", "outcome predictability", and hence, there is no such thing as a "top candidate" unless you are Malala Yousafzai or Timothé Chalamalameimammamia. What I mean is, your excellent stats make you a "realistic" candidate for these schools, but there will be loads of applicants in the prospective pools of them like you. Some candidates will even be the recent grads of these schools, and thus will be better connected than you are. Some will be seasoned policy professionals who want to pivot to academia after years long work in prominent think tanks or the U.S. government, some will have publications etc. Long story short, range is important. Also, your European list stands in stark contrast with its many modest choices to your U.S. list. If you ask me, many mid-tier U.S. schools will provide you with a better education and better credentials than some of these European schools. So, my humble advice to you would be expand your U.S. range. Choose two to three top-notch schools at most, four if you are really keen on trying your hand at these. Then add slightly lower-ranked but still very respectable schools. For example, why isn't Duke on your list? Both Timur Kuran and Dani Rodrik are there, and both are doing PE. Also, instead of applying to Harvard Gov't, apply to the Political Economy program that is co-designed with the Gov't department and HKS, and is run by HKS. In that case, you would need to apply through HKS, which is tiniest bit less competitive. As I said, I am not doing PE, so I cannot recommend specific schools, but Michigan, NYU, UCSD, UCLA are known for their quantitative rigor. Still, if you ask me, do three of the HYPSM, three of these other schools I mentioned, and six schools ranked even lower. The competition is UNREAL. Nearly all of the schools in your current list and the ones I mentioned here were subjected to BRUTAL funding cuts. Plus, when the current administration wants a school to cave in, their first instinct is to go after the said school's visa sponsorship privileges. Thus, the game is harder for int'l students. I know that George Mason has a good political economy stream and so do UIC and Vanderbilt. You can try GWU, Georgetown, UNC Chapel Hill, Virginia etc. but def. expand your range. For UK, on the other hand, please note that the application process is much more cumbersome. As you also noted in your post, funding at many European institutions is not guaranteed, so, you need to follow the ESRC and DTP open competition deadlines and send in an initial application. Also, when you are applying to Oxford DPIR and Cambridge POLS, you need to fill additional external scholarship forms for the funding schemes that suit your profile (e.g. The Leverhulme Trust PhD fund). UK schools have their own funding as well, but these are limited in coverage, and the full coverage ones are awarded to 3-6 incoming students at most. Moreover, some of these internal and external funding schemes have residency & citizenship reqs (e.g. Commonwealth, EUEA etc.). So, choose frugally and wisely when it comes to the UK. For Europe, EUI and Mannheim are excellent choices. The former offers unconditional full funding and the latter does not have fees associated with a much more generous stipend & expenses scheme. I would suggest that you add Sciences Po. Paris, HEC Paris, IHEID, and CEU to your list for the very same reason. However, you can expand your scope here as well. Look at Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands for some excellent options. Now, IHEID, CEU, and Sciences Po have deadlines and admission styles that mimic the US system. HEC Paris has a final app. deadline in late March/early May. When it comes to VRJE Amsterdam, UvA, Lund, KU Leuven, on the other hand, much like UZH on your list, these treat PhD admissions like hiring rounds and mostly hire by project. The good thing is, their cycles start around Feb., by that time, you will be mostly done with your US and core European apps and will likely have an idea of what you need to do. So, follow sites like FindAPhD and Academic Positions for structured PhD calls. You can also sign up to receive notifications whenever a PhD position is open at these universities on their websites (most use Verbi, check dept. pages for more info.) Last, but not least, when it comes to fit, think narrower. Think professors, not schools. Of course, some schools are clearly better at something than others. For example, UNC Chapel Hill and UIUC are behavior and comparative-heavy schools whereas UW Madison and Georgetown have an edge in IR. Still, if you find a perfect PE match at a CP-heavy school, apply there, if you find only some generic matches at a PE-forward school, pass. Find professors whose work you cite or would cite in your own work. As a final note you might want to look into policy schools as well. Most of them are not as cut throat as traditional poli sci departments and are especially strong in PE. Suggestions; McCourt, LBJ, Ford, Scharr, Harris, Batten. Oh, and, these applications are hard to complete with lots of components, concurrent timelines, so choose wisely, not widely. I saw some people apply to 20 schools, DO NOT do that. Build your timeline and when you will do each application before September ends, it will help you streamline. Apply to 12-15 US & UK & Core European schools, and once they are done, apply to the other European schools if need be. Best of luck!

Got that NW rejection. Nice...

Me, I didn't get an e-mail or a portal update, but, as another user already said, I don't want to read too much into it... I didn't get anything from UIUC as well, and someone claimed a waitlist here, so I was like, "No acceptance, no rejection, no waitlist, then what?" I contacted them and they said they were making some students wait because the process was still ongoing, and they didn't know whether or how much they will have to turn to their waitlist. So I interpreted it as I'm on a some sort of waitlist, but that waitlist was not a priority waitlist. Like, they notified people whom they want to enroll if their admits committed elsewhere, and were keeping some of us at bay if those prioritized waitlists go somewhere else. So if we don't make it, we'll be like "Oh it's just a late rejection." I don't know, I'm super confused and can cite nothing but my rear as my resource for all these deductions. Still, I think it's safe to assume that we're on some type of waitlist. This is a bit like that "Are we officially a thing?" phase in a relationship and sucks for the party who asks the question, which, in this case, is us the applicants. For Northwestern, a similar scenario is possible, but is is also possible that they are releasing rejections in batches because all decisions should be certified by the proper authority, and academics in charge of that process are in no shortage of dull and boring paperwork, I don't know. In the past, some schools rejected me and didn't bother telling me that until I asked them about it numerous times, so... Yeah, let's be cautiously optimistic with 3:1 ratio. Also, I haven't heard anything from Georgetown and UC Merced.

Well, it's part my personal story and part the program(s). Since my story is irrelevant to the general discussion, I might offer what I think about these terminal master's programs at prestigious universities (As far as I know, Columbia has a couple of terminal social science MAs as well as LSE and Oxbridge across the pond.). 1) It's no secret that these programs are largely cash cows. Value-wise, they are not very highly regarded but they are not trash either. So, students with little aid and enough resources go because they want that name on their resume, and students who get the most generous aid give these programs a shot as a final push towards the line. The latter group of students already have good enough profiles for many PhD programs, but either their applications are lacking in one aspect, whether it be GPA or publications, or they're exclusively shooting for top tier institutions, and think a degree from UChicago will boost their chances. 2( These programs are a bit like some European research master's and take nine months (3 quarters) to complete with one week breaks between the quarters. But unlike European research master's, they require you take 2-3 courses each quarter . These are not realistic performance expectations from students, and even a minor thing like a particularly bbad cold can topple your world in that pace. What then? All your effort and money go down the drain. 3) While it's true that these degrees will add lil something to your resume, the same value can be harvested from other endeavors at no (monetary) cost. You can hunt for internships, RA positions, or work on a publication for a reasonably well-ranked journal and they will boost your profile just as much with the extra perk that you won't have to cough up 60k to do these things. 4) I think all that scholarship money think is a carrot they dangle in front of our noses to pull us in. There is an old adage in Turkish that goes something like: "You don't mind sacrificing a chicken if you expect a goose in return." So, they're trying to get us into sacrificing our chickens with the promise of a goose is what I'm saying. 5) MAPSS and CIR alumni are complaining all over the internet about the faculty's preferential treatment towards the PhD students and terminal master's students lacking a support system. For me, the reason that my profile is sub-optimal for places I really want to attend is not the lack of a UChicago degree, it's a lack of other things, and some of those things I can not control or change. Would a CIR degree make up for the lack of those things? Maybe, I will never know. I got way better packages from similar places in the past, and couldn't come up with the money to cover whatever is left. So... But if you're an American, are offered at least 1/2 aid, and enticed by the program, I'd say go for it just to see for yourself.

Claiming a CIR referral admit. 20k scholarship. Been there before, means nothing to me, yeah...

Hey, I talked to the department yesterday, and the DGS said all decisions are made at this point and selected applicants were contacted. Our decisions should appear on the portal soon.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I could not detect any changes to my portal, but I'm an int'l student, decisions for domestic and int'l students might be delivered separately on separate days, or I might be looking at a rejection...

Big congrats! Was it via e-mail or the portal?

I saw at least one acceptance from Pitt on the results page, and people claimed both acceptances and waitlists from GTown here. With the latter, I could not discern any pattern that might help you shape your expectations though, more acceptances/waitlists can be on the way, or it can be all rejections going forward, I don't know.

Thanks, this was super helpful. I actually never thought about Nordic countries and had places like Bocconi, SciencesPo, Hertie etc. in mind. So definitely opened a new door.

Well well... I still have a bunch of schools to hear from, but at this point, I am almost certain that nothing good will come out of them. So, as much as I hate to say this, I am starting another cycle as one nears its end, this time, for Europe. Already have a small list of schools, but just in case I miss a good opportunity, could you suggest any European programs with later deadlines, preferably with a standard application procedure rather than "find yourself an advisor" type of thing, anything project-based with an emphasis on behavior would do too. Thanks in advance for any input.

I went through five cycles in total so far. Two undergrad, one master's, and two PhD. In some, I got into decent programs with no aid and couldn't attend, in some others, got decent aid but didn't have the means to cover the rest, and in still others got flat out rejected from every school I applied to. I had a very similar mindset to yours in terms of comparative weight material and immaterial values such as prestige, financial prospects, and meaningful work hold in our lives. However, after so much, I saw that it's even more random than often suggested here. Of course there are expectations, cutoffs etc. But once you make it to the starting point of the race, unless you are truly exceptional in some way that denying you a place would be objectively irrational, like if you're Malala Yousafzai or whatever, it is truly, truly random. I saw people with "barely there" scores getting into top twenty and some with near perfect scores getting rejected by much lower ranked places this cycle alone. Sometimes what you need is not three points on your GRE or five decimal points on your GPA, it's not one more publication, the endorsement of a superstar professor, sometimes, it's just a lucky break. That lucky break, you cannot create, summon, or call at will. So, my humble advice would be, focus on what you can control such as qualities that would raise your profile both in the private sector and in academia like decent knowledge of statistics, a programming language, knowing your subject well, languages and whatever you value, whatever you believe that if you had would make you a well-rounded, more mature person. Schools like people with worldly knowledge, people who had breathed the air outside the academia jar. I believe everyone here is well above average, so put your potential into some other use, and in a couple of years, if you realize that this is your true calling, come back to see if they will take up on the opportunity. Best of luck for everything.