bigfishtheory

Claiming an acceptance at MIT! Comparative politics. Email came about 3.5 hr ago.

PROFILEType of Undergrad Institution: Ivy LeagueMajor(s)/Minor(s): Major: Politics. Minor: Statistics and Machine Learning. Undergrad GPA: 3.812 overall GPA / 4.00 Major GPAGRE: 168v/167q/6.0awAny Special Courses: Intro to computer science, probability and stochastic systems, Mathematical models in politics (game theory), Regression and Applied Time Series, Machine Learning for Predictive Data Analytics. 3+ courses using R, some experience with Python, MATLAB, Java Letters of Recommendation: 1 from RA adviser (tenured prof in politics/political economy), 1 from another RA adviser (untenured assistant prof in finance/econ), 1 from Junior Independent Work advisor (untenured prof in political theory). Research Experience: I worked as an RA on four separate occasions, involving about 5 projects, spanning a duration of 2 summers and 1 semester. 1 project in Econ, 3 in poli sci. Mostly did data analysis work, also did some work with formal modeling using MATLAB. Three semesters of required undergraduate independent research work. Writing sample: Junior independent research paper (cut it down to meet some page requirements) Other: Undergrad Research Fellow in one of the research groups in the Politics dept here. RESULTS (PHD) Acceptances: UCSDRejections: Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, UChicago (referred to CIR MA), Michigan Pending: Harvard, MIT, NYU (implied rejection), Vanderbilt (implied rejection), Chicago CIR MA Going to: Idk might try again next year, might go to UCSD, might get lucky at one of the pending (unlikely) Long time lurker--went ahead and decided to post because i can clearly see the trend indicating what will happen with my remaining apps since I have now gotten 6 straight rejections (or 8, if you count the silence from NYU and vanderbilt). This might be a bit long but I need to get this off my chest. Some context: I decided I wanted to apply to graduate school very late (only about 2 months before the deadlines), which meant the learning curve for optimizing these applications was very steep. Clearly, I could and should have learned a lot more about each school and the process in general. I almost certainly should have waited a year before applying. In fact, I was leaning towards taking a year to prepare first (either to do a MA or work as an RA), but I was told by a current graduate student that he expected me to do “very, very well” in the admissions process; one recommender told me he thought my prospects were “excellent”; another recommender, when I explicitly asked him whether I should wait a year to shore up my app, said no, that I was a "competitive applicant already"; a Prof. I reached out to at Michigan said that she thought I would get in to most programs. Taking this advice, I went ahead and applied. Clearly, things could have gone better for me... (although I am of course happy to get the acceptance at UCSD). Definitely think my SOP was not as good as I thought it was, otherwise my results would have been better. If I had to guess my single biggest application weakness, it was that my argument for why I was a good fit for each individual school was weak and/or boilerplate. Also, I didn't have a good reason why I was interested in my subfield/research agenda, which remains a difficult question to answer for me, in truth—I am very interested in it, but articulating a neat and simple “why” is tough. I also think recommendation sourcing was a severe weakness: I got no recommendations from professors in my particular subfield (CP), only 2 out of 3 were in political science (one a theorist), and 2 out of 3 were untenured. However, these were the professors I assessed as having the best knowledge of me at the time of applying, and all three advised me on research projects (either me working as an RA for them or on my own independent projects). I know they were all strong letters, but I don’t think they came from the right people, I guess. I had planned on getting a fourth recommender, and he actually agreed to write me a rec (in writing, too!), but then promptly ghosted me despite repeated email followups. Luckily I wasn’t counting on his application to meet the minimum three, but I think he could have helped me out-- I did well and participated frequently in his class. His class was also one of the courses which inspired me to pursue a PhD. Another major weakness to my app was probably that I applied saying I was interested in comparative political economy, but have almost no economics coursework under my belt. I also did quite badly in an introductory economics mathematics course (although my quantitative skills are shown through other, more advanced courses that I performed well in). I thought my Econ deficiency would be compensated for by having received a very strong LoR for my RA work with an economics professor on an economics project, but I guess not. I also switched to comparative politics relatively late in undergrad, so I had only a few courses explicitly in CP at the time of applying. I had been a theory-focused major prior to switching to CP. GPA was also maybe a hindrance, as it’s definitely on the low side for acceptance ranges at the programs I applied to. If this ended up affecting my chances a lot, I’d be irked as the majority of my non-As were freshman and sophomore year in a foreign language class I was required to take. Hard to know how much of a factor grades were, though. A lack of publications definitely hurt me, but there’s very little chance I could have changed this before the application deadline anyway. Finally, I believe GRE was within the range of acceptability and probably played little to no role in my rejections. Takeaways: I approached the process with the idea that I could differentiate myself from other poli sci applicants by showing off my technical chops in statistics/data science/CS. I told professors to emphasize these skills in LoR, and I emphasized it in SoP as well. I think this was the wrong approach. I needed to convince the committee first and foremost that I was passionate about political science, and let my transcript speak for itself. The frustrating thing is, I AM very, very passionate about political science research, but I suppose I did not do an effective enough job conveying this in my application. Grad admissions are extremely difficult. I’m kicking myself for making avoidable errors in my applications which have cost me time, stress, money, and self-esteem. I should’ve done much more research about optimizing applications before I decided to apply this cycle. I resent somewhat that I was slightly misled by mentor figures in my life to believe my profile was better than it really was, but it was my responsibility to actually write a strong application. It appears I failed to do so. I should have waited a year before applying--at the very least to get some more clouty recommenders and to shore up some of the other weaknesses in my app. In truth, I (naively) expected the prestige of my undergrad institution to carry me far by itself. This turned out not to be the case whatsoever. I have not decided what I'll do yet--UCSD is not the best fit for my interests, so I'm not ecstatic about going there, although it is a good program. I will probably apply again next cycle, but this has been a very discouraging process.