deadinside

Try to publish a paper or, at least, work on a paper draft to show your academic competence. Regarding your other stats, you look fine to me.

I wish you all the best luck in the world. And to those who got rejected, keep trying because academia is a long run. BTW has anyone recieved news from UW-Madison, UMichigan or NYU?

Pursuing a Phd in social science with no interest in academia seems a bad idea. My advice is that you take your time and think what do you like more (subject) and start from there.

Hello everyone As I've posted before in this topic, I'm a chilean MA (sociology) and History (BA) prepairing for the incoming application process. My background can be resumed in the following: - 1 peer review publication (South American Journal) and 2 more currently under review (one being a personal paper and the other done collectively) - 1 year experience working as a RA in a well known Chilean social science research center - 3 more publication in chilean academic-ish newspaper - Knowledge in research softwares (Atlas.ti and RStudio) However, my concerns begin when it comes to standarized tests. Since I'm an international applicant I have to take both TOEFL and GRE (altough in some universities GRE is not being required). In ther former, I scored 93 (26 Listening, 26 Reading, 23 Writing and 18 Speaking) and underperformed in speaking because my dog started to bark when I had to record my answer in that section. In the latter I'm scoring between 155Q and 156V in the practice test I've done. BTW: I'm applying to really competitives universities. For instance: UMich-Ann Arbor, UW-Madison, NYU, Brown, UC San Diego. My first question is, do u think I should retake the test? I contacted a professor from one of the universities mentioned above concerned about the TOEFL score, because the recommendation they have on their website is that you apply with 100 or more. His reply was literally: "90th is fine, don't worry about it. Good luck with the application. This will not affect your application one way or another." My second one is, are those scores enough for an international student? Thank you very much and good luck to everyone

Thank you very much for your answer!! I'll definitely consider your advices and add some universities to the pool. Also, I'll begin the process of sharing emails with schollars (if it's possible) and I'm highly suspicious that you have to be very carfeul with this process, otherwise it can counterback the process.

Hello everyone, I hope you're doing great and healthy in this times of COVID. I'm a chilean last semester MA (sociology) student, with background in History (BA), preparing my dissertation and my thesis defense. Plus, I'm preparing myself for applying to a PhD programme in the 2020 cohort and I have a couple of questions about it, and it'd be nice if you could help me to solve them. The proyect I want to research is, in simple terms, about comparing in a historical-comparative scope the relation between type of capitalism (E.g. Neoliberalism) and the type of political articulation against it, focusing in the left parties. Specifically, I'd like to compare the trayectories of Bolivia and Chile. In that way, I was looking for PhD programmes who could suit me well, coming to the coming universities (ordered by application preferences): 1) UC Berkeley 2) UW-Madison 3) NYU 4) UMich 5) Northwestern 6) McGill Uni (Canada) My first question is: Do you think these universities are well suited programmes for me, considering that they have to have Political and Historical-comparative scholars? The second topic I want to adress is, more or less, the competitiveness of my application. In Chile, we use to get Masters and at least 1 peer reviewed paper before we apply to any PhD programme. In my case, I currently have 1 peer reviewed paper, and 2 more incoming (at least): One of them being a manuscrpit of my MA Thesis and the other one a co-authored paper coming from te research proyect I'm working with chilena renown scholars. As I semi-mentioned before, I'm working as a Research Assistant in a proyect with 6 more scholars who have renown in Chile, and I'm hoping doing so all this 2021. Therefore, do you think my research background is competitive among applicants or is it average? Finally, the last topic I want to adress relates to contacting people. At the time I've contacted PhD students from UC Berkeley, UW-Madison, NYU and UMich. All of them have told me that my research interests are well suited with their respectives universities. That said, there's a thing that bugs me: contacting scholars. In the UK PhD system you are expected to contact scholars (even before your application). In the US system it's a bit different I think because there's no universal answer for that. Thus, my question lies in either contacting -or not- possible scholars who can guide my thesis once inside (wich many of them I've already identified) In advance, thank you very much for your time. Best