balderdash

You're a Fulbright. To quote a great film, "Chill, Winston." (I got a SAIS offer but went abroad instead.)

First, I would call the graduate secretary and see if they're interested in additional material or not, and ask how to send it - last year, a few offices told me to send similar statements via email and they would simply print it out and attach it to the file. Others said they didn't want that information, so I snuck it into the application elsewhere (like the SOP, suggested above). It's still early in the season; I wouldn't expect the graduate coordinators are going to be annoyed at you asking (and if they are, well, that's their job). If they do want you to send the information, the best thing to do would be wait until you enroll and then go get "proof of enrollment" from the school's registrar. Then fax/mail/scan and email. That will look the most official.

For that I can only offer the forum regular's refrain: search the board, there must be a hundred threads on that very subject by now.

Yeah, don't worry about it. Write a good statement and I don't see any problem with your apps. By the way, +1 for "I'm feeling really rather nebulous" - I laughed out loud.

The question itself is misguided, unless I'm really missing something here. Your cumulative GPA is the one the college grants you when you graduate, based on their metrics of whether to incorporate those grades or not, and if so, to what extent. So if your school has honored those grades and assigned a weight to them, then it will already be factored into your four-year college GPA. If they feel those grades aren't a part of your academic standing (other than giving you general credits for them), they'll exclude them from the cumulative GPA. In either case, it's already been calculated. No effort is required on your part. (For the record, were you to combine them, you would need to weight them according to how much credit was given by your college for each class at the community college and abroad.)

Prima facie, no. (See CBlatts, Harvard MPA/ID).

Also, I wanted to post this, which is some grad school advice from a PS professor at Swarthmore. It's written more from the prospective of how he views students as being (un)prepared to apply, but you can glean some knowledge from it. http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2011/08/05/more-on-going-to-graduate-school/

I use it quite a bit. I uploaded a review that's to be published in December, and now I frequently get notifications that it's been accessed via a "[name of book] review" google search. This usually directs people to my webpage/blog, too, so it's a double benefit. Not that I'm going to get famous from a book review. But still. It has helped me with a few job interviews/publications/conferences.

From what I understand, it's considered like an MS. Most people will go on to do PhDs, though. There were four guys in my college last year who were doing it (2 Americans, an Eastern European, and a Portuguese guy), and all were thinking PhD.

I did. 8/12 responded, and the four who didn't were absolute superstars. Also, a few of them asked me questions, and I had a short exchange of emails with each to get a better idea of the program. Two even asked me to pass on personal messages to a former supervisor. So taking PH's advice from above, I would say that it certainly doesn't hurt if you're familiar with professional emails. The worst is that they're just going to forget you, and it may end up helping you some months hence.

Yeah, and I would expect that a lot of the growth comes from the switch to for-profit colleges, adjunct lecturerships, etc. as opposed to TT positions.

I went to Cambridge last year, and a friend of mine went to LSE. Just to address your figures, Cambridge is much cheaper than LSE because you're not living in London. The total cost for my year was about $40k US, while hers was $70k (difference between a 9 month and a 12 month course, partly). Also keep in mind that tuition prices have gone up substantially at both institutions - my degree went from 11,850 pounds to over 15,000 in one year. So I'd say your $45k figure is about accurate, adjusted to the CAD, for Cambs. But you'll probably reach $75-80k for LSE. But that said, I wouldn't trade my year in Cambs for anything...

Most departments indicate that a chapter of a thesis would be acceptable, even if it is only part of the argument being made - so long as it goes beyond a lit review. Wouldn't that suffice?

I bought the Kindle 3G. It works really well, but the problem comes with highlighting/making notes. I find that the keyboard is clunky enough where I don't want to type up notes, so I highlight long passages. But after 10% of the book gets highlighted, it stops adding them to your online collection (for copyright reasons). This means I have to go through and copy them to a word document, then manually delete them one-by-one, copy more to the word doc, etc. until I get all of them down. It's a hassle. But for reading, it's a breeze. Well worth it.

Add Korbel and JHU SAIS to the list.

I think that's fair. The reason I focused so much on it above was from my own personal failure to pay much heed to it at all. I think most would intuitively grasp the importance of situating the research question in the literature and such, but tend to downplay the importance of discussing the fit. The purpose of my post was to, as I said, drill home its importance; I still fully agree with you that the research question drives the app.

You've got a few months before the apps have to be in. Use it to court the professor. Stop in during office hours, ask him/her out to coffee for help on something else (ie an article or review you're writing), and then eventually ask for the letter. Of course, leave enough time for the letter before the deadline, but you can get a better personal/professional relationship with the professor by then.

I am dropping 4 of the 7 and picking up anywhere from 3-6 in addition to 3 of the same. I haven't quite got it sorted out. The changes aren't based on "aiming lower" so much as reorienting them toward a better fit.

(I think Penn has a few, as do many strong CP programs around the country (I'm not sure about them at all, but check Bloomington, Berkeley, UCSD, and Madison). In fact, in my search for Africanists, it seems all I can find are East and South Asian scholars!

Also consider doctoral work in IR - SAIS and Fletcher jump out as prominent programs that require language training.

Hello all, After four months' hiatus, I'm back for another cycle - good to see some old faces (handles?) around. To my knowledge, no applications are open for business yet, but with Yale's coming online Monday, I thought now would be a good time to wish everyone good luck. More importantly, to all the new applicants this year, I'm going to try and give some unsolicited advice. Here goes: Last year, I went into applications humble yet confident. I had a 3.90 at a top-10 national university with a reputation for difficulty, research experience, was doing a master's at Cambridge, had worked in government for 9 months in addition to various internships, was awarded Phi Beta Kappa and other honors, had 3 good recommendations from tenured professors, submitted a capstone paper for a sample, and had a 1570 GRE. I went 0 for 7. So this year, I'm focusing on what actually matters: the personal statement. It is the single most important part of the application. Never mind what the departmental websites say about holistic approaches and solid backgrounds; that all matters, but only as an initial check on the candidate before the real admitting and rejecting happens based on the PS. Focus on matching your research interests to specific professors, and write why they will want to supervise you and why your research will benefit from them. And spend some words doing so: I've been told about 40% of the PS should be discussing this (last year, I used about 15%). Don't just look at their subfield ("comparative politics") and confirm that their area focus ("Africa") matches yours. Read their bios, but then analyze their CVs. Find recent articles and/or books. Then read the works themselves. Quickly, you'll find the professor you thought was a perfect match is actually only tangentially related to your research. Which is the second most important thing: have your research absolutely sorted out. Have a research question. Make sure you could explain to your grandmother it in 100 words or fill 10,000 words discussing its intricacies, because you'll have to do both at some point. They won't take you on interest ("I want to look at political violence") and credentials ("I have an MPhil from Cambridge") alone. They want to know that you can formulate and articulate a proper scholarly inquiry. This should also take up about 40% of the PS, according to academic advisors with whom I've spoken (last year, I spent about 25% on this). Maybe these things were obvious to other first-time applicants and I just lost my way, or stupidly ignored it. But I certainly wish someone had drilled this into me before I started work on my applications. Perhaps I would have got an offer last year. Perhaps not. Either way, my personal statement was concise and well-written but completely useless for my application. I deserved my rejections. And so will you if you don't take this advice. Best of luck.

Princeton took one person from the waitlist, in IR, and it wasn't me. This concludes my cycle. See you all in September when the apps heat up.

Thanks, I actually had not heard that before. Oh dear.

Well, today's the last day of Princeton's waitlist. So if that doesn't work out for me, I'll have been 0 for 7. Luckily, however, I got a teaching job today, so I'm good for the year in one way or another. I'm going to focus on personal statement and letters of rec. This year, I had 1 poli sci and 0 Africanists write recommendations for me. Next year, it'll be 3 poli sci and 2 Africanists. So hopefully that will give me a bit of cred in my subfield. Also, I've submitted a book review and will be sending out my thesis in a few weeks. Combine that with (hopefully) doing well on my final exams, and I think I'll pull it up to strong enough for reapplying. I think one thing to look at a lot more this year is making sure fit is right - I definitely didn't do enough of it last year, which is partly to blame for my predicament. So this year, I'm going to spend months finding the right professors and making sure fit is worth 2 paragraphs of my personal statement.