balderdash

Depends on the school - Oxbridge has the FUF, which is a personal guarantee that you'll be able to pay for the course whose offer you're accepting... so you don't want to accept if you can't honestly sign the FUF. If you're not talking Oxbridge, then it's less of a problem. I would just call them and tell them your situation. They want you to go there, otherwise they wouldn't have accepted you. So they should be willing to give you an extension on your response, provided it's somewhat reasonable. For an example, I was accepted to an MA in the States with a response deadline of March 1 last year, but I wouldn't hear from UK schools until March 15th. I called the US school in late February and got the extension to March 31st. It all worked out. As a last resort, accept the US offer and tell them straight out that you may change.

I have a love of stand-up, debate, and basically any sort of verbal demolition of another's character or argument (in a humorous way). Thus, H. L. Mencken on President Harding's 1921 Inaugural Address:

What's crazy is that he could've got away with it if he had just graduated, not applied for the Rhodes/Fulbright, and continued on his way getting jobs. Ridiculous.

Should have bought hard-shell suitcases instead.

Frankly, I'd rather a blank stare than the conversation I usually have: "What do you study?" "Political Science." [Cue half-hour rant on bleeding-heart liberals/soulless conservatives.] When you give people the word "politics," they immediately think they know what you're talking about because they watch The O'Reilly Factor or Keith Olbermann. It's not what Poli Sci is about. At all. Especially given that my focus is on the theory of the state and the international relations of sub-Saharan Africa.

My own experience: Poli Sci was the 10th, and my final rec didn't come in until the 10th. I just got the email today saying that it had been forwarded to the department.

Glad to hear it. Try not to get too excited waiting for Cambs!

MIT, Stanford, and Harvard don't have one. Chicago and Yale do. Columbia and Princeton say they do, but it doesn't work/doesn't seem to exist.

Stats are good, but this SOP is frighteningly bad. And psh, Africa? So passe.

I'm an American doing an MPhil at Cambridge now, and I can assure you that they do reconsider these things. There are more than a few students doing my course right now who were in your situation. Basically, they give an offer on such a condition just to make sure you work hard through the end of the degree, not because there's anything special about that 3.9 cutoff. If they only wanted people with a 3.9+, they'd have rejected you outright. So no worries there, I'm sure you'll get good news. As for my own wallowing, I've been applying to PhD programs literally since July. I have been going over and over all of my app materials for months, and I submitted way back in October. But one of my references is having difficulty submitting her letters, so I am missing three of seven schools' copies. One deadline is tomorrow, another is the 15th, and a final deadline is the 30th. I'm stressing out so much about these! I just want the application process to be OVER.

Hey, I'm applying for poli sci, and despite telling me it'd be "this week" each of the last three weeks, I haven't seen any change.

+1.

So one of my recommenders, adamant that all of her letters would be finished and uploaded by December 1, has only completed 1 of 7... Yesterday, the Stanford deadline came and went without the letter being uploaded. My question is: Do they honor a sort of grace period with these? Or should I just kiss my $125 app fee goodbye?

Haha I'm sorry, that does suck. But honestly I don't think it will kill your application. I'm pretty sure that if the Prof is a decent person, she'll probably laugh it off and focus on your research interests. Most professors are humble enough that they don't take themselves so seriously as to be actually upset by such an error. If she gets so angry as to deny you admission... well, would you want to work with her for half a decade anyway? I wouldn't.

Work experience to me means research in the field, ie for a think tank or government agency, which I would argue does help. Never said it would condemn - just that if OP has them, it helps a lot because it demonstrates clearly that (s)he has not just the "potential capability" but rather the concrete ability to do research.

Come on, don't be silly. You know you're a solid applicant - you're a Rhodes ffs - and at this stage you shouldn't need our acknowledgement to make you more secure about it. Sorry to be harsh, but it's particularly ludicrous to discuss your application getting "thrown out in the first round."

If you have publications, then you've got a good shot at all of them. If you don't have publications but you have good work experience, then Princeton is unlikely but the other two are solid options. If you have neither publications nor good work experience, all three are unlikely with funding (unless your PS/SOP is truly outstanding).

1. What college? I'm at Cambs now doing an MPhil. A high 2:1 should be around the 3.7/4 range. Lots of American apps (for instance, 2/3 of the incoming students at Stanford) don't even have a masters (or an MLitt), so you definitely won't be "laughed out the door immediately" for your qualifications. 2. No real recommendations on the GREs other than you need to practice it a lot more than you probably think. Basic algebra sounds easy until you forget the rules of geometry - as a quick test, what are the relationships among the sides of a 30-60-90 right triangle? If you don't know it by heart, you're going to be in trouble. So the punchline is that you shouldn't underestimate the difficulty. 3. No worries on the math. It would be better if you had it, but it's not a disqualifying shortcoming - and besides, there's not much you can do now. You'll probably have to do more than you'd want at the PhD level, though. 4. Apply to the programs with which you'd fit best and that are good in what you want to study. It's much more common for PhD students to get funding in the US than in the UK, and the proportion of people on a simple department grant/stipend is much higher than at Cambs, where it's all Gates or Fulbright or whatever. Hope it helps.

I sent mine an email thanking them for their help once they had submitted recommendations for my MPhil, but once I was accepted and knew where I was going, it was wine all around. In my experience, it's the best way to do it.

It seems I have a copycat *gasp*! And Buhkaran - thanks. I sent her a desperate email that got the recommendation for the one school with the Dec 1st deadline, but I still lack the other six. Next deadline is the 7th... yikes.

So the Professor didn't upload any of my recommendations despite having agreed on Nov 3 to do it by Nov 30. Sweet. Also, one of the deadlines is tomorrow.

To be honest, and I don't mean to start a massive argument or to insult your writing skills (which I'm honestly certain are superior to my own), but isn't crafting your writing to the requisite format part of being a skilled essayist? I mean seriously, when you're submitting to a journal, a dissertation committee, or a conference, you're structuring your argument and changing the scope of your work to the requirements at hand. Why should the AW section be any different? Yes, I understand it's only in half an hour, and that it takes but a minute to be graded - both of which are ludicrous. But if you realize that to pander to such a system necessitates key introduction/conclusion/transition words, basic structure, clarity of prose, and impressive vocabulary, then why can't you provide them if for no other reason than to do well on the test? I would never publish something with which I wasn't comfortable, but I would certainly change my style for one essay in this situation. Well, that's my two cents, anyway.

Well, today is the day by which my recommender agreed to submit her 7 letters. Let's see if it actually works out...

Haha I had never seen PSJR before, so I just googled it... I guess that's probably where the person that told me had initially read it.

Well, from a current applicant, for what it's worth: you should be fine if you can write a good SOP and give a reasonable argument for why you're passionate about what it is you want to do (saving Malthus from the crypts of political theory, arguing relativistic epistemology in the Kosovar context, or whatever ridiculously specific subfield). If you're going to write "I did corporate law, didn't like it, so now I want to do a PhD in Poli Sci because it's interesting," don't waste your time. Also, it should show that you have some background/experience in the area. I think admissions would question your passion for your intended area of inquiry if you did it at undergrad then left it for 6 years to do corporate law instead, without any time researching, writing, or traveling to further this passion. And you're not late, so long as you can meet the deadlines. By "Top" I'll assume you mean HYP, whose deadlines are the 15th of December. If you can get everything in by then, you're in the same (only) batch of apps as everyone who turned theirs in back in October.