LM2022

I think for international students an AW of 4.0 is ok. It is not great, but not horrible either.

Some programs release their results in mid or late January, some in early or mid March, most of them in February.

I just wanna say that it is so sad to see such an useful thread came to an end several years ago. It helps a looooooot in my own application circle. Hope some faculties somewhere will pick this up again.

164 is not low for Q, but not exceptionally high either. 156 is definitely not good for V, and will hurt your chances, but if I have an exceptional, exceptional, exceptional profile that makes you look like quant geek then I think 156 will not necessarily "doom" you. AW is a bit low as well, but as I said if your background is mainly quant, those inperfections, in the eyes of some profs/adcom members, are tolerable. If you are not a quant geek, retake the exam.

I think his case may be different from us...his government will pay for his study, so maybe the department/him is not bound by the April 15 rule.

UW

wow...I just wanna say your wailist is amazing...hope you get into Harvard

I second this... One more thing...from your Q scores I guess you are not very into quant stuff. If that is the case, you might want to consider try harder on those programs where qualitative approaches or other "alternative" interdiscplinary approach (as opposed to more popular interdisciplinary approaches like political economy or computational political science) are highlighted. You might wanna consider UCSC for your next round (if you are still interested). They dinstinguish themselves from other US political science departments by doing studies of "politics" rather than poltiical "science". Applying to PhD in History, East Asia Studies, or antropology may also be a way out for you.

I think the problem is that you really need a good reason/execuse if you wanna defer your PhD matriculation. I doubt that one can defer PhD enrollment only because one is dried up in the previous studies. So maybe you can come up with a plan on how to spend this gap year, and make the plan look fulfilling, meaningful, and urgent (so you really need to defer), but also actually laid-back. Then you can take the plan to the DGS and...wish you good luck!

I agree, Duke is super fantastic. Can I trade my JHU offer with yours, pbspoon? You mentioned JHU is ranked slightly higher in your field. Let's trade our offers so we can both be happy! (just kidding)

I think that means you are accepted. As long as you didn't fake your credentials (which I believe you definitely haven't done), you are fine. Just be cooperative and let the bureaucrats do their jobs.

btw are you waitlisted by Georgetown? I think if you can be wled by Georgetown then definitely you would have a shot at JHU. May I also ask what s your subfield?

I think JHU has not only sent out the admits but also the rejections. If you have heard nothin from them yet, I would say that s a good sign: maybe you are on a waitlist but they just didn't tell you that.

I heard that in addition to usnews ranking, APSA also has a ranking for political science departments/PhD programs. May I ask where I can find such a list? I cannot find it on the APSA website.

Well...I am a foreign-trained lawyer so I am not very sure if I am qualified to also speak for my US counterparts, but I guess the problem is that we are trained very differently from social scientists. Although there are a variety of approaches to legal scholarship (law & economics, legal-socio analysis, etc.), they all ultimately boil down to helping doctrinal legal analysis and serving the application of legal rules. By contrast, social science is all about describing phenomena, identifying causes, drawing universal models from social facts. So basically we are trained to be advocates, lobbyists, and worldly problem-solvers; but they are trained to be scientists developing new knowledge. Well, although in their decades of legal service some lawyers can eventually develop a good sense of how things work and where the problem is (like Hans Morgenthau, a lawyer who became a political scientist), that does not make lawyers automatically social scientists. We are still essentially different species.