navyir

I still have not heard anything yet, I imagine they are working their way through the list today. Anyone here claiming the rejections?

As someone who has been through applications, been accepted, and started a PhD, I really cannot stress how important your fit with faculty is in terms of admissions and you having a succesful experience. I don't know your background at all but the entire process is a gamble. Prospective students, particularly those with only undergrad experience, are making a gamble on what they are going to be interested in researching over a several year time frame. That is rarely accurate as you are exposed to more work and topics and your interests evolve. Admissions are gambling on limited info that you have similar interests and will want to do grunt work in service of their interests. Sure, I want to go to a top ranked school but I frankly didnt apply to 90 percent of them because the faculty just is not doing the research I want. If your research topics are the mainstream topics and they are in the top schools then go for that. If they are specific, go for lower but good fit and good placement or it is futile one way or another. They wont admit you or when you get there they wont push your research forward and you wont do that for them. I couldnt even imagine applying to more than 10 schools because I dont want the experience of having to convince advisors about my research and go it alone because it is not their expertise.

Not that I am one to give advice or someone people should listen to given I am leaving one PhD for another because I ended up with an untenable fit but if you don't want to do an MA to boost your application, I would suggest pouring your time into your own work rather than someone elses. I have done the academia thing and think tank world for a while and would say that as related as some other research oriented positions may seem, there is no substitute for just going it alone and submitting or publishing your own solo peer-reviewed work.

Claiming a Brown rejection as well. I anticipated it as it was a tough sell for me in the first place in terms of fit and rank. Add to that my poor quant GRE score. I'm an older candidate with 15+ years of extremely related IR experience, an MA from a top 30 school with a ton of quant/methods courses and a mixed-methods writing sample leveraging survival models. I wasnt going to go back and spend a bunch of time studying math subjects like geometry that I havent taken in 20 years and wont use in IR to get a good GRE score when 99% of the schools that are a good fit for me dont require it.

I hope you and your family are safe and well! It is absolutely devastating to see the damage in both Turkey and Syria.

I find just setting notification rules for my email to capture any potential news from the schools I applied to is very helpful to stop the compulsive refreshing of my inbox. Ok, fine...mostly stop the compulsion ?

I also got the rejection for UW-Madison. First decision of the cycle for me.

Curious if anyone here is claiming the Georgetown or Brown interviews that have showed up in the results...I know faculty from the think tank world and seems odd to me.

As someone leaving another school due to bad fit, I know you are definitely right. I was very targeted with my apps but it is always interesting to see how things play out in a department that might have a subfield that is like 65% one focus and 35% the one that fits you. I am also always so fascinated with whether others call out profs from what they intend to minor in. My experience in the classroom is that those profs are just as critical to your success as your major profs, but is it bad strategy to call that out in an SOP? One might never know.

Congrats to those claiming UWM! Given I have not heard anything, going to take this as my first rejection/decision of the cycle, wasn't my top fit but still just adds to the nerves?.

What is your subfield? Hoping interviews are a bit idiosyncratic and it doesnt mean I am doomed at Wisconsin?

@KiavellidesIf you want to talk about the IR subfield at UVA let me know. Can share my experiences....

I applied to Brown, Cornell, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Minnesota, UNC, Penn, JHU, Georgetown and Syracuse. Not a peep from any of them so far. I know several dont typically contact anyone for another week or more.