Pierre Ng

I am a PRC national (male, cisgender, heterosexual, ethnically Chinese, first-gen college student) with a Bachelor's in IR from one of the top 2 universities in China and currently in my second year towards a Master's in IR at the same uni. My substantive interests are broadly situated in IR and IPE. I am interested in studying political methodology as a second major/minor subfield but I am not confident about my quant skills cuz I didn't take any math courses in college except for "Statistics" which was unfortunately marked as "Pass" instead of a numerical grade due to COVID-19 lockdowns. I got a B for "Mathematical Logic" in my freshman year which is not a relevant math course but it might raise a red flag somehow. That being said, I did a lot of studying to compensate for my quant deficiency: I did take two quant-y courses in college (Social Stats 91/100, Quant Methods in Social Sciences 96/100) and got As or higher for four graduate-level quant methods courses during the first year of my Master's studies: "Quant Reasoning", "Applied Econometrics", "Big Data Analysis" and "Computational Social Science" (for which I got an A+). I also got certificates for some math courses on Coursera as part of my informal training. The greatest disadvantage that worries me most may be my super unimpressive college GPA (3.67/4.00 according to my uni's grading scale cuz I didn't take schoolwork seriously in my first two years of college). However, I excelled academically in my Master's program (3.97/4.00) but I am not sure to what excent it could offset my deficiency in college GPA. My GRE score: V 165 (95%), Q 167 (83%), W 5.0 (91%) (I am not a native speaker of English so I also need to take TOEFL/IELTS and my previous TOEFL score is 115/120 with 28/30 for speaking.) I have done three research assistantships up till now. There are a few schools on my mind at the moment: Top preferences: UCSD, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Rochester, Columbia and NYU. Secondary preferences: WUSTL, OSU, MIT, UMich and UW-Madison. Backup options: UNC Chapel Hill, Minnesota (Twin City) and UIUC. I have no study abroad experiences whatsoever. I can secure strong rec letters from my profs, one of whom is well connected with the US poli sci academia. Basically I have been looking at programs that: (a) match my substantive interests, (b) have faculty members super specialized in political methodology and/or (c) offer methodology as a major subfield that I can pivot toward once I get in. Is there anything about my background that would put me at a serious disadvantage or am I just too ambitious in applying to schools like Stanford and Harvard? I would appreciate any suggestions on school choices or anything that could help with PhD app at this point of time.