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Zahar Berkut

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Everything posted by Zahar Berkut

  1. Just the name "master's in human rights" raises an eyebrow for me. Even if it comes from a prestigious university, it's not clear who would view this as a qualification-- I can only hope a law school would look favorably on it. A degree in international relations with a focus on human rights will be a lot more flexible and earn respect from a much wider community. But please, if other forum-goer's have first-hand knowledge of such a degree, do correct me.
  2. Now that we're in our summer loll, I'd like some of our veteran forum-goers to weigh in on how to tell if a school "fits," along with some related issues. Let me offer a few questions I've been wrestling with: 1. How important is it to identify potential advisers who work in your region of study? (As opposed to identifying someone who shares your thematic interests, and then finding a history professor to make sure you've got your maps straight.) 2. If you want to work in a relatively new or niche field, or want to innovate in an established field, how do you deal with the paucity of people who worked on your research interests? (How do you define who is "close enough" to those interests? Is pulling faculty from a different subfield who have taken your desired approach a smart call? I'm thinking mainly of approaches drawing from political psychology.) 3. If you have several different research interests, would you recommend emphasizing one over the others and letting your "fit" rest on that one set of interests? 4. Pragmatically, how important is it for your future career that your adviser pull some weight in the field-- being famous, well-connected, well-published, etc? 5. What are the risks in identifying junior, untenured faculty members? (Aside from them-- horrors!-- not getting tenure.) Feel free to take on any and all of these, or offer your own Q and A for that matter.
  3. Does anyone have any information about when graduate orientation starts? I'm trying to figure out when to move in. I could just take the Sept. 16th date they're offering, but if I can spare a few more days at home before my real program orientation begins, I'd probably take it. (And I'm afraid to even ask about course listings--- sometime in July is all I know, which seems oh-so-late to me.)
  4. You have as good a chance as anyone, and your record certainly won't itself lock you out of any school of any ranking, but the two pieces of information you need to rank yourself are those GRE scores and the strength of your quantitative background (for American subfield, that is). From there, it's all about "fit" and luck. I'm assuming your academic paper reflects a strong background in polisci research, too.
  5. I recommend taking a look at APSIA's list of member schools to spot quality public institutions. UC San Diego comes to mind, and I might check out UCLA even if they're not on the member list. http://www.apsia.org/apsia/members/allMembers.php?section=member
  6. As someone with similar regional and thematic interests, here are my two cents. Studying nationalism as a political scientist will likely require you to couch your studies in empirical models (not necessarily quantitative, but it doesn't hurt). Political science, even when more historically oriented, couches everything in theory and hypotheses derived from theory. There tend to be incentives to study contemporary topics, and refer to history only for background information (which some political scientists tend to do way too little of). History will offer you much more freedom, and if you're interested in the history of ideas, you'll probably have better job prospects as an historian than as a political theorist (though not necessarily more than a comparativist or IR scholar). Marc Trachtenberg wrote a good book called The Craft of International History. You might find it useful for comparing how political scientists and historians might deal with similar topics (there's a great discussion on the philosophy of history too). Trachtenberg is one of the few people who has held positions in both history and polisci departments, so I trust his experience.
  7. Hi Nice Guy, When looking into MA programs, make sure they offer the FLAS, which should provide you full funding. The FLAS program is under siege with the rest of the recent congressional budget cuts to Title IV (international education) programs, but it appears that schools who won funding recently will maintain it for the next few years. If you're not tied down with personal obligations, you can try applying for a Boren or Fulbright (which you could also do following an MA program to strengthen research credentials). Both of these can offer the chance for language training in addition to archival research, and you should not feel prohibited by your school-- it's a point of pride to take people from a range of backgrounds for both programs, especially Fulbright, and you just need to write a damn good application. The Boren allows you to receive up to two years of funding for combined home/abroad study, and it has a one year service requirement that some PhD's cover over summers through internships, which might also be served abroad. As far as M.A. programs go, I know UNC Chapel Hill offers a "fast track," which they say is designed for Foreign Area Officers in the military. I think it involves extra coursework and a summer term, but it might be appealing if yopu want to finish in one year. Your background might be especially helpful for that, since it's geared toward people with a higher degree of maturity and self-discipline. Wisconsin might have a good program, or Michigan, but I'm not able to speak on them at length (they definitely have great history faculty). II know someone who did UT Austin's program, and they definitely have resources there. I think all of these programs currently offer FLAS except for Michigan. And not to push anything unrealistic, but you might look into U Chicago's CIR or their MAPPS program. Both are 1 year MA's with a thesis component, designed as a stop gap (the latter especially for academia). They take a broad range of students, and the curriculum is completely customizable. You might at least investigate either of these-- they don't necessarily include language training (or even total funding), though, and one of the hallmarks of a good regional studies program is sponsored summer language training, possibly even before beginning in the fall.
  8. I can't speak from experience, but I think this thread deserves comments from someone with experience transferring. All I can think to ask you is this: can you be sure that you'll get the attention and guidance you want at any program, be it CHYMPS, top 10, 30, or otherwise? And have you talked to your peers at your program to better understand how they've been managing in an environment that puts a premium on independence?
  9. Agree with everything said above-- what will be important is choosing a program that does not completely squash qualitative approaches, as opposed to one that de-emphasizes quantitative. But what field and research interests do you have? I have a feeling the school selection will answer itself almost based on that alone. You can just cross any hostile options from your list if they come up.
  10. U Kansas is also a great school for REES. I know of two Fulbrighters to my current country who came from their MA program (admittedly not a Balkan country, but still). Funding matters a lot, so if you're covered then you should be in a good position. What plans do you have following the MA?
  11. I have met some MIB's at Fletcher, and they seemed quite happy with the program. It's fairly new, so I expect they're working out some of the kinks as they go along, but they also made sure to hire very strong faculty to support it and bring in a set of half credit area-studies type business/economics courses to support the students in the program. The reason they decided to create the MIB at all was because many Fletcher students ended up entering the private sector with the MALD anyhow, and they decided that offering a specialized track could only help students heading in that directio. So while it remains a possibility that some employers would prefer the MBA, you won't have to worry too much about job opportunities with the MIB from Fletcher (as the above poster shave shown).
  12. Stanford IPS has an incredible faculty roster, yet somehow is still considered less competitive than the "top tier" international affairs APSIA grad programs like SAIS and Fletcher. Speaking of which, have you looked into these programs? Or are you strictly applying to programs that offer both an international and "domestic" public policy component? I agree with Bukharan that you're very competitive, but proposing a focus in a quantitative field really behooves you to have as high a quant score as you can get. (As for your first question, I can only assume there is a possibility of secondary scrutiny when passing your accepted application on, but I can think of very few reasons why they wouldn't take someone already admitted to IPS if they explained their justification for the dual degree well enough.)
  13. Technically this belongs in the government affairs forum, but I'll bite. Browse the list of schools at APSIA.org to get an idea of who is out there. Work experience counts for a lot in these programs, so you have a reasonable chance at top programs despite the GPA (top 5/6 are, as a rule, SAIS, Georgetown, SIPA, Fletcher, Kennedy, Woodrow WIlson). Try to have some idea of what you'd like to specialize in as well beyond quantitative skills. Also, make sure the school actually accepts the GMAT before you take it. If you want a higher quant score-- and your current one is not bad-- you might be better off retaking the GRE (even if you risk losing some points in verbal).
  14. Or at a minimum you won't be able to use the same passport with an Israeli visa or stamp to travel to some places. It will just create some extra difficulties, presuming you are not asked about your education in any possible visa application, and if you are, it's not considered an issue. It could also cause some professional complications later on by having it in your background-- maybe. It's hard for me to say about that one, but it's a possibility worth thinking over.
  15. Díos mío, I also didn't realize it was this competitive. It sounds like there's a high chance you'll get off the waitlist, but in the meantime you could write to Stanford Housing and ask if they can provide information or advice for an apartment search. Very likely they can connect you with current students living off campus, and you might be able to just put out a notice asking if anyone wants a roommate for the coming year. That way the search would be done for you and you'd just join other students. Good luck!
  16. I'll also add that an econ major is just fine for a public policy degree.
  17. Also: lottery results! Escondido Village, two bedroom double. Satisfied.
  18. The director of my country's program told me the grants were reduced for the incoming cohort slightly. Have not heard anything about the coming year yet.
  19. Nobody in particular really, but when I researched the school I found a chunk of their current grad students seemed to be clustering in the general area of policy-relevant security studies, including quantitative, though not necessarily formal theory or cross-over into IPE. It's probably a good point that you're not reading their stuff, but in general they do have very strong faculty. Also, thanks for the syllabus link. I've been curious about formal theory myself, for not being exposed to it much at all as an undergrad. One friend writing her dissertation now insists that formal theory in IR is strictly game theory, but I think that's incorrect based on what I've been reading. (Not that our original poster Thucydides quite pledged to do strictly formal stuff.)
  20. I'm curious to hear what you mean about MIT. My impression is that they have a lot of students doing work on policy-relevant topics, so maybe not heavy theory, but a lot of data analysis.
  21. Produce some writing sample that would be of interest to political science faculty, and get your letters of recommendation. Then, if you believe you have a reasonably strong application, you can seek admission in both PhD programs and terminal MA programs. I think you'd be very strong on the terminal MA side, and you do have a reasonable chance of getting into a good polisci PhD program. Just don't restrict yourself to the "top 10" ranked programs like Stanford and Princeton, and look into any of the top 30 whose faculty can support your research interests. You stand a reasonable chance of a research and teaching career from any of these-- but a very important question will be where you want to research and teach. If you want to work in India, you'll want to check with someone knowledgeable about academia there to better assess job prospects.
  22. Let's keep this going. Talking to some friends currently at the school, one of the questions I find myself wondering is whether there's a sense of community among grad students at Stanford. Clearly grad students have next to no free time, but I still insist it's possible to have some semblance of a friendship network for those precious moments of rest and relaxation. Thoughts?
  23. If you want to do government work, the Middle Eastern Studies degree should be fine. If you're concerned about getting hired (and if you're thinking of working for the American government, they're probably more likely to hire than most companies out there), then your concern should not be the subject of your degree but its prestige and career network. There's a reason tons of people go to the top 5 professional schools for a myriad of careers that only have the vague anchor of "international" connecting all of them. (Just since you posted in the political science thread, you definitely don't want to apply to a polisci MA program for your interests.)
  24. My impression is that you are in a very strong position. Security studies lends itself extremely well to political-economy approaches because there is no real methodological litmus test in how you need to work in security studies-- taking a look through International Security, for instance, it's easy to find a mix of historical-qualitative, quantitative, formal theoretical, and economic methods. Basically, you'll just have one very powerful additional tool, and you can likely choose to do work on topics closer to either security studies or IPE as you develop your thesis. But IPE is a difficult enough approach to master that I think you'll be viewed as having a strong advantage. From there on it's just up to you to answer interesting questions in a compelling manner. I might mention security studies and IPE as two distinct interests that you also desire to overlap in your personal statement, as a way of ensuring your readers that you are already deeply established in one field that you will continue to do some work in. But you knew that already, didn't you? I think Stanford and Berkeley both offer strong support in security studies/IPE linkages, if you plan to apply to top programs. Michigan, Ohio State, NYU, and Rochester come to mind as places with heavy quantitative/methodological focus... but this really is not my area, so I can't say much (except that MIT was also the first place to come to mind for me). Reading suggestions... Fearon is one of the giants in game theory/security studies, as is Bueno de Mesquita. I think Bueno de Mesquita co-authored a review article on the "Rochester School" of positive political theory that you might find useful as background (but I must admit, none of my own professor ever mentioned or endorsed the approach). Axelrod's work is considered canonical now, though it's not purely security studies.
  25. Late response, but I'm pretty sure the efficiency apartments take a curtain and cut part of the room off, making that the new bedroom. Roommates in the apartment typically trade off halfway through the year. It did not sound appealing to me, so I left it unchecked. But it's also cheap, so there's the gain. Crossing my fingers that my modest but pricier arrangements come through.
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