midwest513

Not to be a downer, but it definitely says something about a department when you try and hire a former PhD student (Alex Downes) and he decides not to come back. I do American Politics...but I'm pretty sure that he does security stuff. Also..it seems that Harris does some quanty stuff to some extent at U-Chicago. At least in American Politics they have Shor, Howell, Berry, and Ashworth. Ethan Bueno DeMesquito does IR game theory over there as well I think.

A prof at my undergrad institution does India stuff and he did most of his methods training in the economics department at Cornell since their methods sequence is kind of lame/weirdly truncated....so it won't be unprecedented if you do indeed want to be a Cornell quant.

I think maybe I'm a bit confused with the characteristics of ABM's...I thought ABM's were more computational models with elements of game theory. For example...this book: http://myweb.fsu.edu/dsiegel/BDSTBook.html I like the idea and found some of it interesting but they seemed overly interested in trying to completely account for all sorts of patterns in elections. I really don't want to/don't have a time for a formal critique of the book, but just my thoughts.

Not arguing that the entire field isn't useful, but I do think that by going with a 'microfoundational' approach the literature sets some pretty strong assumptions about the actors/agents and tend to generalize alot for these models...in fact many of them either stop and make conclusions based on the findings of said models or they base their entire statistical analysis on them. I think people lean on them a great deal more than you may suspect.

favorite example of formal modeling not being the most useful thing in the world is agent based modeling. I'm not saying it can't have applications in political science that are successful (legislative politics has really flourished in AP...and formal modeling has revealed a great deal about political institutions), but agent based modeling tries to explain too much in many senses. These microfoundations based models seem to be interested not in causal relationships (what I am interested in), but explaining everything. It's a little much for me because in many senses I think these all encompassing formal models can miss very important variations in attempting to explain everything they explain nothing.

I liked to think of political economy as more of a framework for thinking about politics. To some people it means doing pretty extensive formal modeling..which obviously has it's place. But to me (while I can do some supplementary model building and game theoretic stuff) political economy is more about understanding how the economy and politics interact and the feedback effects that entail (at least in my research). I think some of the agent based stuff is cool but a bit much for my taste.

Criticize. But you should also emphasize pros and cons. Logically unpack why their argument doesn't make sense...no one can fault you for that.

This sounds great. Let's make a thread a few weeks before. I'll be presenting at the Undergrad Posters on Saturday as well.

Lurker here: I'll be around...but you must be on HUGE grant! Regardless, I would be into meeting up and doing Giordanos or beers or something.

To be fair, that seems like more of a university wide problem then department specific.

Plenty of students take a semester or a year as a visiting student at other departments where they can work with other faculty who interest them after they pass qualifying exams and are working on their prospectus,etc...You can still do this.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Co-Sign

COSIGN!

If things don't end up going well with my department I'll send you a PM.

Yeah, depends on your price range. I am staying at the Travel Lodge down the street (still finagling people to stay w/ me). If you can't band together with someone else from your program, the MPSA Hotel forum might be helpful. The Travel Lodge is about 100$/night though...and the cheapest around the Palmer.

Northwestern has Chong and Druckman who do that stuff pretty exclusive. You'll also want a place like Stanford that has a strong communications and Michigan that do that kind of stuff with well funded Communications programs (like Annenberg, but Stanford and Michigan also have strong cross collaboration) that do experiments.

Just remember this. When you are applying your application needs some sort of coherence or the programs will just toss it out because of the uncertainty of what you want to do. This is the point of 'research fit'. You have to have a clear vision of what you want and why. If you can do this in trying to link your interest in theory to testing it empirically you may be in luck, but it seems you need to do a better job of articulating your interests in each program you apply to.

What might be helpful is (at least in my limited understanding), is that if you had done research with two of those profs who left try and see if they can take you to another institution as their 'student' (that is if you were close with them and they are your advisor), and you may be able to get out of the predicament that Penelope Higgins stated , of having to redo your coursework.

Interestingly enough my undergrad institution GWU has a lot of people doing European related stuff. There's even an institute: http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/ Farrell, Wolchik, Morgan, Feigenbaum, and Hale (just to name a few) do various research related to Europe.

I'd suggest doing the law degree first. That way you can see if IR is really your thing. You can always go back and get a Masters in IR from a public policy oriented school and have the prestige of a top tier law school degree to perhaps get yourself some funding (or you could work for a while before heading back to grad school). Many people, for example, who go to Boston College's law school also do a MA in International Affairs at Tufts. Not unheard of.

I would contact people who have done your program who went on to PhD programs, I bet many of them were in the similar straits you are in now.

Generally I feel that if you get into a great department that you will be able to take formal theory classes (you'll be selecting schools based on that). Seems like the trade class could really influence your research agenda though and would be much more unique and inform your thinking about the topic. They can teach you the formal stuff, not the trade theory.

I've heard that the general rule with assistant profs is that it's okay to reference them in your SOP, but don't make them the cornerstone of your application. Also, see where that newly minted PhD went, maybe that's a place you should be looking.

Just a few sentences on how you chose the programs you got accepted too would be nice...

I was wondering if everyone who was posting this past admissions cycle could write where they ended up, why, and could offer reflections for future Political Science graduate school applicants.