expfcwintergreen

I don't know whether or to what extent that's true for the other subfields, but comparative (where I will be) is growing. There's currently five people in the comparative faculty, and they're in the process of hiring two more. Midwest513 is right: the program has an overall reputation as something of a rising star. Almost certainly true. Davis's American is generally ranked somewhat higher than their comparative, and the program in general has a reputation for producing high-caliber quantitative research. Unfortunately I don't know anything about theory at Davis, but it seems to be a good place for "hybridity." I myself have a core set of thematic interests (I'm primarily an institutions guy) that I'm interested in exploring from both a comparative as well as an American perspective, and when I visited in March pretty much everyone I talked to gave the impression that they encourage that kind of interdisciplinary (or at least inter-subfield) work. One thing I can say from my own experience is that they won't get hung up on any black marks you might have on your profile as long as you make up for them elsewhere. I applied straight out of undergrad; I had a low cumulative GPA (~3.1 at the time I applied) due to a miserable first two years, but I had a good major GPA (~3.9), good GRE scores, and a bit of quality research experience, and once I was accepted they seemed pretty eager to get me on board (though they did not court me quite as hard as a few of the somewhat lower-ranked programs that accepted me). Work experience might help; in any case it certainly won't hurt. My cohort is 14 people including me, and if I recall from my visitation, only me and a few others were coming straight out of undergrad; the rest were coming from masters' programs or the working world. As with many or most programs, fit is probably the single most important thing. If there are people there that are doing stuff that excites you, I strongly encourage you to get in touch with them now - Davis's faculty and departmental staff were by far the most helpful and approachable that I dealt with during my application cycle. It was a stark contrast to certain other programs I applied to.

Hi there. I applied and was accepted to Davis in the last cycle, and I'll be starting there this fall. Obviously I can't say anything about studying there yet, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have about applying. What mixed things have you heard?

Anyone heading to Davis tomorrow?

Congratulations! I think I'm in as well - I checked my online status when I saw your post, and it says department recommendation - admitted, graduate school action - pending. No email or letter, though - how did they notify you?

'Nother Berkeley reject checking in. On the bright side, I finally got my funding offers from Davis and Pitt - nothing like people offering you free money to take the sting off your first rejection. Edit: @jsclar and saltlakecity: My last name is in the middle of the alphabet, so I don't think they're going alphabetically.

Theodore Roosevelt. His vision for the country was so ahead of its time - in my opinion, "The New Nationalism" was one of the best speeches ever given by anyone. Not to mention what a total badass he was.

I'm in the same boat. It's torture; at this point I wish they'd just send me a rejection so I can stop getting my hopes up and get on with my life. Anyway, I'm officially losing my mind over this cycle. I was just taking a nap, and I had a dream where I got a call at work, and it turned out to be one of my schools saying they'd changed their mind and they were rescinding my admission offer. I protested that I already had a letter and a funding offer, but they said, "Yeah, but if you read the letter carefully, it just says we've recommended you for admission, it doesn't say you're actually admitted." I woke up sweaty and terrified. In the dream, my boss was CJ Cregg from The West Wing.

My mom has a BA in English from a Canadian provincial university; my dad has a BE in chemical engineering from the same school and a Ph.D. from a top-15 (in his field) state university. He works in the private sector, though. My parents are thrilled that I'm going for the Ph.D., but my dad thinks I'm a little bit insane for wanting to go into academia. He keeps reminding me that I could work for the Foreign Service, or a think-tank, or the government. He's an engineer, and I suspect he doesn't quite grasp the distinction between politics and political science.

Adams, Scheiner, and Andrews in comparative. I contacted Adams last semester, and he seemed really excited that I wanted to work with him and that my interests aligned so closely with his. He called me and we had a nice chat about the program and political science in general. Are you planning on going to the reception thing?

Well, I've had an interesting day. This morning I got my official waitlist notice from UT, and this evening I got my unofficial acceptance notice from UC Davis. Judging from what's been posted in the other thread, I guess I'm most likely not getting into my first-choice school, but getting in to my second-choice school is a nice consolation prize

Comparative. I was originally going to apply for the MA at Oregon, but they really seemed to be steering applicants away from the terminal MA so I ended up applying to the Ph.D. program.

I called the graduate coordinator this morning out of curiosity, and they said the adcom is meeting tomorrow and/or Friday. (Edit: by "curiosity" I of course mean "crippling anxiety")

I think my slavish devotion to my email is starting to affect my sanity. I just got an email from a familiar name with the subject line "Congratulations on your admission!" and I actually started shaking, but it turned out to just be a follow-up letter from a POI at Pitt. It was a really nice letter and it was nice of him to send it, but this is the second time in two days I've nearly had a heart attack over an email that turned out not to be an admissions notice. Anyway, congratulations to everyone who got into UT. My undergraduate experience here has been great, and having taken two graduate classes, the departmental culture among the grad students seems really friendly and tight-knit. I haven't heard anything on my application yet, but I don't think I'll be too broken up if I don't get in.

I see there's another Texas rejection in the survey. Weird that we haven't seen any admits yet. I've been at UT for three years now, and so much about the way this school works is still a mystery to me...

I was about to say I also applied to only one top-15 (Chapel Hill). I keep forgetting I also applied to Berkeley - as I mentioned in the other thread, I just thought, why not, you'll never know if you don't apply. Anyway, of the programs where I'm actually hoping to get in, I'm so anxious about UNC that I'm feeling a little sick. I deliberately ran the range of the rankings, from big bad Berkeley to unassuming little Miami of Ohio, with most in the 20's and 30's of the USNWR rankings. I thought I could be a strong or weak candidate depending on what each adcom was looking for. Since then, though, I'm feeling more like I have a strong application overall, with my low cumulative GPA (3.17 at the time I submitted my apps) being the only real black mark on my profile. That's from failing two classes in unrelated fields three years ago when I was in a different major and at a different point in my life, and I made sure the adcoms knew that. I got into Pitt, though, and the survey shows they rejected a couple of people with substantially higher GPAs than me, so I'm hopeful that if Pitt can see past that one black mark, then my other schools can too.

Of course, there's really no telling exactly how helpful those GRE and GPA statistics are, because I don't know how important stats are to UNC's admissions process relative to fit, SOP, rec letters, etc. etc. Two things, though: 1. In at least one of the years I looked at (2007, I think?) the mean GPA for admits was actually somewhat lower than the mean GPA for rejects. 2. I spoke to one of my POIs there earlier in the application process, and the feeling I got from her was that, to the extent that their process is stats-based, GRE is the most important number they look at. Anyway, good luck to all who've applied. Here's to hoping we get some good news this week.

This is for the political science program only. The raw data is here. Year - Applied - Accepted (%) - Enrolled (%applied, %accepted) - mean accepted GRE - mean accepted GPA 2010 - 293 - 60 (20%) - 14 (4.7%, 23%) - 619V 690Q - unknown 2009 - 268 - 44 (16%) - 24 (9%, 54%) - 587V 641Q - 3.538 2008 - 249 - 73 (29%) - 35 (14%, 48%) - 616V 664Q - 3.560 2007 - 190 - 60 (31%) - 29 (15%, 48%) - 609V 674Q - 3.511 2006 - 220 - 65 (29%) - 35 (16%, 53%) - 616V 645Q - 3.666 5yr mean - 244 - 60.4 (25%) - 27.4 (11%, 45%) - 609V 663Q - 3.568 It's not as harrowing as I'd imagined, but I know that's not much comfort when you're waiting for that email...

I'm really not getting my hopes up about Berkeley; it was my "why not, you'll never know if you don't apply" school. My terror is currently reserved for Chapel Hill. I actually spent half an hour tonight dredging through UNC's admissions statistics over the last five cycles... I can post my findings, if anyone's interested.

Gah! I just got an email with an attachment and the word "University" in the subject line, so naturally my heart skipped a beat, but it turned out to be one of those unsolicited "have you considered us?" mailers from those weird little universities that get your info from ETS. Heh, I said the same thing when I got my first letter, and yet here I still am, obsessively refreshing online status checks...

Following up on my earlier post, I'm also feeling a little uneasy about Davis. A couple of days ago they sent me an email because one of my transcripts was lost in the mail, so I had to order another one. That was Februrary 2, and they sent out a bunch of acceptances the next day. I hope the extra wait doesn't hurt my chances... Thanks, and best of luck to you.

I'm getting really anxious about Chapel Hill. There's only one report in the survey, which seems kind of weird, but looking at past years it looks like they don't send them out all at once. I suspect there will be news this week. Irvine, on the other hand, seems to send out all their acceptances in one or two days. My online status still says my application is "being reviewed." I don't think that's a good sign...

That's weird. Maybe they were just talking about doing that sometime in the near future, or maybe my professor was thinking of someone else who's doing similar work. Anyway, as to the concerns in my original post, I've been hitting a goldmine lately just pulling up books and papers I've enjoyed and seeing where the authors are working. For example Russell Dalton led me to UC-Irvine, which may not be the most prestigious school (#36 per USNWR), and they have kind of a weird program structure (comparative and American are integrated as "democracy studies"), but in terms of what the faculty is doing it's a shockingly good fit for me. And Kaare Strøm and the legendary Arend Lijphardt led me to UCSD, etc.

Thanks everyone for the advice and commiseration. I'm feeling less panicked now, and a little more confident that I'll find a way to make things work out. Yeah, Hooghe and Marks are actually what attracted me to UNC in the first place. Unfortunately, according to my professor, they're on leave from Chapel Hill for like three years doing research in Europe. It still seems like a great program, though. Plus, if I were to get in and start out there a year from now, then maybe I'd still be able to work with them when they came back (isn't the beginning of the third year when you start to transition from coursework to dissertation anyway?)

So I'm going for a Ph.D. in comparative, and my general areas of interest are in party systems, elections and electoral systems, and public opinion, with a strong focus on Western Europe and Scandinavia in particular. I'm almost a year into my grad school search with applications coming up in a few months, and I feel like I've learned absolutely nothing. It's like there are no big European politics programs - it seems like every school in the known universe is strong on Latin America, but I'm very lucky if I can find a faculty with more than one or two Europeanists. Same with parties: you can't swing a dead fish without hitting someone studying democratization, but party people are few and far between. I'm taking a grad-level European politics course this semester, so I went to my prof for guidance, hoping she'd know of some big-name programs, but to my dismay her response was basically: Yeah, sorry, that's about the state of things. Ah, crap. Obviously my best option would be to get into a top-ranked school that's good at everything, but I'm not exactly a model candidate for, say, my dream school of Berkeley. Other schools I'm looking at, with varying degrees of fit potential, include UNC-Chapel Hill, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Colorado, and Oregon - I mean, after a year of searching I just have no clue. I'm not even looking for some mythical Perfect Fit, I just need to come up with a pool of 10-20 schools I'd feel good about applying to. So, to recap: parties, elections, opinion, Europe, light on the quant (I'm not bad at math, I just really don't enjoy it). The question: Where should I be looking? Should I lean more towards the programs with the most and best-established Europeanists, even if they aren't much interested in the other things on that list? Or should I lean more towards programs that are studying parties and elections and opinion, even if it would break my heart to give up on European politics? My long-story stats are as follows: - Degree: Government and Linguistics double major at UT-Austin, graduating May '12 - GPA: 3.17 cumulative, major 3.83 Gov/3.9 Lin. The reason for the cum/maj discrepancy is because there was a lot of misery and woe during my first two years, but in my last two years I've gotten mostly A's and perhaps two or three B+'s. - GRE: I just took it this week, and they couldn't give me my exact score because they're still working out the new scoring system (130-170 or whatever). The computer said my score would be comparable to somewhere in the range of V 680-780, Q 750-800, which puts me somewhere between the 96th and 99th percentile for verbal and between the mid-80s and mid-90s for math. AW I'll get with my actual scores in November. - I'm currently in an undergraduate research program, but I won't actually be producing anything until well after applications are due. No other research experience, publishing, or relevant extracurriculars. (I do, however, have some great research papers for potential writing samples.) - Zero relevant work experience or internships. I haven't had a job of any kind in almost three years, and even that was just part-time retail.

Hi. I'm new. I'm double-majoring in political science and linguistics at a top-20 public university. My original major was economics, which required me to take a bunch of calculus. Despite getting an A or a B in every math class I'd ever taken, I failed calculus. Twice. And on top of that, I got a few C's and D's in some core classes I hated, like biology. But ever since I switched my major three semesters ago, I've been loving school and doing great. So great, in fact, that I've realized that all I really want to do after I graduate is go for a Ph.D. in poli sci. But I'm really worried that those earlier screw-ups have ruined my chances at getting into a good program. My cumulative GPA is only 2.76, and even in my best-case scenario I'll only graduate with a 3.28--but my major GPA is 4.0 for both majors. All other application factors excluded--solely in terms of GPA--what do grad schools look at? Is my low cumulative enough to get me tossed in the reject pile all on its own, or would they pay more attention to the fact that I suddenly went from A-B-C-D-F to straight-A halfway through undergrad? One option I'm considering is applying to a terminal master's program first. If I did that at a more realistic (read: lower-ranked) school and did really well there, might I still have a shot at a top-10 Ph.D. program? Or are Berkeley and Stanford simply out of my reach? (edit: I won't be applying anywhere until a year from now; at this point I'm just trying to get a feel for how high or low I should aim.)