jazzrap

OP,
 
Work experience will only help an applicant a lot when it is both quant-heavy and directly relevant to your research interests. Therefore, in your case, it probably won't help a lot as it does not meet the first condition. There are two ways it will help a little bit. First, in your SOP you can write that it is an experience that has helped inform your research interests. In other words, it can make your SOP flow more smoothly. Second, it definitely means that you are a candidate who is quite knowledgeable about the geographic area you intend to study. Note that there is a decreasing rate of return on your regional expertise in admission. Being a Chinese yourself already helps in this regard, so having interned at a provincial-level government think tank will add more credential to it, but not that much in the eyes of a professor who does admissions. 
 
More importantly, there are three aspects of the admission you need to consider. First, your GRE scores. The writing score will hurt a lot. It will make you add to the stereotype that Chinese over-perform in the GREs. Professors can be like: "hey, there is another Chinese who got a verbal score that is higher than the actual level of research-level English he has. His writing score says a lot." An American will have less of a problem scoring 3 out of 6 in the writing section than a Chinese who comes from China. But even for an American, 3 out of 6 is still pretty low. Not low enough to shut you out of the door, but it will hurt you in the later stage where professors are debating between two files. In addition, there is still time, so retake your GRE also for the sake of getting even higher scores on verbal. It is important to have a score as high as possible. Trust me, scoring a 335+ will help a lot. People will say things like "I got in Michigan with a not so high GRE score" or "I have seen people with perfect scores who got eliminated by most programs." Just because there are people who die in a car crash with the seat belt on and there are people who survive without the seat belt on does not mean that you should not fasten your seat belt. Those who got into a top 5 with low GRE might have perfect GPA, which you don't have, a letter from Thad Dunning, which you don't have, and a degree in CS and Economics, which you don't have. Oftentimes, professors face a choice between two candidates. One interned in the Federal Reserve for 2 years. The other works as a NGO correspondent in Rwanda.  The first person got a letter from Gary King, the other from James Fearon. The first person has a degree from a top 5 US university with a GPA 3.8. The second person has a degree from a top 10 US university with 3.9. Professors are not able to tell whose profile is stronger, but with the GREs, they can. 335+ is better than 328. Case closed. Let's be clear. your current scores in verbal and math are not bad. If it is August, I would not even recommend retaking the test. However, it is June. 
 
Second, you need to think more than just China. Nowadays comparative politics has moved completely beyond regional studies and most research produced on a single country must be framed in a way that contributes to mainstream theories that can predict phenomenon cross-nationally. Therefore, don't say out front in your SOP that you want to study Chinese political system. NO. Say this: "I hope to make contributions to the rapidly proliferating literature on authoritarian regimes." Then, don't even mention China until you reach the paragraph where you need to explain your work experience. To begin reading the mainstream theories that China is relevant to, I recommend works by Milan Svolik, Babara Geddes, and Scott Gehlbach. 
 
Third, these years applicants from China never succeed in getting into a decent school without training in US or Britain. Many applicants now go with the route of applying to master programs in the US to gain experience before PhD applications.
 
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to PM me. Good luck.

It will definitely make your profile a bit stronger. However, I don't think it would do anyone good to just assume to get into a top 5 (it is perceived by a lot of people that there are six "top 5" in the discipline: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Michigan, Berkeley, and Yale) even if he/she has a BA from Harvard and MA at Columbia with perfect GPA and perfect GRE and three glowing letters. The admissions process could be a bit idiosyncratic and turn out unexpectedly. And it is also extremely competitive. 
 
Try your best to make every single part of your profile outstanding. Get good training at Columbia, leave great impression on those whose letters will matter, read up the frontier literature to write a professionalized SOP that asks interesting cutting-edge questions, score better than you can imagine in the GRE, and then it is up to luck. 
 
A top 5 would be good, but a top 10, top 15, or a top 20 would not hurt that much. There are occasionally folks who went to programs below top 25 and still landed great jobs. 
 
And apply to as many programs as you can. 

The open house was for newly admitted PhD students, held in mid-March. 

OP,
 
Work experience will only help an applicant a lot when it is both quant-heavy and directly relevant to your research interests. Therefore, in your case, it probably won't help a lot as it does not meet the first condition. There are two ways it will help a little bit. First, in your SOP you can write that it is an experience that has helped inform your research interests. In other words, it can make your SOP flow more smoothly. Second, it definitely means that you are a candidate who is quite knowledgeable about the geographic area you intend to study. Note that there is a decreasing rate of return on your regional expertise in admission. Being a Chinese yourself already helps in this regard, so having interned at a provincial-level government think tank will add more credential to it, but not that much in the eyes of a professor who does admissions. 
 
More importantly, there are three aspects of the admission you need to consider. First, your GRE scores. The writing score will hurt a lot. It will make you add to the stereotype that Chinese over-perform in the GREs. Professors can be like: "hey, there is another Chinese who got a verbal score that is higher than the actual level of research-level English he has. His writing score says a lot." An American will have less of a problem scoring 3 out of 6 in the writing section than a Chinese who comes from China. But even for an American, 3 out of 6 is still pretty low. Not low enough to shut you out of the door, but it will hurt you in the later stage where professors are debating between two files. In addition, there is still time, so retake your GRE also for the sake of getting even higher scores on verbal. It is important to have a score as high as possible. Trust me, scoring a 335+ will help a lot. People will say things like "I got in Michigan with a not so high GRE score" or "I have seen people with perfect scores who got eliminated by most programs." Just because there are people who die in a car crash with the seat belt on and there are people who survive without the seat belt on does not mean that you should not fasten your seat belt. Those who got into a top 5 with low GRE might have perfect GPA, which you don't have, a letter from Thad Dunning, which you don't have, and a degree in CS and Economics, which you don't have. Oftentimes, professors face a choice between two candidates. One interned in the Federal Reserve for 2 years. The other works as a NGO correspondent in Rwanda.  The first person got a letter from Gary King, the other from James Fearon. The first person has a degree from a top 5 US university with a GPA 3.8. The second person has a degree from a top 10 US university with 3.9. Professors are not able to tell whose profile is stronger, but with the GREs, they can. 335+ is better than 328. Case closed. Let's be clear. your current scores in verbal and math are not bad. If it is August, I would not even recommend retaking the test. However, it is June. 
 
Second, you need to think more than just China. Nowadays comparative politics has moved completely beyond regional studies and most research produced on a single country must be framed in a way that contributes to mainstream theories that can predict phenomenon cross-nationally. Therefore, don't say out front in your SOP that you want to study Chinese political system. NO. Say this: "I hope to make contributions to the rapidly proliferating literature on authoritarian regimes." Then, don't even mention China until you reach the paragraph where you need to explain your work experience. To begin reading the mainstream theories that China is relevant to, I recommend works by Milan Svolik, Babara Geddes, and Scott Gehlbach. 
 
Third, these years applicants from China never succeed in getting into a decent school without training in US or Britain. Many applicants now go with the route of applying to master programs in the US to gain experience before PhD applications.
 
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to PM me. Good luck.

Hi all, as a current female student at UCSD, this report is troubling!  
 
Assuming the PSR poster is real, I hope she brought this to the attention of someone she feels comfortable with (her hosts, the DGS or the Women in Political Science group); if not, I would encourage her to do so. Obviously, behavior like this is inappropriate and we would hope to prevent it. 
 
Speaking from my own experience (n=1 of course, but I believe I'm modal!), UCSD in an extremely welcoming place where I feel supported and invested in as a scholar, despite the resource challenges that often face public universities. Both faculty and students (male and female) are attentive to and proactively working to address the gender imbalance in academia. Respect and encouragement have been the norm in my interactions with professors, staff, and fellow students. If that culture is not coming across to prospective students, we clearly have work to do---so please give feedback formally as well as online!
 
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to PM me.

It is March already folks. Let's give some of the love back to GradCafe by posting on the Let's do it for our future friends and colleagues before the current group starts leaving this forum for good. I am sure most of you benefited from the earlier versions of that thread while preparing your application. I know I did. Let's go and fill those pages. 

Their quant methods training is now on par with NYU, WUSTL, Rochester, UCSD, Columbia, and any top 5 for anyone not willing to go beyond applied methods. Their two areas of longstanding strengths, security and industrial political economy, are not very trendy subfields on the market. Taking that into consideration, therefore, this year's job placement is pretty good. 

I'm tired of lurking and just want to say that I'm glad I found this forum. Knowing that you are all in the same boat makes this process much more bearable. Seeing this kind of support is a beautiful thing. 

Technically, I am not a second cycle applicant, but in my "first" cycle (applying for fall 2013) I estimated my strength and decided to take a semester off to "avoid" applying. 
What I did in the past year: my senior thesis won award. I got a higher GPA. Took more methods courses. Got a near perfect GRE score. More importantly, however, I figured out what an SOP should be like. I did know that an SOP should talk about research questions, but the past year I was so immersed into the literature that I could actually write an SOP that really speaks to the frontier. 

I'll also volunteer to talk to the UCSD admits. Of course, you're all probably going to be drinking at my house in a month, so maybe it's not that urgent.

Don't apply to PhD unless you are a hundred percent sure that a research career in Political Science is what you absolutely want to do. In this sense, working for a few years after your college education might help you figure out where your true passion/obsession really lies. On the other hand, as far as admissions are concerned, I don't think there is empirical evidence (and anecdotal evidence suggesting both directions) establishing work experience as a key factor for higher likelihood of acceptance. It might improve your chances through things like taking more time to write a SOP, succeed in your GREs, meeting more powerful mentors who will support you, etc. However, they won't accept you just because you have more non-academic experience than ordinary undergrad candidates do. Note that any kind of experience outside an academic institute is at best mildly related to what you will want to show in an SOP. 

Well, not really. This implies that the information you need to write a strong SOP and determine that a school is one you want to apply to is exactly the same level of information you need to write a precise rank-ordering between those schools. Before you apply, you should have a sense of the general strengths, some people you would like to work with, a general sense of placement, etc. This allows you to make the decision of whether the expected value of an application is higher than the application cost, and to mention a few POIs/strengths of the department in your SOP to demonstrate you've thought about fit. Once you've been admitted to a set of schools you need to set out to resolve as much of remaining uncertainty as possible so that you can narrow the confidence intervals around your estimates of expected value and make a better decision between the options you have. It is unreasonable to expect that applicants will have done enough research ex ante that they will not need to engage in more information-gathering after having offers in order to make a more fine-grained evaluation of the options, particularly given that many applicants apply to 10+ schools.

Demonstrating fit with faculty in an SOP is different from determining whether you are fit with the program. For example, while most successful applicants fit well with particular professors, few of them really know whether causal inference stuff is taught in Quant II, or not. A lot of great programs where great professors do their research offer rigorous training, but some have just started to follow the causal inference trend. And whether in-house training in game theory is necessarily better than outsourcing the 3rd course to the econ department? Whether one semester of math additional to the summer school math camp can really make or break an applicant's decision to attend? Plus, why do placement candidates do well this year while not others? These questions are what we have to ask during campus visit. 

Congrats! That must be awesome. Hopefully I will get married in two years.

Well it is very common for these sorts of questions. Say if someone is accepted at a highly ranked program with decent fit and a slightly lower ranked program with superb fit. 

Well it is very common for these sorts of questions. Say if someone is accepted at a highly ranked program with decent fit and a slightly lower ranked program with superb fit. 

Well it is very common for these sorts of questions. Say if someone is accepted at a highly ranked program with decent fit and a slightly lower ranked program with superb fit. 

So I will see you at Rochester then! OH YEAH! 

So I will see you at Rochester then! OH YEAH! 

I don't regret responding this way, but I recommend not replying like I did:
 
I talked about how we people on gradcafe are waiting for this... although my email overall was not very childish of course

I don't regret responding this way, but I recommend not replying like I did:
 
I talked about how we people on gradcafe are waiting for this... although my email overall was not very childish of course

I am in at MADISON!! WOOOO YEAH!!! 
 
Congrats to Duke and UCSD admits! 

I am in at MADISON!! WOOOO YEAH!!! 
 
Congrats to Duke and UCSD admits! 

I am in at MADISON!! WOOOO YEAH!!! 
 
Congrats to Duke and UCSD admits! 

I am in at MADISON!! WOOOO YEAH!!! 
 
Congrats to Duke and UCSD admits!