RWBG

FWIW, NUS has built a great group of folks who are pretty visible/active, at least in IR/comparative. I don't know anything about their MA or Ph.D programs, but at least some of the faculty there would be quite well-known in the US. (Also, fwiw, I am at a US department and have no affiliation with NUS)

OK, thanks! Given that I'm at Michigan, you can understand my curiosity!

What are you referring to here with respect to Michigan?

Your experience doesn't sound like the norm. When I received first-round rejection letters from SSHRC, they were always at the same time that first-round "advance to second round" letters went out, and they never included a score. This is also what seems to have been generally the case for others, from what I've seen on this forum. Your experience sounds much more akin to that of someone who advanced past the first round and was rejected in the second.

If you want to be a methodologist, I'd probably pick Princeton (Michigan has good methods folks, but Kosuke Imai seems to be more active in placing students as methodologists). However, if you want to do methods-y public opinion, you might be better served at Michigan, which I think has a stronger public opinion group, and a very long history of training people in the area.

Not sure who told you it was a month long thing, but it's two weeks at Michigan. Two weeks is more or less the norm across programs, though there are some that diverge from this norm (Duke's is a special case, mostly because one of the authors of a math for polisci book is there and the authors created a bunch of online materials for their online version of "math camp").

I think you can make it work. I know folks who've sold the whole "there's a set of techniques and approaches currently being used by scholars at your university to study X that I think could be ported well to the study of Y in order to produce new insights". As someone who's been on the admissions committee for one of the schools you're applying to, I think some people in this thread are construing "fit" way too narrowly; we wouldn't need to see that there are people here who exactly work on your substantive area/region of interest, just that there's a plausible story by which the training and people here could help you do interesting/useful work.

Without touching the rest of what you wrote, it would be worth noting that the big lesson from the formal study of conflict is that the "costs<benefits from war" is not a persuasive explanation for why war breaks out, given that states can bargain and make concessions outside of fighting. Good luck with CS.

Yep, it was March 19-21. Good luck!

I served on an admissions committee and that advice sounds completely wrong to me. We don't have information about the places you applied unless you voluntarily give it to us, and either way, there's no reason we should care about that.

Yes, but it's a different thing for the US applicants, who apply directly to SSHRC. For these folks, notification in late February to early March is more common.

With caveats that each admissions commitee is different, I would say that we would consider your coursera classes much the way you might expect; as indication that you have the initiative to learn the content you need, but not necessarily as an indication of aptitude. However, if the alternative is a local college, it is possible (depending on which college it is you speak of) that performance in those courses would be a weak signal as well; there's a lot of variation in grading standards for this kind of thing, and in the content/depth covered in any course, such that unless it's at a school we know about it can be hard to interpret (and frankly, even then it's a challenge). Your best bet might be to do a bunch of coursera courses, indicate this on your CV and possibly in the statement, and then make sure to do really well on the GRE quant section, while possibly writing a writing sample that uses some of what you've learned.

I don't know the public law subfield very well, but my understanding is that there are different flavours of it, i.e. some which are more empirically-oriented, standard positive social science-y, and some which are more akin to political theory. If your interests are the latter, then I can't speak to what an optimal strategy would be; on my admissions committee, I mostly deferred to those within that area when evaluating such applicants. If your interests are more positive social science-y then an important thing to do will be to clearly establish why you want to examine these questions from a social science perspective (e.g. don't lean too heavily on the law review article), what training/experience you have that would indicate to us you would be a good social scientist, what research ideas you have that fit within political science, etc. We've turned down plenty of smart people with legal experience (e.g. people practicing with Harvard law degrees) because while they convinced us that they were smart, they weren't able to persuade us that they would be better social scientists than other applicants, or that they had as clear a sense of what a research agenda/career in political science would entail.

You're right that psychology is a very different field. The publication process is very different in political science. Having read hundreds of applications this year for admissions, I can't think of any applicant who actually had publications of the quality that would make a significant difference.

To follow the storied academic tradition of citing oneself, here were my thoughts on using GPA for admissions at my top 5 program: "GPA is a tough signal to interpret, because there is so much variation in grading standards, both between institutions and within an institution depending on what kind of courses you take. I find it very challenging to use GPA as a signal, except as a negative one, although grades in particular courses can sometimes be useful. GRE is not the most important factor, but it is at least a consistent measure from applicant to applicant, so I tend to take a quick glance at that first. Fit and intangibles are probably most important when at the final narrowing stage, although significant violations of fit (i.e. applying to do nothing but ethnographic research focused on a region where we have no-one with expertise) might be enough to make us feel that we shouldn't admit you." So to summarize, on the question of which GPA, the answer is probably neither. I might take a quick glance at the "overall GPA" section at the beginning of the application, essentially just to see if it was anomalously low (anything above a 3.5 wouldn't get a second thought from me, and I only really started to wonder when things got below 3.2, at which point it would just get me to look more closely at the transcripts to figure out what was going on). I had more thoughts on admissions in the 2013-2014 cycle thread, so I'd recommend searching through that if you want more.

South Bend isn't that bad, I hear Great post though. I'm glad this has become a venue for your sentimentality. I suspect things will change less than you think they have to. Who has time for ironing?

I respect that the data limitations constrain your ability to get at what you want. Maybe you could do something with total graduate student enrollment, or number of students on the market; none of these are perfect, but they may be better than faculty size. The faculty size measure actively penalizes schools that have high faculty to student ratios; for instance, I know that Michigan has generally had relatively small cohorts as of late (averaging 12 students over the past five years [1]), while UCLA over a similar period of time has had substantially larger cohorts (averaging 21 students over the five year period data was collected [2]). But using faculty size, UCLA gets a big boost in the placement efficiency ratings because the Michigan faculty is 1.5 times as large as UCLA's, ending up with an assistant professor efficiency score of 0.775 versus 0.507 for Michigan. If we instead use average cohort size over five years and compute assistant prof. placements/avg. cohort size, we would get a score of 2.66 for Michigan and 1.47 for UCLA. Point is, I generally respect the do-the-best-with-the-data-you-have argument, but your data here may be more misleading than helpful. [1]https://secure.rackham.umich.edu/academic_information/program_statistics/program.php?id=82 [2] https://www.gdnet.ucla.edu/asis/progprofile/result.asp?selectmajor=0699 Edit: Sorry for the perhaps self-serving comparison. These just happened to be two schools that I knew there was data for, which unfortunately was endogeneous to where I'm attending.

I'm not sure I understand the value of this placement efficiency measure. As I understand it, we should really be concerned about placements/cohort-size not placements/faculty size, and it's not clear to me that faculty size is a good proxy for cohort size.

I'll second the IPE people loving IPES. I haven't been yet, but most of the people I know who have attended have been suggesting I go even I'm not presenting.

Sure thing. Feel free to PM me as well if you have any questions in advance of the visit weekend.

They also have a nice cigar bar, if you want to be a really pretentious grad student. Yale stipends being what they are, you might be able to make it work.

I mean, off the top of my head, amongst faculty you have Arthur Lupia, Don Kinder, Ted Brader, Nick Valentino, etc. W. Russel Neuman's also at Michigan, in a different department. That group has trained so many of the American political psychology types - also off the top of my head, Jamie Druckman, Adam Berinsky, Cindy Kam, Yanna Krupnikov. We also just placed a political psychology type at UNC this year. Lots of research areas I could see the argument for Yale or Berkeley over Michigan, but I can't see it for political psychology/American (although I am, admittedly, in a very different subfield).

Not to be a Michigan shill, but I'm a little surprised that Michigan hasn't made your shortlist of choices there given the interest in American politics/political psychology. If Michigan has a specialty it's known for, that's it.

It's probably less about training capital-M Methodologists and more about training applied types who are methodologically sophisticated. The people we interviewed from NYU tended to use a fair bit of formal theory and statistics in their research, and different departments will do better jobs at training such people. Beyond that, I don't have too much to add to this, except to note that it's going to be very difficult to get at some of the things you want to here. So many confounding factors, from selection effects, to variation in institutions' efforts to compile and publish data, to subfield variation, to variation in methodological approach to the discipline, to movement in faculty, etc. Best of luck though

Though not really so much if you're including formal theory. It's a great department, just something to consider.