RWBG

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad Institution: Top 25ish Major(s)/Minor(s): Political Science and Economics Undergrad GPA: 3.5/4 Type of Grad: MA Grad GPA: (no grades yet) GRE: Q800 V740 A5.5 Any Special Courses: Math and econ courses, some econ grad courses Letters of Recommendation: One polisci, one econ formal theorist, one trade law scholar Research Experience: Two RA positions, mentioned starting one other in January Teaching Experience: GMAT/GRE instructor, debate coach Subfield/Research Interests: Formal IPE/methods RESULTS: Acceptances($$ or no $$): Madison ($$), UCLA ($$), Michigan ($$), Rochester ($$) Waitlists: N/A Rejections: Duke, Stanford, NYU*, Princeton*, Yale* Pending: Harvard Going to: ?????? * = expected, not official yet.

Well, it appears I can't edit my original post, so here's the SOP. I technically still haven't heard from a few schools, but it feels like the cycle's over for me. I also feel like the probability of this having an effect on admissions is low! I included my SOP for Michigan, given that it's the highest ranked school that I was admitted to, and thus possibly the most instructive for future applicants. This does not, however, reflect any decisions I've made about where I'm going! "In my last year of high school, I read Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony, and I was intrigued by how it addressed international institutions’ role in facilitating cooperation between states in a fashion more sophisticated than the journalism with which I was familiar. Later that year, I took out an individual subscription to International Organization. This spurred my interest in political science research, which in turn convinced me to pursue political science at the undergraduate level, and finally to apply to an M.A. at X University. Now, I am applying to Michigan’s Ph.D program with the intention of pursuing a position at a research-oriented institution upon completion of the program. In other words, the writing has been on the wall for several years now that an academic career in political science is right for me. As a Ph.D student, I hope to study international and comparative political economy, with a focus on linkages between domestic politics and international economic policy. I am particularly interested in pursuing mathematically rigorous approaches to the study of the political economy of international trade, using tools inclusive of game theory and statistical modelling. In my senior thesis, under the direction of Professor X, I looked at a related question - namely, why trade policies (such as tariffs) often are used to accomplish redistributive goals that could be carried out more efficiently via non-trade policy redistributive measures (such as lump sum transfers). Generally, one would expect political actors to have an incentive to enact policies that are as efficient as possible in order to maximize the “pie” being bargained over.[1] I proposed that commitment problems in the trade lobbying process can lead to the prevalence of relatively inefficient redistributive measures that can be more credibly committed to in the long term, illustrating my logic and generating testable predictions using a reduced-form two-period lobby contribution model inspired by Grossman and Helpman’s Protection for Sale. I then ran a fixed-effects regression on panel data from OECD countries to show that the timing of the lagged effects of openness on public sector size and vice versa accords well with those predictions. A more formal empirical test is left for future work; strategic statistical models may prove fruitful in estimating the relationships identified in my formal model while avoiding potential misspecification pitfalls. I will present my thesis in a poster presentation at the MPSA this April. My class with Professor Y deepened my interest in trade-related institutions, and I wrote a research paper for the class in which I assessed the desirability and political feasibility of non-proprietary rights (i.e. non-patent) incentives for innovation on an international scale, within the context of the TRIPs agreement. This is an important topic given that proprietary rights solutions entail an unavoidable trade-off between incentives to innovate and monopolistic distortions, and is a topic that I hope to pursue further at the Ph.D level. Going forward, one research question that I am interested in pursuing is whether there are policy-induced learning effects on trade preferences. Hainmueller and Hiscox’s 2006 paper in International Organization suggested that education can have learning effects on trade preferences - essentially entailing a Bayesian update of individual beliefs about the aggregate outcomes of free trade. In a similar sense, I am curious as to whether the actual implementation of trade policies (such as free trade agreements) updates beliefs about the aggregate and distributional consequences of subsequent trade policies. By constructing an appropriate time-series of existing survey data documenting public opinion on trade before and after the implementation of major trade agreements, it may be possible to estimate the empirical significance of such effects. I have come to appreciate that formal and statistical modelling can be employed usefully in political science research, but I am also aware that it is very easy to use such tools incorrectly, even for technically sophisticated users. Moreover, devising models that can capture complex relationships can be a difficult task. Consequently, I have gotten a head start in my training by spending much of my undergraduate degree taking courses in mathematics, calculus-based statistics, econometrics, and microeconomics. Moreover, at the graduate level, I took the Economics Department’s mathematics and statistics review, and I am currently enrolled in the first graduate sequence in microeconomic theory. At Michigan, I hope to build upon my existing knowledge of these techniques by taking as many courses as possible in formal theory and statistical methods, so that I might achieve a level of proficiency at which I will be able to create sophisticated formal models, and develop my own estimators with which to evaluate them. Formal scholars such as George Tsebelis and Arthur Lupia would be great mentors when working to integrate formal and statistical models in my research. Additionally, I appreciate that Michigan has scholars such as Scott Page, Ken Kollman, and Robert Axelrod who are integrating agent-based models (ABMs) in political science research - an approach which has interested me since I read Professor Axelrod’s book on the Complexity of Cooperation two years ago. The implications of ABMs for international trade are not immediately obvious to me (they appear to have more obvious implications for the IPE of finance), but it seems plausible that the nonlinear dynamics often exhibited by voting behaviour may affect what trade policies are ultimately implemented by politicians. It is an area I would be interested in exploring further, and I have begun learning NetLogo in order to do so. In addition to Michigan’s strong methodological training, I am very interested in the substantive training I would get under IR scholars inclusive of James Morrow - his work on the political economy of international trade is exceptional, as is his work more broadly in IR. Michigan is an ideal school for me because it has the resources to allow me to pursue my substantive and methodological interests to the fullest extent, and I feel its training would benefit me substantially as a scholar. I thank you for your time, and hope you will allow me the opportunity to pursue my studies further in your program. [1] This logic is outlined in Daron Acemoglu’s paper on the Political Coase Theorem."

Well, if it's any consolation, that's how I felt last year. As I've said a couple times on this forum, don't let not getting in discourage you, because so many people on this forum had that experience and are now being admitted to programs. In any event, LSE's a nice place, and I'm sure you'll enjoy your MSc there! I also hear they do a great job placing their students in Ph.D programs.

No Princeton for me! But you know what, I feel good about my options. This seems like a good opportunity to listen to this song:

With all the shennanigans of late, I would really refrain from drawing too many inferences from the results survey.

I think the consensus is that absent a claim here, people are cautiously optimistic that they haven't started. Who knows though? Predicting this stuff is futile, and is likely to slowly drive one into madness, until they eventually start writing political science pickup lines and posting them on a message board on the internet.

If it makes you feel more comfortable, feel free to restrict the domain of x to x in R+. I'm not yet sure if there's a way to conceptualize negative x.

If it were a Canadian thing, the appropriate demarcation would be Red, White - Blue, Green. But these letters could stand for many things. I'm just speculating.

New offering: Rochester-style pickup line. Let x be the amount of sexual intercourse. Recall that both our utility functions are increasing in x?

Nah, it's fine. Whatever.

Two things: (1) Gradcafe keeps a public record of name changes. (2) My username actually has nothing to do with my actual name. However, when I post an SoP later, I worry about things being tracked back to me. Probably just being paranoid.

Ah, what the hell. Just run with it.

Edit: I decided after all the shennanigans with anonymity lately, I don't want a record of my attempts to be humorous on the internet. Post rescinded!

Don't encourage the trolls! If the acceptances are real, I'm sure we'll have at least one claimed acceptance here soon enough

It might be a bit late. Even if schools haven't released offers, I think most have already met. But you can e-mail them and see what happens; sometimes they'll update it for you.

Both.

Well, my grades aren't much better than that, and I don't have any graduate grades, but things have been going alright for me. Although for precisely that reason I have been shocked with each new admissions offer. I also didn't apply to Berkeley, and probably wouldn't have been admitted if I had.

UCLA March 8-10 Michigan March 15-17 Wisconsin March 22-24 WUSTL - Mar 23-24 Rochester March 25-27

Great advice! I'd add this to the thread I made earlier

To jump on the bandwagon; Sherlock is definitely fantastic. All of you who haven't seen it are bad people.

Similar in that it's formal, but it's mostly stuff on terrorism. That's why PH recommended working with him. Edit: Some really cool papers too. I have little interest in terrorism research, but his paper on suboptimal provision of counterterror was really neat. Some of the other stuff he's written looks neat too, but I haven't read it.

Yep. Also, I hear Harvard has a near-perfect yield rate (something like 25/27?) which suggests that the Harvard overlap may lower the yield rates of other schools.

I forgot to mention; this is one of the funniest things I've read on gradcafe.

I think the biggest issue would be the (alleged) split in the department; I think most of the formal/quant people left polisci and went to other schools. If you get in though, I'm sure you'd have the opportunity to work with people in other departments, and at least you'd have a few people in polisci to provide a base. You could probably make it work.

Possibly; I don't know much about the Africanist market. Madison has hired a lot of quant/formal-friendly types in the last five years, so it's hard to say yet whether the people being placed in those areas are going to do better on average.