Max Power

god i hope so

i have just been informed by harvard that i've been named the v.o. key fellow for the upcoming year. unfortunately it comes with no money. cool title though

i'm also in the club of sub 3.0 with a masters phd offers. i had a 2.97 in undergrad. i went back and did a masters with a near-perfect gpa. this cycle, i did extremely well getting offers from 3 top-10 departments. getting into a masters program doesn't seem terribly difficult, if you are willing to pay. many masters programs are cash cows for their university. however, they also have the resources to make someone an attractive candidate. i found that i was able to get everything i needed, as long as i was willing to work for it. i put a lot of work into getting myself into the right classes and building relationships with faculty. the masters not only provided me with a chance to show i could do top level work, but also gave me some really excellent references and a lot of ideas that were the basis of my statement of purpose

Very generally, my interests are in voting behavior and experimental methods (pm me if you want to go into more depth). Also, I have heard equally tremendous things about him plus I'll add that he's never been anything other than extremely helpful to me. My mentor is one of his students from Yale. I talked with him several years ago when I first was thinking about leaving campaigns to go back to graduate school and he gave me good advice then. I've been in to talk to him a couple of times since he started at Columbia, once before and once since I got an offer. He has been incredibly helpful to me in sorting through my offers.

i agree that in econ there are a lot more objective bench marks like doing well in real analysis that track with success in top 5 departments and poli sci applications are more objective, but i still can't convince myself that this mythical concept of "fit" isn't the thing. i'm sorry to fall back on the comparison of adblanche and myself, but i can't believe our apps were that radically different. i have to think we both had strong SOPs, LORs and writing samples to have any of the offers we got. All that i'm left with then is fit. Fit is also an unfortunate 2 way street. I thought i had a great fit at berkeley. They have a lot of voting behavior people. But they may have already been overloaded with voting behavior grad students and needed to get grad students for different profs. By contrast, Don Green just started at Columbia and has no grad students, so i'm pretty sure that my application stating i wanted to work on voting behavior and experimental methods fit a need that the department had to get someone who could and wanted to work as his research assistant

i think only one person (carousel) ran the table on programs they applied to. I get a chuckle every time i look at adblanche's signature. We both applied to a bunch of the same programs and both had very successful cycles and yet not a single program made offers to both of us. To me, this makes a very strong case for fit mattering more in political science than in econ where if you can't get into one of the top programs, you are a long shot for any of them and they are all fighting for the exact same applicants Also, that is the same letter I got from Berkeley. So much for personalization... edit: @grantman big archer fan

it really was. it made me feel like there was serious horse trading going on for the last spot or two and i was thaaaaat close it seems that way, but i bet all 3 of us got the same thing

I just got my Berkeley rejection so my cycle is now completely done, making my 0 for 3 in California. My silver lining is that its going to make my decision making process simpler since Berkeley vs. Columbia vs. Harvard vs MIT might have made my head explode

@SLC2k12: Today is the alleged day for us to hear from Berkeley, so lets get excited

QMSS is definitely not cheap, but it is a really excellent program that you should seriously think about if you decide to go this route. I cannot say enough good things about what it did for me. it seems to have placed people very well in phd programs (especially Columbia recently) to the extent that people have wanted to go on to a phd in political science. the balance of the incoming classes there has shifted pretty strongly towards political science the last couple of years. i just talked to chris weiss there today and he said they are looking to hire a political scientist for the program in the near-term. if you want to know anything about QMSS, pm me and i'll be happy to answer

i haven't read Gary King's book, but if people are interested in a shorter version, Chris Achen has a paper on "garbage-can regressions" that you can read here

@saltlakecity, still nothing from berkeley here

a better option, if she is working in new york, might be to live in the middle in stamford, CT or thereabouts. a friend of mine did that for a year while he had a clerkship in new haven and his girlfriend had a job in new york and it didn't seem too bad

Where fit is concerned, I'd like to quote the great Potter Stewart's concurrence from Jacobellis v. Ohio where he said "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it." Fit is about trying to figure out how well suited different departments are for an applicant given what type of researcher they think they want to be. Departments tend to admit applicants who play to the strengths of their faculty. They are not trying to build well rounded slate of graduate students. They are selecting future TAs and RAs for their faculty. What good does it do them to admit someone who wants to work on research questions that are not related to the work their faculty is doing? When I was deciding where to apply, I spent a lot of time perusing CVs, looking especially at the recent publications and working papers and then reading the papers. Here's one example from my own experience. I am interested in experiments, especially field experiments. There are plenty of people doing experiments at both Columbia and Michigan. I have a much better fit at Columbia where field experiments tend to dominate than I do at Michigan, where the experiments skew heavily towards lab and survey experiments. Consequently, I got an offer from Columbia and a rejection Michigan.

There's been no mention of Columbia, MIT or Harvard thus far in this thread, so anyone going to any of those can feel free to PM me or not as they want

in your position, i would certainly take the funded offer. unfunded MA programs are expensive and you have an offer of funding at a strong department. the worst case scenario is that you get there and it turns out to be the wrong place for you. in that case, transferring is an option. the more likely scenario is that you'll like it. either way, you'll be ahead by a year and over $60k ($40k tuition plus another $20k for rent, food and other living costs) compared to doing an MA.

i'm feeling pretty torn up about having to turn down at least 2 more offers. i feel really good about all of the offers i have and know i'd really like attending any of them. i know there's not a "wrong" choice, but i'm sure i'll spend a lot of time paining over which one is the most right

just got my rejection from caltech. berkeley is the only one i have left outstanding and my cycle is complete

i'm american/methodology

i think someone claimed a harvard wait list, but to be honest, i'm not sure. you'd have to go reread the posts from Wednesday

i am. though its making me decidedly less nuts than it would have a week ago. my last name is late alphabetically so if the rejections are going out that way could account for my wait time

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad Institution: Yale Major(s)/Minor(s): Computer Science Undergrad GPA: 2.97. If Harvard wasn't bothered, I won't be ashamed to post it Type of Grad: MA QMSS at Columbia Grad GPA: 3.92 GRE: 680V 800Q 4.5AW Any Special Courses: Micro and macro sequence, 3 semesters of game theory (1 in poli sci, 2 in econ), multi variable calculus, linear algebra, discreet math, set theory, algorithm design and analysis, multivariate regression, 3 grad seminars (elections, legislative behavior and institutionalism, comparative democratic processes) Letters of Recommendation: 1 from a senior Americanist at Columbia, 1 from QMSS's director, 1 from an assistant professor at a school I never attended who I worked for in the intervening years and I have a continuing relationship with as a mentor who worked in both professional campaigns and academia Research Experience: Randomized voter turnout and registration experiments in a non-academic setting; randomized turnout experiment as a masters thesis Teaching Experience: none Subfield/Research Interests: American, behavior, experimental methods, methodology Other: I'm 6 years out of undergrad. In the interim, I worked as a campaign consultant, specializing in voter targeting, a campaign manager and a lobbyist. RESULTS: Acceptances($$ or no $$): MIT ($$), Columbia ($$), Harvard ($$), Notre Dame ($$) Waitlists: Wisconsin Rejections: Michigan, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Princeton Pending: Berkeley, Caltech Going to: A good question I'll echo otherworlder's thoughts on the importance of fit. When I sought the opinion of a professor who I know, but haven't worked with, he told me that he thought MIT, Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley were the best fits for me this is based on a combination of specific faculty and holistic department approaches. So far, I have 3 offers from that set and 1 offer and 1 wait list from the other 7 schools I applied to. Just some food for thought. After thinking about it, I'm not terribly comfortable posting my SOP in a public forum. I think its a pretty good one. Based on my results, it probably is. However, it involves a few specific ideas for research projects that I have yet to begin and some fairly identifying details. I am open to sharing it on a one-on-one basis but I just don't like the idea of having it publicly posted in perpetuity.

27 admitted. campus visit is april 4th and 5th. package is 24.5k + 5k summer money

congrats!

came from the department chair