poststructuralist

It's true more for theorists, as far as I know. From what I've been told and researched, it's hard to find a job in general as a theorist, and especially so if your Ph.D. comes from somewhere that's not a well regarded dept. overall or a very good dept. in theory. I worked as an office aide at my school and was in charge of organizing the cv's and stuff for the theorists and IR guys. The IR people got looked at from a wider variety of schools than did the theory people. I think that's generally true across the board. Of course, the people who told me this had PhDs from top schools and were teaching in the ivy league, so the info is probably skewed.

Yeah, I narrowed my SOP down to the interests of the schools I applied to as well. There are some areas where I could have strengthened my app,so I'm not complaining too much. I realize that a lot of it rests on my shoulders and the fact that I am obviously competing with a lot of other extremely qualified people, yourself included. So I'll work on boosting my stats for next year. Just a word about only applying to top schools. I had a long talk with a few profs (with Ph.D.'s from Harvard, Yale and Chicago) who frankly told me that if I want to be a theorist it's kind of useless to get your Ph.D. from somewhere that isn't a top school if I want to be a professional academic. Unfortunately, most of the jobs in theory go to people who have Ph.D.'s from top places, and pedigree matters a lot. Fair or not (personally I don't think it is), that's the reality. So I made the decision that I want to give myself the best possible chance of getting a job after graduate school if I am basically going to give up disposable income for 5-7 years in my twenties. Getting a Ph.D. and being an academic is definitely something I want to do, but I don't just want to do it for the experience of going to graduate school. Whether that was a good decision remains to be seen. I hoped that I would get in somewhere, but came in to the process realizing that its extremely selective and there was a real chance I wouldn't get accepted anywhere. While obviously I'm not dancing and singing that I got rejections, it's not like I thought I was entitled to acceptances all around either.

Any NWU admits not accepting?

Thanks for the words of support. I didn't get top philosophers in the field, but just the top philosophers here at my school. They are relatively well known though. I think one of my problems is probably that my interests are all over the place (despite the screen name). So I go from reading Deleuze to Parmenides to Badiou to stuff about critical race theory to Plato to Hobbes to Metaethics and pretty much everything I can get my hands on. So it's not like some professor is going to look at my SOP or transcript and be like, "hey this kid is into ancients and I am into ancients too" or "hey this kid is interested in democratic theory so am I" and go to bat for me. Plus, now that I think about it, one of my LOR writers actually took on the academic establishment awhile back and there might still be some bad blood in the Political Science world towards her...Whatever though, I'll do something else for awhile then reapply. No biggie. Just wanted to play the world's smallest violin for awhile.

I'm in the same boat, although not quite as impressive of a pedigree as you. Good GRE's, non HYP Ivy BA with a double major in PoliSci and Philosophy,Great LOR's from the top philosophers and political theorists here, I got chosen as an undergrad to be a TA for a class in the PoliSci Dept., have been a Research Assistant for a prof in PoliSci, 3.7 undergrad GPA (i came out of Freshman year with a 3.3 but then did well after that), with 3.9 major GPA in PoliSci, and still no love from anywhere. That's right...no acceptances. I guess my SOP must have been really awful or something. It's pretty disheartening to be honest. I'll give it a go again next year I guess, unless Northwestern pulls through for me...i doubt it though. not to sound bitter...

What's your subfield? If you are in something more quant-oriented, a masters might help. However, if you're in theory I don't know if it would. I've heard that it doesn't help you in terms of time it takes to complete the PhD program, and professors don't seem to value a grad student with a masters more than anyone else. If that's true, and you're a theory person, it's probably easier (and cheaper!!) to skip the master's, work on a language, find other ways to make your application stronger, then give it a go again next year. That's just my two cents.

No call from Brown yet. Any word on if they have notified all admit and waitlist? I assume they have.

Congrats!!

Indeed. Can people who've been admitted to Brown let us know something on the forum? Subfield, information on cohort size, number of apps, whatever? Just to give those of us here in graduate school purgatory some idea of when our suffering will be complete.

I don't know if I quite believe that, but I'm almost willing to so I can have some hope left--suspended disbelief

here's a question: is anyone the brown admit on the results page? should we assume that they contacted all those who were accepted already?

Ha, i didn't mean damn you, it was more one of those quietly sighed "damn"s that come at the end of another disappointment

hey, brown admit, congrats! Any word on when they'll let the rest of us know one way or the other? What's your subfield?

damn.

Just to rile everyone up that's waiting on NWU, I just noticed on the Results page that some people last year didn't get officially rejected until the first week of April. yikes. I hope we don't have to wait that long on a decision one way or the other.