YAGSA

Check Samuel Chambers at Johns Hopkins. He taught a seminar on Marx last academic year, and last semester I took his Frankfurt School seminar and it was pretty good. There are other people in the department who know Marxist and critical theory very well.

For the GRE, just retake it. Almost everyone does better (and some much better) the second time around. However, I think you cannot take the old GRE anymore, if that's what you took, so you'll be in sort of new territory there. Even then, your scores are too low for the kind of schools you want to apply to so you probably don't have much to lose by retaking it. As for the schools, it seems like you just decided to list the top undergraduate schools (except Harvard because naming number 1 would sound like too much?) without much regard for the strengths of their programs and their compatibility with your research interests, which doesn't give out good signals in your favor as a PhD applicant, almost as if you're thinking of getting a PhD in political science on a whim. Like Penelope said, these are the things that you should be working on from now.

I don't think it is, no. I just find them to be convenient to go on little tangents. Like pretty much anything in an SOP it's something that can either backfire or prop you up. I guess everything's a gamble in a SOP, but what isn't when it comes to grad applications in general, right?

Okay, I'll post this draft as it was the last one I made and also, I think, the funniest one. Keep in mind that it wasn't successful at Brown, although it was so elsewhere (for which I changed references to POIs, of course, but everything else was exactly the same). PERSONAL STATEMENT When deciding my undergraduate major, I remembered that one of my favorite law courses in El Salvador had been Public International Law.[1] International Relations (IR) seemed to be a natural continuation of my legal studies, and I planned to combine both in a diplomatic career.[2] This plan dissipated quickly after taking an Introduction to IR class. There I engaged—lucidly for the first time—in the seductive world of theory. In particular, I was swayed by the rugged, masculine style with which realism assesses and explains (or narrates/fabricates, as I would say now) international reality. The research paper I wrote for that introductory class, dealing with Chinese human rights as a U.S. foreign policy challenge, was strongly inspired by the realist tradition.[3] That paper’s topic reflected my interest in Chinese international affairs, which was an outgrowth of what I perceived as China’s growing global significance. Later, as I took history and political science courses centered on East Asia, I consolidated my interests in the region, both for its own sake and for the generalizable lessons to other postcolonial areas, such as Latin America, that can be derived from East Asian recorded experiences and narratives. Through further courses and independent readings in IR theory and political thought (two fields that I wish to marry, harmoniously or not, in my academic future) I became increasingly frustrated with realist frameworks, finding only temporary refuge in the two mainstream alternatives of liberalism and (Wendtian) constructivism commonly offered at the undergraduate level.[4] I could not quite put my finger on what it was about these ways of thinking and speaking of the world that caused me intellectual dissatisfaction. Then I discovered Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, and Derrida, and, among our contemporaries, Richard Ashley, Michael Shapiro, R.B.J. Walker, James Der Derian, William Connolly, Mark Blyth, Charlotte Epstein, and Prasenjit Duara.[5] The writings of these and other authors have aided me to approach a more satisfactory articulation of what I find dissatisfying in our mainstream international theorizing. Put briefly, the chief component of that dissatisfaction is the way in which those mainstream theories (or discourses) ontologize and bring into being a particular heterotopia of anarchy (to borrow Foucault’s term), which ‘naturally’ carries with it the (dangerous, I think) teleology expressed in such dichotomies as survival/hegemony and conflict/cooperation. Since those discourses are enabling discourses in the sense that they permit and justify certain operations in international praxis, my dissatisfaction reaches to the post-Westphalian global order. Bearing this thought in mind, what I wish to do as a graduate student and beyond is to grapple this dissatisfaction through a genealogical or historicized problematization of the liberal global order and its ancillary discourses, employing qualitative and archival methods. Moreover, I want to unearth alternative orders of international relations, rendering salient the processes whereby these have been interred under the coercive expansion of a dominant order and discourse. As I carry this genealogical problematization to the dissertational level, more specifically, I plan to approach it through the means of an illuminating and intriguing venue: the study of revolutionary states and movements, especially in the modern era. It has often been the case that revolutionary upheavals led to the allocation of deviant identities (or ‘unfriendly’, ‘rogue’, ‘terrorist’, and ‘revolutionary’ itself) to the states in which they occurred, as seen, for instance, in two cases on which I am currently conducting research for my honors thesis: China after Mao and Venezuela after Chavez. Other cases I plan to study as a graduate student under genealogical (which for me includes contextual and ecological aspects) and discursive lenses are Sandinista Nicaragua, Kim’s North Korea, and, to “go back home” in a slightly different track, El Salvador’s revolutionary guerilla movement during the country’s civil war within the larger context of the Cold War. Reflecting on how deviant labels have been inscribed on these and other groups and states of revolutionary breed pushes one to question the discourse that enjoys a strong monopoly on the allocation of deviant international identities, and how it seeks to violently (often in the physical sense) suppress the centrifugal forces, or loci of resistance and transgression,[6] symbolized by revolutionary agents. More broadly, my intention is to approach politics from sociological, linguistic, and discursive/ideational/textual perspectives, from which the relevance of revolution becomes even more apparent. Revolutions (and calling them so already reveals the presence of a given ontologizing story or discourse, but the degree of violence in the story can vary) are situations that can be characterized by what Professor Mark Blyth has called Knightian uncertainty in Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Acknowledging the importance of ideas (whether political, economic, religious, or of another sort), Professor Blyth’s theory of institutional change can be applied effectively to explain great political changes. After reading Great Transformations, however, I thought of how Professor Blyth’s theory of institutional supply, stability, and change opens up the analytically anterior problem of the need for a theory of ideational supply, stability, and change. My research project intends to take on that problem. The study of revolutions—moments of profound uncertainty where much is up for grabs in the rearticulation of agents’ stories of the world around them—provides a crucial opportunity to device generalizable answers to the issue of ideational or discursive genesis and contest. A prevalent purpose in social theory is to discover regularities in social behavior, and my particular academic enterprise is to find regularities in the ways in which agents create, propose, and impose ideas—to which I most often refer as discourses, stories, or, to avoid epistemological presupposition and underscore their normative content, fables. I depart from the premise that people can know of and act in the world only because of the fables that they tell to themselves and to others, creating a self-contained and manageable world within our inscrutable universe (which might as well be just the product of a meta-fable).[7] In other words, agents author plots with a moral, just as Aesop did in his fables and academics do in their theories and policy recommendations. Of course, these fables are made true relationally; they are only meaningful when interpreted by others. This sociological constitution of truth, however, is not unproblematic. Much of the process of social truth-making responds to power relations, and Foucault, inspired on Nietzsche, has done much to guide us in that direction. In fact, most of what I have mentioned has already been elaborated upon by others, especially in postmodern scholarship. Building on those elaborations, I hope to contribute to the literature through textual and literary analyses of the fables of international theory and policy.[8] This could be done, for example, in applying a theory of the novel to nationalist narratives in postcolonial states. At this stage I can mostly hypothesize, albeit rather confidently, that it is possible to find regularities in the manners in which agents craft their world-explaining stories. Among those regularities are the limits on story-writing represented by material factors and power relations.[9] In addition, one can identify regularities in discursive phenomena and literary devices displayed and deployed in the making of fables, including those that pertain to international politics.[10] Producers, advertisers, and consumers of politically-relevant fables are constrained and enabled in the interpretation and actualization of their fables by the material, linguistic, and intertextual conditions framing their literary interactions—and these conditions are, in turn, objects of further narration. These constraining and enabling factors, especially in our contemporary globalized world, cut across diverse social groups (such as states), making comparison and generalization something possible and useful. Therefore, my goal is to disentangle patterns or regularities (that is, to come up with a poignant story) from complex processes of ideational generation and contestation in (inter)national settings.[11] I began to discuss my intention of addressing a theory of ideational change by citing Professor Blyth’s scholarship. Aside from using it as a compositional device, I referenced his work to underscore my familiarity with and regard for a faculty member of the Brown’s Department of Political Science.[12] I would also like to highlight the crucial impact that Professor Der Derian’s work has had on my thinking. I became acquainted with Professor Der Derian through his editorship of International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, which provided me with an essential background in poststructural IR theory. Looking ahead, my research project could profit greatly from his insights on information and media studies, for these can account for the paramount ways in which fables are propagated within and across national borders, especially during moments of crisis (as seen recently with Twitter in Iran, to reference a well-known example). It would be a tremendous privilege and advantage to work with Professors Blyth and Der Derian, as well as with other members of the Department’s outstanding faculty, particularly those with regional expertise in East Asia and Latin America. Overall, as a PhD student of the Department I am sure I would acquire a finer discursive acuity to better analyze (read) international experiences (as texts). This would be of great advantage, for, as Arendt illustrated in her reading of the United States Declaration of Independence and Barthes taught us in “The Death of the Author,” we, as readers of world texts/politics, can be more than passive onlookers, being instead active creators of alternative and unique meanings. This can allow us to directly engage in politics in the Arendtian sense, refiguring meanings and making something new. My broad academic aspiration is to share such creational opportunities with my future colleagues and students, expressing and deliberating our intellectual dissatisfactions, inquiries, aporias, and passions. That is what I ultimately want to do—to devote my professional life to research and education. Discoveries of new politico-philosophical grounds in IR and brighter perspectives to elucidate them are to be the academic manifestations of my inner demons, which, as Weber suggested in “Science as a Vocation,” I am following under the adamant belief that to do so is of the highest meaning. Of course, I can only sustain the faith that this pursuit is meaningful if I am able to share it with those around me as colleagues, students, and cohorts in life. I took the first step toward this goal, inadvertently, when I took that International Public Law class a few years ago. At this point in time, applying to the Political Science PhD program at Brown University is to be the next, deliberate step. <br clear="all"> [1] Law school in El Salvador is a five-year undergraduate program, of which I completed only nine semesters before moving to the United States for personal and academic reasons. I should mention that although the Law program’s curriculum is highly technical, it has been useful in combination with my liberal education in the U.S. as it has allowed me to identify fundamental connections between philosophy, law, and politics. Ceaselessly interpreting legal codes was also profitable as it forced me to hone my skills in hermeneutics. [2] After my first year of undergraduate education in the U.S., it should be noted, I added an Economics major, of which I will not speak much here. To be frank, at first I chose to add this major because I am good at economics courses (at least at the undergraduate level) and they are very entertaining to me in a fashion similar to videogames, puzzles, and interactive novels. Nevertheless, being exposed to mainstream economic thought, especially as it is articulated at the undergraduate level, has been very informative, for it is a wonderful exemplar of much of what I find problematic in social science. It is one of my projects, perhaps to be developed in a future paper, to think of how conventional economic analyses can interact intellectually and discursively with postmodern, non-empiricist approaches in political science. [3] This paper was published in the Fall 2009 issue of the Undergraduate Journal of International Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other than its general topic, however, it is of little resemblance to my current research interests and intellectual approach. [4] Currently, I am myself a proponent of what could be reasonably characterized as a (loosely-defined) constructivist framework, but in this point I refer to certain mainstream articulations of “constructivism” whose excessively empiricist compromise struck me as a sort of obdurate, Weberian “re-enchantment”. [5] This list of names is meant to exemplify some of the most important intellectual influences behind my academic inquiry, but none of those names ought to be held (directly) responsible for the ideas that I express here or elsewhere. [6] Yes, I am aware that phrases such as “loci of resistence” have been overused in the postmodern literature, and I might be hurting myself for using it here, but I believe that its overuse responds to good reasons, at least if one is thinking or theorizing in a dialectical manner, which I deem to be the “right” thing to do analytically. [7] Why we do this is perhaps a question that should be left to the psychologist or, even better, to the neuroscientist. That is, of course, if in our stories we value natural science more highly, which we cannot do objectively unless we were to become omniscient gods. In any event, all stories must depart from a set of premises, and the generality of fable-making in human intersubjective interaction serves as the main premise for mine. [8] The importance of the link between politics and story-making has been a recurrent theme in political philosophy since Plato, who referred to the latter activity as poesis in his Republic. Broadly considered, therefore, my approach is not strictly something new. I do believe, however, that there are plenty of opportunities for novel application of this theme in world politics. [9] Our perception of materiality (including issues of biology, evolution, and others that we might include in our considerations of social behavior) is, given my premise, a product of a fable as well. However, from a pragmatic standpoint it is appropriate to treat certain aspects of materiality as “real” due to their widespread perception as such. For instance, uninvited physical pain, although it could be written/read and understood as a blessed portent of heavenly compensations (and many in our medieval stories narrated it in that way), is almost universally thought of as a real phenomenon, as something of little redeeming qualities and to be avoided, to the point that we can practically treat it in that way as given or a constant, especially in analyses of modern settings. [10] An example is the phenomenon of discursive inertia, which I explore in a primitive manner in the writing sample that supplements my application to the Department’s PhD program. [11] More specifically, given that life is usually not long enough to read and write about the whole world, I will focus on Latin American and East Asian regions. [12] I actually had the opportunity to sit in several of Professor Blyth’s lectures of comparative politics during his last semester at Johns Hopkins University, which allowed me to appreciate what an excellent instructor he is. I would be delighted to have the chance to learn from him again.

Don't sweat it. You'll be fine.

At Brown be sure to get well acquainted with Mark Blyth. Brilliant guy, but most importantly he is hilarious as hell.

As Higgins said, it sounds like it is a university-wide election, so you'll be competing with applicants from other departments. Then again, I get the sense that they give out a good number of them, so as a nominee your chances still improve as one person opts out of it (and at FIU I don't think it boils down to GRE as my scores were not that impressive--680V, 720Q). Even then, the TAship at FIU doesn't sound bad at all. Good luck.

I just rejected FIU's presidential fellowship (which I'm assuming is the one you're talking about), so hopefully you'll get it.

Roughly around 85%.

Which school did you reject? What package did they offer?

I plan to do absolutely nothing productive during my last semester of freedom.

I just got a funded acceptance from Delaware (posted on the board). Now my cycle is done! I will be going to Hopkins. Now I just hope I can get my I-20 before I fly back home.

Out of Brown as well. I guess I'm not even bottom-tier Ivy league material. I wouldn't have accepted anyways, but it would have been nice as an ego boost.

Ah, the last page of posts has made me feel so much better about my age (25, turning 26 in July). I've never been off school, but I did 4 out of 5 years of law school (undergrad program outside the US) before getting my BA in America, and now I'm going straight to a PhD. I was worrying about being the oldest among my cohorts, but perhaps that won't be the case.

Chicago completely snubbed me. Didn't get a rejection nor a masters consolation. Oh well, I wouldn't even go for the PhD there now, anyways.