CooCooCachoo

It's not an easy decision to make, to be sure.
 
As a policy school, GWU is a leader.  As for its academic-focus ... well, I can only tell you what I know from multiple conversations with several of its professors.  There are some very strong faculty members at GWU, including Michael Barnett, Martha Finnemore, and Henry Hale.
 
I met with about 5 or 6 professors last summer/fall when discussing applying to the PhD program.  Each one of them essentially told me the same two things:
GWU is working hard to improve its standing in the academic world; Go to the best ranked program I could. So, take that for what it's worth.
 
Now, I suppose there are some exceptions.  What exactly do you want to study?  If you are at all interested in Russia/Eurasia, the Elliot School has an extremely strong program with IERES.  They have Henry Hale, of course.  But they also have PONARS, and I think they're only going to improve over the next year or two.  PONARS alone is reason to consider the school - again, in the case that you want to study Russia/Eurasia.
 
 
 
Between the two, I would probably choose Georgetown.  They are often ranked closely with each other; however, Georgetown's name carries with it significantly more prestige and recognition.
 
 
 
 
The NRC rankings seem to be relatively contentious; I'm honestly not sure what to make of them.  Particularly since you can rank schools by different criteria.  I definitely view GWU as a rising school, though I wouldn't be confident placing it in the top 25.  Not because it's not a top-quality school (I really believe it is), but because other schools have made longer, bigger investments in a curriculum for preparing academics (as opposed to policy experts).  But then again, what the heck do I know!
 
So, those are my thoughts

I'm sure most of you are gone from this board at this point, but I'm super excited that I got the Fulbright award!! And then I'm probably going to still do the Master's at SOAS the next year, so I won't be reapplying right away. Good luck to all of you!!

Not to state the obvious, but, eh, you're in the Pol. Science forum. Now while the field might be in need of marketing, it isn't quite Marketing.

Not to state the obvious, but, eh, you're in the Pol. Science forum. Now while the field might be in need of marketing, it isn't quite Marketing.

Sorry for my absence on this forum as of late, I just wanted to wish all the best of luck as you either begin or continue your graduate education. While I wish I could be in the same position as you, regardless of my negative cycle it has been the utmost pleasure getting to know you all personally and I know you all will succeed in the future.

I'm going the other way precisely because the funding is so awful.

A few things..

You will need a well developed and implementable research proposal. More so than for a US program.

The above post is correct, ESRC and AHRC scholarships are UK/EU only. There are scholarships at other universities though. Look at jobs.ac.uk, here's an example http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEC140/phd-studentship-in-political-science/


More funding is available if you are willing to write proposals to projects being undertaken by the university. Though the website is pretty sparse at the moment http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AEC140/phd-studentship-in-political-science/


[*]You will probably less employable if you intend to teach and research in the US.



Personally I'm going to apply to 10+ US programs and only a couple in the UK. I wish you all the best of luck!

The OSU visit was pretty amazing. The department is criminally underrated at least is the US News rankings. They have amazing people doing just about everything extremely well.

I visited Rochester and Ohio State in the past week and I want to study formal, methods, and American so take this with a grain of salt.

Rochester: They really have a close knit group of people. The professors and grad students all seem to get along. The grad students all take the formal and methods sequence so the students at Rochester are generally great at math. This can be a great thing. The classes are notoriously hard and a professor of mine from the econ department at Rochester considers the program the hardest political science program in the world. Having students who can work together and aid each other through that kind of hell can be a huge asset. Also, the program kind of goes all-out when it comes to recruitment.

Ohio State: As someone else posted, the department is great - in IR. However, they are really suffering in American and Methods. They lost Luke Keele, Craig Volden, and Alan Weisman in the last year. They are hedging all bets on their incoming hires: a guy from Stanford GSB and one from UCSD. Their formal sequence is nearly non-existent. When it comes to their formal sequence, there are maybe two students. William Minozzi is a great guy and I think he will change how we look at formal theory in political science, Jan Box-Steffensmeier is great and is renowned in her studies in time series analysis, the department wants to hire more networks people in the future but the program is really in a rebuilding stage.

no problem .... this is political science ... we can fudge our numbers as long as we can give a good reason and explanation behind it .... I keed I keed before anyone gets upset

FINALLY!!!

I got accepted to SOAS at the University of London. A very nice birthday present, indeed. =)

Received my OSU funding today. Received the Dean's Fellowship.

25k year/ 5 years.

Got emailed by the DGS at Notre Dame on friday but my schools email servers were down until today. I have been accepted with funding at Notre Dame. I was earlier told that I was the first on the IR waitlist so this is quite exciting as I did not get in anywhere else and waitlisted in a couple of other places.

This advice needs to be qualified quite considerably. There simply isn't a magic number. If your interests are fairly conventional (which doesn't mean that your approach to them cannot be earth-shattering, e.g. by introducing new theoretical concepts or research methods to the literature, by making novel comparisons, by expanding the issue scope, etc.) and not too specific, then it might not be a bad idea to apply to 8-12 schools as you'll probably be able to find advisors at that many schools. But if you have a very clear idea of what research project you want to embark on, then it
will simply be a waste of money to apply to schools that do not align with your interests. E.g. good luck finding 12 schools to study feminist institutionalism at. I was in a situation like this: I was hard-pressed to find more than four schools that made any sense (my application to Princeton was a throwaway). So the number of schools I'd advise you to apply to is partly a function of the generality of your research interests.

52 million say bears shit in the woods.

Anyone heard re: Berkeley funding? Would it kill them to tell is how much / whether they're paying us?

Hey guys,

Here are responses by the Realist about various programs on a thread from last year (I think). Hope it is hopeful to get a little insider knowledge.
Here is a link to the thread:


"Harvard: big, disorganized department with faculty all over the place in their little centers and programs. Amazing resources but can be hard to get noticed. Their best grad students are among the best in the discipline. The middle- or low-level ones disappear. If you are going to be a superstar this is the best bet. Cambridge is by far the coolest place among the four.

Yale: smaller, much more organized. Currently experiencing something of a battle between people who believe that the most important thing is to be absolutely sure that your statistical estimates are correct and people who believe that the most important thing is to be interesting, original, and theoretically sophisticated, regardless of how you study what you study. Placement has been a problem in the past decade, at least relative to expectations and history. New Haven is obviously worse than Cambridge.

Princeton: larger than Yale if I am not mistaken. Some great students and the formal-quantitative pipeline has now been activated (check out this year's placement record). Many of the most arrogant professors in the discipline are here. Princeton is much, much less cool than either Cambridge or New Haven.

Stanford: smallest, most focused, arguably the best training. Placement is amazing, especially in comparative/IR. Palo Alto is sunny and warm when the East Coast is freezing and cloudy, but you will be a graduate student in a social science, so you are not the top of the social food chain. Nice place to live, but not cool like Cambridge.
Berkeley: is a big department that has a big-tent approach to political science. There are lots of people here who do their own thing. Traditionally it has not been a place to go if you want to be on the cutting edge methodologically, but its best students are absolutely the most interesting and theoretically sophisticated students out there. Placement can be a problem for Berkeley students unless they can demonstrate that they are not head-in-the-clouds types. Funding may be a problem for future cohorts, but I don't know. I worry about the future of the UC system, especially its ability to retain junior and new associate faculty given the absurd housing prices in the Bay area. But if you've ever walked through downtown Berkeley, you know how phenomenally cool that place is.

Michigan: is also a big department, but traditionally it has had much more of a normal science approach to how we study politics. This can be very good, but it can also encourage narrow and uninteresting work, and placement suffers accordingly. Interestingly, it's the opposite of the Berkeley placement problem. (This is not necessarily true for theory, which I do not know about.) Funding is not likely to be a problem for Michigan grad students, nor for the department, due to the way that Michigan finances higher education. I quite like Ann Arbor and you can live high on the hog there on a grad student stipend. But it's no Berkeley.

Chicago: is difficult for me to describe. It has experienced a wrenching departmental divide between the big-tent all-inclusive model and a narrower heterodox vision of what political science should be. The latter group has prevailed, and it is on a mission to stake a claim for that tradition within American political science departments. It's not clear that all of the graduate students whom they admit agree with this, or even understand it. Chicago has hemorrhaged faculty, especially in comparative. Chicago faculty are not necessarily arrogant but many of them are just obnoxious. Placement historically has been great, but I get the nagging sense that many of these placements were advised by faculty who are no longer there (again, especially in comparative). Chicago is great if you like Italian beef, the Cubbies, and livable major cities.

Columbia and NYU I know less about. Here's what I do know: NYU is a bastion of positivism--economics-style political science research is the priority. Very close mentorship of students, but high variance in placement. Columbia is more of a standard department with a broad interests; nothing jumps out to me about it. There's a certain cachet about NYU and Columbia grad student life that many people like. Don't know anything about funding in either.

MIT: is a medium-sized department with a bit of a divided personality. On one hand, recent hires at both the junior and senior level have been very methodologically advanced, at the cutting edge of contemporary political science research. On the other hand, they have this security studies identity as well, which is much more old-fashioned. I'm not sure if these people have a problem with one another, but in my experience at other places, both camps believe that what the other does is garbage. Placement from MIT is pretty good, but the standard accusation is that the quantoids are boring while the security studies people are hopelessly unscientific. MIT's in Cambridge, so it's a great grad student/young professional scene.

UCLA: is a big department in a sprawling city. They train lots of grad students well, but they are a such a big department that many people get lost. Not much of a departmental culture of coming into the office for most faculty, although some do. The strength is comparative, and they used to have a security studies identity in IR, not sure how strong that is anymore. UCLA has a tough time retaining faculty because of all of the problems that Berkeley has, plus UCLA is a step down on the rankings latter so they lose people to better departments even if they don't care about housing prices or public university problems. LA is fantastic if you like LA, and if you don't, well, get used to sitting on the bus or waiting in traffic, because you'll do a lot of it.

UCSD: is a smaller department, one with a strong departmental identity (contrast to UCLA) and a good placement record. They are very focused on contemporary political science so if you have heterodox interests this isn't a great place for you. All of the housing/COL/public uni problems of UCLA also show up at UCSD. UCSD faculty will tell you that the departures of Cox, McCubbins, and Poole isn't a huge loss, but it is...it's unclear how these guys could ever be replaced. Beware, many of the best faculty that you know are actually in the policy school (Gourevitch, Haggard, some others). My understanding is that La Jolla has pleasant weather all of the time, but I don't know if students get to live in La Jolla or have to live somewhere else. Some of the faculty surf before work, really."

Wow! That's awesome, and not basing anything at all on PSJR is very good advice

I'm not sure how the wait list works at UofT but if it is general (i.e. not sub-divided by field), a spot is going to open up in the program in a few days. I hope you or another Grad Cafe-er gets it!

RWBG for most likely to develop a predictive model for the likelihood of winning superlatives.

For better or worse, I just don't find this information that relevant. I guess it would be interesting if you could see the number of people brought in for an interview at different schools (and then somehow sub-divide them by area of study, number of other interviews, performance at the graduate level, external grants, number of publications, awards given for dissertation, scholarly network, spousal placement, etc.) What I am saying is that placement records need to be taken with a grain of salt and an eye for the many, many individual characteristics that a school cannot be held responsible for. For example, these raw counts do not say anything about the number of people that left the program early, entered the private sector, went into government, decided to start a family, realised that political science was not for them etc. etc. etc.

I also find this approach to chosing a graduate program overly deterministic (am I going to get down voted for saying this? mayyybee). Lets just say that there are 10 universities (or 20, or 30, or whatever) in the world at which you will receive comprable methods and substantive training, excellent funding, good supervision, etc. Now, one of those universities may have a better placement record than the others but that really says nothing about YOUR chances of placing well with a PhD from that school vs. any other comprable school. You control your own fate! Even if you do buy into the "placement record" method, you would have to know placements as a percent of graduates on the job market. Also, did 5 grads end up in a top 20 and the rest get no offers (this might indicate a sink-or-swim environment that allows some students to drown) or did 1 end up in a top 20 and the rest in top 100s or with job offers from NGOs etc.

The bottom line: there are tonnes of factors that would have to be figured into a "placement-based choice model". Do not let the above list determine your choice of Graduate School!

I finally heard back from CIR. They said that they simply have no more money, and they made more scholarship offers than they can manage since they expect majority of them will turn it down.

I guess I'll live in my car and eat McMuffins for 9 months!

Howdy,

Years ago, I used The Grad Cafe to keep me sane through the long (LONG) application process and I thought perhaps I'd bounce back and see if I could provide any advice to people just starting out on the journey. This may not be useful at all, but I'll check back once a day or so for the next week if people do have questions.

A bit about me: I'm currently ABD at a top-20 dept. with a major concentration in IR. I'm probably far less useful for theorists or Americanists, but I do work that crosses the border with comparative, so I may be able to help there too.

A few pieces of advice I wish I'd had:

1. CHECK OUT THE PLACEMENT HISTORIES of the places you're considering. Now that I'm nearing the end of my grad student career this is becoming quite concerning to me. Some top-20's have better histories than others, and amazingly, some not-top-20s have better histories than top-20s. Depts should list this on their website (recent placements) and you should ABSOLUTELY ask about this on admit days. Beware of "token placements." All depts will have one or two students who have broken through the glass ceiling...and they will certainly tell you about them. Ask for the % of students that get tenure-track jobs their first year of being on the market. Ask for the negative cases (how many people on the market this year have not gotten an academic tenure track job?). These are hard questions for the dept, but important questions for you to ask. Also, ask about competitive grants (how many students in a given year get NSF, USIP, or Fulbright awards?) If students only rarely get these, that's a red flag.

2. Make sure the POI you are considering isn't an ass. After your first two years your life in these programs is contingent on the whims/graces/moods of your committee. Sure, you should look for substantive fit, but you also need to gauge general personality traits. Are they at least a bit socially adept? I've been very lucky in this regard, but I have friends who have not been...

3. Don't ever shoot yourself in the foot. You do this by being labeled early on in the program as arrogant. Don't upset the faculty (social capital is what gets you grants and good letters of rec down the line) and don't upset your fellow students. Learn to control your pride.

4. Ask about faculty-student co-authorship. Some programs don't do this and that hurts the ability of their grad students to get good publications on their CVs before they go on the market. Some depts do this as a rule, and that's good for you. Ask about co-authorships in each of the subfields. Americanists tend to co-author a lot more, as they work on quant articles that are conducive to these things. Some comparativists and IR scholars dont. Ask about this.

5. Get a good, collegial vibe from the dept you pick. You don't want to spend the next 6 years in the middle of a minefield. Make sure it's a friendly place.

6. DO NOT GO if you don't get funding (or have a really really really good chance of getting it in year 2). You can't sustain debt for this type of a degree. Reapply. I didn't get into ANY funded PhD programs in my first go-round (only consolation unfunded MAs). The next time, I focused a LOT more on the GREs, bumped my score 200 pts, and got into a handful of great depts. It sucks to have to go through this process again (I KNOW) but it isn't the end of the world.

Of course, there is all the standard advice too (look at rankings, faculty "fit", etc. ) but this other stuff tends to fall through the cracks.

And good luck!!!!

Long time lurker, first time poster, already attending, etc.

I wanted to talk more about "fit" and the role of the statement of purpose. It is my understanding that the there are at least two components of the SOP that signal fit to the ad-com. First, the substantive focus of your research; and second, the presentation of that research focus. There has been quite a lot of information on the forums on the former but not nearly as much attention to the latter. What I mean by presentation of research focus is the way you formulate your questions, display an awareness of the significant debates in your field, and your ability to situate yourself within these debates with your questions. In addition, the specific terms you use to phrase your research is also a critical element of research presentation.

Now, why would this matter? Keep in mind that you are proposing to study a certain set of questions and ad-coms are aware that the chances of you actually carrying out that specific research is very slim. Applicants are known to exaggerate or just plain manufacture interests in certain substantive issues to just get their foot in the door. This is standard practice. In many programs with well-known specializations or specialists, a plethora of applicants will claim to be interested in the same sorts of research focus. Provided that at this stage, the applicants have comparable numbers and/or experience, how do you determine the "best fit" in these cases? It may come down to whether ad-coms judge your approach to the research focus to be interesting and situated enough. Of course, what it means to be "interesting" and "situated" is incredibly subjective. Given the eclectic composition of ad-coms, this means that the same SOP may "speak to" one member and not another, depending on how they conduct their own research inquiry. Some are averse to the "this is when I became interested in politics" anecdotes, some don't mind. Some care about how you use loaded concepts, some may give you a pass. Some care if you integrate faculty names throughout rather than just in the last paragraph, some don't. However, all pay attention to how you ask questions and what that says about your potential to do research (regardless of your actual substantive interest).

The point is not that your substantive focus does not matter. Clearly, it does. But if you are wondering why certain schools where you have a substantive match may have passed you up, I submit: this process is incredibly random and a lot has to align for one to edge out similarly qualified applicants to make the cut. One such variable is your ability to signal your fit not just with the content of your research but the contextualizing of your research.

I was hoping for some really mean/funny rejection letters. The formulaic, you all are so qualified and if we could have 800 spots we would take you all but we dont response got boring. I want to see an email when you open it is like REJECTED in big red letters, or starts "Congratulations! Welcome to Program X...jk your application was pretty awful. Please never step foot on our prestigious campus or we will call the police. Oh and thanks for the 100 bucks. Booze money for the department!"

Maybe I just have a horrible sense of humor but I would have gotten a kick out of some creative one's like that.

I am definetly not funnier but I did develop a more wry sense of humour (mostly driven by basic and thus amusing observations about the most mundane things happening at any given moment). Also, RWBG... you have schooled me. This is a perfect example of how I haven't gotten any funnier over the years. If I had a dime for every time someone said "I was joking" and then gave me THE LOOK (the one RWBG had when he/she read my comment), I would have at least enough money to bribe a few admissions committees.