polisciftw

So my application at UCSD still says Under Review. Any thoughts?

Berkeley should update the status of your application when you log into their application page.

For your UCLA obsessive pleasure, viola the application status page! https://www.gradadmissions.ucla.edu/newapp/Login.asp?topage=AdmissionStatus.asp

Take a look at the discussion here: http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/topic.php?id=86569.

I'd also add to my previous answer that another way to look at graduate programs is how much teaching they expect you to do. If they assume that you will TA for every semester, this should indicate to you that their expectations for the quality of your research are quite low. The responsabilities of TAing are so great that is enormously difficult to conduct original research, take courses, and TA. Keywords to look for are whether the department will ask you to TA while you are taking classes, or offers you fellowships for the first 1-2-3 years of the program.

For the poster who asked about ranking versus match with professors, here are my two cents on this issue: 1) Exact research interest match with a potential dissertation chair is not essential. A good chair should understand the contours of the debate within your topic area of interest, but need not engage in that sub-tranche of the literature exactly. For instance, if you are interested in the politics of austerity and international organizations, a chair who has worked on the political economy of trade and international organizations would suffice. In making this decision, consider whether the people in five years' time who will be reading your chair's letter of recommendation for a job will be familiar with the name. 1a) A correlary to part 1: What is far more important when considering a department is whether you get along with your potential chair or professors you think you will work with. Even if your potential chair is a true star, and your research interests match perfectly, it will not help you if they are unwilling to give you the time of day. Conversely, falling five places in the ranking but working with someone who will co-author with you and push you towards better work is not a bad trade off. 2) Given my answer in part 1, there are other considerations that I think are more important than an exact match of research interests. For instance, does a potential department offer extensive methods training and encouage students to take them? There is a lot of variation in the amount of methods training on offer in departments. Even if you see yourself as primarily a qualitative researcher, there is absolutely no way you can be dinged for learning more methods in terms of future career trajectories. Another good question is whether departments allow you to take classes in cognate fields AND if they count those classes towards your requirements. Harvard, for instance, encourages its students to get a masters of statistics and counts many of those classes towards their governemnt requirements. Stanford also encourages students whose interests include political economy to get a masters of economics. Other topic areas include computer science (for computational social science), psychology (political behavior/psychology), sociology, etc. Also consider, if you see your interests veering across disciplines, the ranking of those departments. Even if your department allows you to get a masters of economics, the quality of these degrees varies like political science degrees. Other considerations include funding for graduate research. Every department offers pretty much the same fellowship amount (somewhere between 16k and 28k with large standard errors), but not every department funds graduate research activities. Do they fund trips to conferences? Are there small grants you can apply for to do fieldwork/work over the summer? Do they pay faculty members to co-author with graduate students? One way to answer this question is to look at any potential POI's CV and check for co-authorships with graduate students. I cannot stress how important co-authorship is to your standing in the department and your standing in the discipline. Is the professor willing to put the time and effort in to training their students how to produce good work? Or do they let them fend for themselves? Finally, beyond rank (which is a fuzzy measure and frankly, as the joke goes: "if you have to ask, you aren't a top ranked program") look at placement. Look at where any program has put students in the past five years. Would you be willing to work at any of those schools? Outside of the top 10, every department that you visit will tell you that they are on an upward trajectory. If the answer to the above question is "no," don't count on the upwards motion carrying you to Harvard/Stanford.

The schools I'm familiar with are American schools. That's interesting about the Canadian schools, but I have no idea what could cause that there (as I'm utterly unfamiliar with their university system). When I refer to waves, I don't think I mean to imply strictly distinct waves (i.e. weeks apart). But several schools last time around informed me with a week gap between some first admits and when I received notification.

Questions about yield are also why most applications ask you where you are applying, so that schools have a sense of their competition. And, as I thought I had after I submitted before, striking the ideal balance between offers of admission and yield is the reason why schools generally don't send out rejection letters until some time after they release their acceptances. Doing this gives them the opportunity to offer admission to students who are on an "unofficial waitlist" if admitted students inform the department they will not be accepting their offer. IIRC, Harvard had a really rough time with getting its ideal yield numbers a couple of years ago and had to rescind some rejections and offer to admit some previously rejected students. But in essence, schools certainly have tiers of admitted students and will admit in waves.

Sure, it could well be that I am wrong. I'm not currently on an admissions committee. But I do know several people who are, and I am describing the process that I am familiar with at three universities. I doubt admitting people in waves creates any palpable waves in a cohort. And schools certainly force deadlines to commit to their opening student weekend either by setting an RSVP deadline or offering a maximum travel reimbursement. That makes it more difficult to book trips at the last minute. While schools are certainly open (I'd hope!) to students visiting outside of the visiting students weekend, there is certainly competition. Schools do want you to make an informed decision instead of being disappointed later, but they also want their top picks. I'm not suggesting that schools contact people on wait lists, but that agreeing to attend an opening student weekend provides useful information to a department about how likely their first round candidates are to select their school. If, for instance, no student admitted in the first wave commits to attending the weekend, then that is critical information that will likely prompt a department to update its second round offers. Nothing I say should be taken as the gospel (or even accurate) about all programs, which are all heterogeneous and have their own traditions. But the incentives for a department to get as many of its first round picks exist for all departments, and they do take steps to maximize their yield.

I'd also guess that calculating the ideal admit-to-yield ratio is the rationale behind interviews at schools like Emory. The faculty are not likely to be judging you as an individual, but more trying to assess the likelihood that you will attend so that they can optimally structure their lists.

There are a couple of reasons to notify your favorites first for a department's perspective. First, for the true "starts" on an admission cycle, they may get invited to attend a large number of open houses. Given the fact that there are only 6 weeks in between March 1st and April 15th, the number of weekends/open houses an individual can attend is limited. Forcing people to commit to attend your open house early prevents them from contacting another open house. Second, a department might want only 10 people to matriculate. However, they assume that if they like a student, that *other* departments will certainly do so as well. As such, they admit more than the number they hope will matriculate. Of course, this whole process has restricted information so it may be that all 30 people they admit receive offers from no other department and all choose to enroll in University X, but that is highly unlikely. So, a department uses an early admit to signal A) their commitment to a given student in a rank ordering of students (i.e. we would very much like *you* to attend) and as a means to get a sense of how far down in its list of suitable students it needs to admit to yield 10. EDIT: Some departments do this by admitting students in waves and getting information from them about their likelihood of attending. Others seem to admit in one fell swoop but put many people on the wait list as a means of enhancing their chances of getting the yield they want.

Thanks, Lemeard. It's really exciting news for me.

Yes, all funded.

Friendly, but also competitive. I think this is true of all departments where people want to go into academia. It seems kind of like this: competitive bikers all ride together in order to draft other riders. Some take turns in the front, others in the back, etc. But once the finish line approaches, they all break apart. Right now we're drafting each other, but everyone knows that there are too few jobs for too many people.

Honestly? I wish it could be better. Some cohorts seem to gel really easily, while others less so. I'd say mine is among the less so camp. I wish we had organized more social events in the first semester so as to prevent this, because now it seems a little silly to try "get to know one another" events.

_

Gah. Why do the online systems of so many schools still show my GRE as outstanding?

Anyone else obsessively checking to see whether their supporting materials have been received?

Oh! Submitted to Berkeley early. Oh well!

So, UCLA and Berkeley closed today. Any other apps closing soon?

Submitted all of mine, too! Good luck everyone!

I'd strongly advise you to add WashU to your list.

Hey everyone, I know we're all coming down to the wire for the first round of applications to go out, but I wanted to put out there that I'd be happy to answer people's questions about departments/applying/etc. I'm a second year PhD student going back on the application market because my advisor is going to a new university. Applying is definitely an "inside baseball" game and I wish I knew some of the rules the first time around. In any case, best of luck!

Any ethnic politics people around?

I find it hard to understand why it would be offensive. It would not offend me if someone said "you have an accent." We all have an accent. As a consequence, we all write with one.