CaptainCrunk

okay okay, i'm not trying to stir up trouble. peace out

CaptainCrunch, if you were the "rockstar" you make yourself out to be, you'd have gotten into a master's program last year. I work with some people direct from undergraduate and others who have master's and indeed some went straight in. These people had all the things you claim to and even lacking some of them, yet managed to get into MSFS, WWS, SIPA and SAIS. So perhaps with your rather bemusing arrogance, you could ask yourself whether your failure last year was entirely your lack of experience (as some others had much the same and still managed to get in) or perhaps it was your attitude?

I actually think CaptainCrunk is a visionary exposing the unknowable nature of the universe, and irrelevance of material attachments. He is so committed to working in int-dev that he doesn't even need experience in int-dev to show the degree of his commitment to int-dev. That whooshing noise we're all hearing? That's the sound of a Buddhist koan flying directly over our unenlightened heads. Open up baby birds, mama's about to drop some wisdom.

okay okay, i'm not trying to stir up trouble. peace out

I dont think it means that you're guaranteed admission if you reapply. Its naive to even think that. If I would hazard a guess, its just a remainder to apply this time around. Unless you received some kind of email in the last admissions cycle indicating that with more work experience you'll get in, I would hold off on the bottle of champagne.

Given that glitches are possible (the Cornell undergraduate rejects accidentally being sent acceptance letters comes to mind), I don't think anything's "obvious". Getting an email encouraging you to reapply doesn't necessarily mean, at least given the limited context of your first post, that you're considering to reapply, as you elaborate in the second.

I think it depends on the nature of the email, which is more of what I was asking for. Assuming it was a generic email (from "admissions") asking you to reapply, I'd imagine that maybe there aren't as many registrants on SIPA's online application portal as they hope for roughly a month before the deadline, and that they're emailing previously unsuccessful candidates to get those numbers up. In this case, I'd say that, yes, you have more of a shot than you probably did the first time you applied due to your increased work experience, but not necessarily more than anyone else they're emailing (again, if they're just sending emails to all previously unsuccessful applicants, say, in the past year). If, on the other hand, it was a personalized email from a particular admissions officer's email account, then it could be that you were a borderline case when you applied and that they actually wanted to encourage you in particular to reapply. I'm imagining it's somewhere in between, though: a mass email sent to previously unsuccessful candidates that had limited work experience, since they're the most likely to have improved their candidacy.

In general, though, I think whether you reapply should be determined by how much you'd rather go to SIPA than what you were "going to do NEXT year" (is this a graduate program? a job?), as opposed to whether you're "guaranteed" to get in.