saltlakecity2012

Let's try to break down some of the elements of "lifestyle fit". Tack on whatever else you can think of. 1. Weather - I know, it seems silly, but it's important to me! I have mild seasonal affective disorder. 2. Culture - art, music, film, indoorsy vs. outdoorsy, liberal vs. conservative, available athletics, etc. 3. Housing - what kind of housing is available? How far is it from campus? Where do most students live? Can you get the kind of housing you need (shared or not shared) in your price range? 4. General - what do the students in your department do for fun? 5. Demographic - what's the demographic profile of your department? Are you 10 years younger or older than everyone else? Is the whole program international, or American? Anyone else?

Omg, that puppy and the ducks video made my day. Hooray for the Internetz!

Orst, I'm having difficulty understanding what you think is childish about my behavior. This is a cooperative, collaborative environment, and negative comments have no place here. I understand your point of view - of couse you have to consider the wishes of your partner, especially if it's a relationship you want to be semi-permanent if not permanent. There is no substantive conflict here, merely a conflict of approach. Anyway, I really don't want to take up any more space on the thread discussing this. I hope we can all let the matter drop and that comments like that will be considered more carefully before they are posted from now on. About kittens - I think this raises a larger point. If you're not going in straight out of undergraduate, like a lot of us, there are "lifestyle" elements to consider. For example, I am looking for a place where I can continue my membership and activities in a number of community groups that have become very important to me over the past several years, and will be important in helping me retain my sanity. Also, if you're from a large city (like me) and have been living on your own and working for several years, will you find what you need in terms of intellectual, cultural, and recreational stimulation in your new school's location? More importantly, what kind of lifestyles do the current students there lead? Are they all locked away in grad student housing and never leave campus, or do students live in a variety of situations and locations and have lives outside of school? These are pretty important considerations for me, and the significant other conversation is also very relevant here.

On the "quality of cohort" thing - browse through the results survey for the past couple of years (this year in particular), and you'll see that the GPAs and GRE scores are out of this world. I think wherever each of us goes, given the existing level of competition, we will be with the brightest and the best.

Oxford and LSE would be great places for you. Like balderdash said, Oxford doesn't have a political economy specialization, but the development studies program could be exactly what you've been looking for. You would have the opportunity to do political science, history, languages, econ, policy, area studies, and a bunch of other stuff that would be an excellent preparation for doing development-oriented research. I would look at it very closely - I applied to the MPhil in development studies there for this year. LSE is also a great place for people who are more policy-minded.

Woah - this is totally out of line, and totally unacceptable grad cafe behavior. Jnwich was just providing an alternative viewpoint that will probably be just as, or more, useful to other people reading this than the conventional wisdom that you go wherever your partner goes. I hate to break it to you, but most relationships end - your career stays with you forever. Of course, every individual (and couple) prioritizes differently. Some of the people on this forum care much more about staying with their partner, particularly if they're choosing from among a set of very similar options in terms of quality. Some people will not have the chance to choose amongst schools of similar quality, and it may in fact be a serious error to choose a school that is of much lower quality so you can stay with your s.o. Why? Because in 5 years you will be on the academic job market, and the chances of you being able to both get jobs at the same school or in the same area are slim to none. By each attending the best schools possible for you, you might have a better chance of being reunited at your first teaching position.

You ask. Ask current students, ask students from other departments, ask other accepted students, ask professors (probably more junior faculty than senior although I'm not sure on this), and ask recent graduates of the program if you can track them down. Look at placement records and then look placed people up on their new school's website and cold call them. Be extremely polite and grateful towards anyone who offers you information, and try not to frame your questions like this: "I've heard people in your department are assholes. Care to comment?" Perhaps try this approach: "I would love to learn more about what you consider to be the greatest strengths, and perhaps some of the weaknesses, of the department as a whole. I am particularly interested in departmental culture." You can also ask specifically for papers co-authored by students and professors over the past few years, and particularly any with your potential advisors.

Wow! I logged back on to grad cafe to find a lot of really excellent advice added on to this thread. Most of the things posted after the OP were things I had neglected to think about, so I think this thread will be very useful to me, and hopefully to others as well! Looking forward to hearing more thoughts. Edit: I completely agree with RWBG's post about balancing strength in your specific area with intellectual diversity. I was browsing the website of one of the schools I've been admitted to at 3am or thereabouts, looking through the various research institutes, the websites of the cognitive science, sociology, international affairs, slavic studies, and econ departments, and I realized that while the political science department has perhaps fewer people doing exactly what I want to do (the various areas of it), the school overall (and the department as well) is such an amazing intellectual environment that I could find the academic resources I needed even if I had to go a bit further afield than intended. But - there is something very valuable about hardcore methodological training, whatever your methodology may be. If you train in formal theory and quant methods, you will be able to compete for jobs to teach classes that not every poli sci PhD can teach. If you focus on methodology as your primary subfield, you will also be able to collaborate with a wide range of scholars in political science, economics, sociology, etc., and be able to work on very different types of projects. It's true that grad school is about specialization in some ways, but you won't do most of your specializing through your first 2 years of coursework, you'll do it when reading for and writing your dissertation. Coursework is designed to make you a qualified teacher in your field, not an expert in a very narrow area within your subfield of choice. So choose a school where you have access to good advisors who can steer you in the right direction for your research questions, but where you also have access to rigorous training (in whatever area or way) that will help you in the job market.

So I know that lots of people are still waiting to hear back from programs, but there are also lots of people on this forum that have heard good news from more than one school. I thought I'd start this thread so that people can share ideas on how to choose the right program - I know I would appreciate any suggestions! Here are the basic things I've been suggested to consider, ranked in no particular order: 1. Funding - compare the stipend, but also compare the local living costs. Compare the teaching commitment required. Is their health insurance? If so, what are the details? Is there summer funding available? Is there an option to get a 6th year of funding if needed? Are there any conditions on retaining your funding package other than teaching? 2. Location - will you lose your mind (and thus be unable to complete your dissertation) if you commit to living in the school's area for at least 5 years? 3. Departmental training - will you get the best training for what you want to study? What type of courses are available in your area of interest? What is the typical curriculum for students in your subfield? Will you have the opportunity to take courses outside the department (econ, statistics, psych, sociology, area studies, language) if you need to? On the flip side - does your program have excellent training in one area and no focus on others that you might want to incorporate? 4. Ranking - I don't mean USNWR. I mean prestige within your field. Obviously USNWR rankings reflect some of that, but it really doesn't matter if Program X produces the best comparativists if you want to study political theory. Even if you want to study CP, your program may not have produced a single scholar focusing on your region of interest in the past several years. Probably a bad sign for you. Tips on this: ranking matters much more when you're looking at a difference between one tier and the next (i.e. top 1-10 schools vs. top 10-20 schools). Even then it can be a bit tricky. For example, one fellow grad cafe-er has elected to go to a program that is lower in the overall rankings for its subfield than another he got into, mainly (as far as I understand) because his area of interest is somewhat narrow and the lower ranked school has better people in it. So for the purposes of this ranking, it would score higher. 5. Departmental culture - is there a lot of collaboration amongst faculty? Is there a lot of collaboration of students with faculty? Is the department fiercely competitive (are fellowships competitive)? Does everyone wear birkenstocks all day long, and if so, how do you feel about birkenstocks? How is the department viewed in the field (for example, U Chicago and UC Berkeley are very different places)? Are faculty available to students even if they're not their advisees? Are students who have advanced to candidacy still around, or do they hide? Do poli sci students only hang out with poli sci students, or do they mingle with lesser kinds (I jest!)? 6. Departmental size - how large would your cohort be? How many students does the program have currently? How many faculty members? How many advisees per advisor? How many advisees do the people you're interested in have? Do you want a large, small, or medium-sized program? Do current grad students feel like they get lost? 7. Existing students and cohort - do you think that the people who will end up in the cohort for that school will be people you want to spend 5 years working with? Probably best evaluated during the visiting weekend. Also, get on the email list for your school if it's up on RWBG's thread. As for current and former students - how long does it take on average to complete the dissertation? What kind of awards to students win? What kind of funding do students get for research projects? 8. Placement - make sure you get placement numbers from the schools you're looking at, even if they don't offer them to you. They have them, and you want to see them. Don't just evaluate placement based on the percentage of job market candidates for that year that accepted offers, however. Obviously that is pretty important, so you will want to know the number of candidates for each year of placement data. But look deeper: what kind of schools do candidates get offers at? RU/VH? R1? R2? SLAC? Do most candidates go straight into tenure-track positions, or do a lot get lectureships, do post-docs, etc.? How many of its own students has the department hired in the past 5 years? If you can get this kind of data, which subfields and advisors tend to produce the most desirable candidates? It's all very well and good if UCLA is sending off lots of comparativists to excellent schools, but that's not as useful a signal if you're planning to do American politics. If (heaven forfend!) you are interested in non-academic career paths (don't let anyone bash you for this, btw), check out how people do in that world. Some programs that have less than awesome academic placement do very well here (NYU is a great example). Does the department have a placement director/advisor? What kind of career mentoring do students receive? Has placement been getting better or worse (obviously take into consideration the economic environment)? 9. Your persons of interest - does the department have at least 3 people you could see yourself working with? Even if they don't all have EVERYTHING you would want in an advisor, they should be very strong in at least 1 major area of your interest. If you want to do some crazy complicated project pulling from a bunch of different areas in poli sci (like me), does the department have the resources for you to do that? Are advisors known to be possessive, or are they encouraging of students who need to use other professors' expertise as well? Of the people you're interested in working with, how old are they? Are they scaling back their advising activities? Do they still teach? Are they planning to leave the university? Don't be afraid to ask them, or to ask current students. If they're close to retirement, do they actually actively advise, or are they resting on their laurels? What have their former advisees gone on to do? What kind of connections do they have (read their CVs and check out connections to academic and non-academic organizations - journals, research institutes, think tanks, government agencies, NGOs)? Ask their current advisees if they are available, friendly, enthusiastic about advising, approachable, helpful, or rather eternally busy, extremely formal, cranky about having to work with graduate students at all, intimidating, and unwilling to act collaboratively rather than critically towards their students. 10. Departmental future - is the department on its way up, on its way down, or likely to remain where it is? This depends on a number of factors, and is a very subjective measure based on some combination of the above. You probably don't want to be in a top 15 program that is only still top 15 because rankings lag instead of a slightly lower ranked program that is rocketing upwards and everyone knows it. 11. Vibe - self-explanatory. Visit! 12. I ran out of ideas. Anyone else? Edit: obviously this amount of information errs on the side of over-preparedness. Sometimes one or two of these factors will weigh much more than the others, which simplifies things.

Aaaaaaaand... another day of no Berkeley. Awesome. I only accept rejection letters through March 1, so they're cutting it kind of close!

Good! You totally deserve it.

Ha! Totally. Thanks for that. And congrats on making your decision! I'm sure you have some enviable peace of mind now, but do you miss the frantic, frenzied, obsessive panic days of mid-late January?

Thank you. Same here! Don't worry about compensating - it doesn't matter. I don't normally pay attention to it, but I happened to be browsing back through a few threads and noticed that someone had been busy on my posts. Hence my hope that whoever it is finds the act of pressing the red arrow fulfilling, as it certainly doesn't impact me And grantman - you're awesome, as usual!

Ha, that's awesome. Not that I disagree with the way you read it!

Claiming my Columbia rejection, too. I think they're coming now because I just spoke with the department - I told Fortna that a bunch of people were still in limbo, and she said she would speak to the DGS about it. Edit: whoever is having fun downvoting practically every post I make, knock yourself out. I hope you find it satisfying on some deep, spiritual level.

Yeah, and I can definitely field questions about Columbia.

Okay - big news! Columbia HAS NOT sent out all their acceptances. I just spoke with the woman who puts together the admissions folders for the political science department, and she said that not everyone who has been accepted has been notified yet. All notifications will be made by the end of this week. Things are definitely pretty crazy this year... both Berkeley and Columbia sending out trickles of acceptances, a wave of rejections, and apparently instead of having waitlists, just holding a group of applicants till the last minute. Maybe they'll have waitlists, too. Weird. EDIT: I think the woman I spoke to was mistaken, and that in fact they had notified all accepted students. Can't be sure though. I'm guessing everyone will hear soon.

I'm waiting, too, so I'm just going to call them. The stakes are not particularly high for me, so I'll let you know what they say.

First off, getting a poli sci phd if you want to go into non-academic career paths is not so unreasonable. I didn't say anything about teaching in my SOP - I said that I wanted to help inform the development of a particular type of institution. That is doable both from the academic setting and the non-academic setting. There is also a lot of overlap between security studies academia and security studies outside of academia - most serious security studies scholars spend time working with government agencies, think tanks, or NGOs, or advising them. Secondly, my parents are both professors in the social sciences, and they also have the associated bitterness towards academia. Yes, it's true, academics face many challenges, there are lots of internal politics, and you will find that sometimes it is not a very meritocratic profession. But that is true anywhere. I would say one of the worst things about academia is that you are likely to have more than a few colleagues that qualify as A-grade assholes. Again - this is true anywhere. If you want to do serious research, which it sounds like you do since your other option is think tanks, I would suggest the poli sci phd. RAND is awesome, and a great place to work (I hear), and there are lots of other think tanks of that variety. This has been said a few times on other threads, but if you're serious about wanting to do research with direct applications, I would get the poli sci phd but do it at a place where you can network very heavily (i.e., a place with a good policy school and professors in your department with connections). I'm biased because I don't know much about public policy doctoral programs, but if you like doing political science and can find a program with people you want to work with who have done interesting things that you might like to do, go for it.

On a different topic - I still haven't heard from Berkeley. jsclar, apill - I'm assuming you haven't either?

No joke on the decision. What's Stanford's package, if you don't mind my asking?

I absolutely agree. I think a lot of people spend more time explaining why they are qualified than they do why they will be a good investment. They want to know that you can do the coursework and have the stamina to write the dissertation, of course, but they also want to know if people will look at your career down the road and say, "Aha - he went to University X. They must be great." I think that demonstrating that you will do interesting things, have ambition, and are highly self-motivated can only help, and that your SOP should really reflect your PURPOSE in applying to graduate programs (why do you want to get a PhD and what do you intend to do with it) rather than your QUALIFICATIONS alone. Qualifications are extremely important, though, and if your transcript and GRE scores don't necessarily reflect what you think makes you qualified, you need to spend time coaching your letter writers (take them through your CV, show them your writing sample, explain what interests you about the programs you're applying to, and have them help you with your SOP) and summarizing your qualifications in your SOP.

I think they have already sent out their acceptances and waitlists - I think, although I have no information to back this up, that they are looking at the people who requested to have their applications automatically forwarded to the MA program if they did not get into the PhD program. But I really don't know, and I would have thought that they would have sent out letters saying "You didn't get into the PhD program, so we've forwarded you on to the MA program" already. So - I have no useful information for you

Do you know what the teaching load is?

This whole idea of "qualification" to do the PhD is a little sticky, so I wouldn't beat yourself up. Plenty of very highly qualified people have had to repeat their application cycles (think balderdash & RWBG) - I think it's much more about learning how to show yourself off in exactly the ways they are looking for than about being "qualified." I'll hold out hope for you for this cycle, but if it doesn't go your way this year, remember that you don't know where you ranked in their applicant pool, and that with more information you are just more likely to succeed next year!