spottedtoad

If you feel comfortable, nada.am, could you PM me as well with the info?

Program Applied To: MPA (MPA, MPP, IR, etc.) Schools Applied WWS Schools Admitted To: WWS Schools Rejected From: None Undergraduate institution:Swarthmore Undergraduate GPA: 3.7 Last 60 hours of Undergraduate GPA (if applicable): About same Undergraduate Major: Biology (graduated in 3 years) (Also M.Ed. in Science Education, Brooklyn College, 3.93) GRE Quantitative Score: 800 GRE Verbal Score: 800 GRE AW Score:5.5 Years Out of Undergrad (if applicable):10 Years of Work Experience:11 Describe Relevant Work Experience: 1 year CityYear Americorps, 2 years Teach for America corps member in South Bronx, 6 years as founding science teacher at new public school in Manhattan, 2 years as a high school Biology/Environmental Science teacher out in the burbs. I was also a TFA advisor and an instructor for some science education courses along the way. I live fairly close to WWS, and with a hefty mortgage and two small kids, I'm not eager or able to move away for grad school, or to pay for grad school for that matter. I applied last year to the mid-career MPP program, and was wait-listed. Strength of SOP (be honest, describe the process, etc): Trying to condense 11 years of experience into a single 1000 word narrative is challenging. I think I did a better job of it this year than last, emphasizing my perspective more than my accomplishments, and trying to keep things focused on a single theme, of science education for citizenship. Strength of LOR's (be honest, describe the process, etc): Great letter from NY principal, great letter from biology prof at Brooklyn I did research with, decent letter from current principal (he likes me a lot, but he's not the best writer...) Other: Before I applied last year, I had a gut feeling that I stacked up better against the MPA applicants than the mid-career applicants, especially academic record seemed to be stressed more in the MPA pool. Update: Admitted to WWS. Second time's the charm! Now, I'm wondering if I'm insane to leave a job in this economy...Time will tell!

It's interesting that they include quantitative GRE scores in that link, but not verbal scores. Either they don't take them into account as much, or they are just not as impressive as the quantitative scores.

Program Applied To: MPA (MPA, MPP, IR, etc.) Schools Applied WWS Schools Admitted To: None Schools Rejected From: None Still Waiting: WWS Undergraduate institution:Swarthmore Undergraduate GPA: 3.7 Last 60 hours of Undergraduate GPA (if applicable): About same Undergraduate Major: Biology (graduated in 3 years) (Also M.Ed. in Science Education, Brooklyn College, 3.93) GRE Quantitative Score: 800 GRE Verbal Score: 800 GRE AW Score:5.5 Years Out of Undergrad (if applicable):10 Years of Work Experience:11 Describe Relevant Work Experience: 1 year CityYear Americorps, 2 years Teach for America corps member in South Bronx, 6 years as founding science teacher at new public school in Manhattan, 2 years as a high school Biology/Environmental Science teacher out in the burbs. I was also a TFA advisor and an instructor for some science education courses along the way. I live fairly close to WWS, and with a hefty mortgage and two small kids, I'm not eager or able to move away for grad school, or to pay for grad school for that matter. I applied last year to the mid-career MPP program, and was wait-listed. I got some feedback from the admissions people, and it helped me re-write my resume, SOP, and policy memo, and also change one of my recommenders. If I don't get in this time--- I guess I'll teach another twenty years! There are worse fates. Strength of SOP (be honest, describe the process, etc): Trying to condense 11 years of experience into a single 1000 word narrative is challenging. I think I did a better job of it this year than last, emphasizing my perspective more than my accomplishments, and trying to keep things focused on a single theme, of science education for citizenship. Strength of LOR's (be honest, describe the process, etc): Great letter from NY principal, great letter from biology prof at Brooklyn I did research with, decent letter from current principal (he likes me a lot, but he's not the best writer...) Other: Before I applied last year, I had a gut feeling that I stacked up better against the MPA applicants than the mid-career applicants, especially academic record seemed to be stressed more in the MPA pool. This year, I'm told that the competition is even more intense, so I'm not feeling particularly confident.

Not that this is answering your question, but there are worse places than CUNY. It's cheap as dirt, and the class size is tiny. I did a biology master's there, and while most of the teaching was mediocre, I had two great professors. I did research in one of their labs, and in spite of the lab's dollar-store accoutrements, she was publishing more and better research than the big-shot Princeton professor I worked for another summer.

I think there was a similar poll a while back, but I'm curious to hear about people's career goals, and where they would like to end up, with the help of their graduate degree.

Anyone else have a job where late March is the absolute last moment you can tell them if you are coming back next year? Makes a person rather nervous...

Hey-- I'm no Gallup. I just thought it would be interesting to hear what a group of people who see themselves as someday shaping and molding American public policy think about the failure of the most ambitious piece of social policy in a generation, regardless of its objective merits. It also struck me that this was legislation created by wonks-- our future professors and the people working in the jobs we someday hope to hold.

If you're interested in medicine, you should spend some time on mdapplicants. It will give you a pretty good sense of the competition, and how to stand out. (I was depressed by a poster who had a 42 MCAT and a 4.0 from a top school, and didn't get in anywhere. If it was accurate, it was a clear example of anti-Asian bias in admissions.) I would say that regardless where you are headed, you should try to get some more research experience. If you get some strong publications, the schools will come to you, more or less. I would apply for a one year research job, rather than grad school. If you are headed for medical school, I would match that with some intensive clinical volunteering, and looking into master's program in something off-beat or interesting. (Like international development, or some subfield of public health. Not biology.) Grad schools, ultimately, are looking for a checklist. Who's the smartest? Got them. Who's the most public-spirited? Got them. The way to win the game is to accumulate more ways for them to check you off.

If there's any message from the story of health care reform this year, it is that changing politicians is a lot easier than changing policies, or how government works. What do you think the story of health care reform suggests for us as people going into policy or public affairs programs? At the very least, our future professors were among the ones coming up with the ideas these reform bills were based on, as well as doing the research to support them. Is it possible to do anything complex, difficult, or ambitious in our system? Does the study of policy-- as health care policy has been studied in the last thirty years-- really contribute to changing the way things work?

It would seem to me that people going into Policy or Government are likely to be among the more news-obsessed segments of the population. Given that I have two small kids and a demanding job, the hour or more I spend (waste?) a day on newspapers and blogs represents almost all of my free time. What about you?

1. It's entirely possible that you will get into one or more of these programs. This is a Master's program, after all: they're making money off of you. I would say you would be a much stronger candidate after a year or two of work experience. There just seems almost nothing in your docket to distinguish you from many, many other college seniors. Not to say you won't get in somewhere-- but the problem may come back to haunt you, after you finish, when you will have a bunch of school on your resume, and not much else. 2. Not that there's anything wrong with messing around with challenging math courses, but I think the idea (wide-spread, I think) that a Master's in policy requires this level of mathematical analysis is kind of funny. You're not getting a PhD in Econ here. In fact, none of the programs I've seen even have a undergraduate calc requirement. They want "quantitative" ability so that you can a) read papers and understand the arguments, and write papers and make quantitative arguments. I think that's about it. We're not going to be inventing new formulas (of the type they used to use to sell collateralized debt obligations) here.

That's hilarious. If the human gives a higher score than the computer, it's just averaged together, then? I think it would be interesting to put in some Emerson or Thoreau essays and see where they came out on the scale. It's kind of a reverse Turing test...the computer is grading us to see how much we sound like a human being.

It's easy to overestimate the level of the math tested by the GRE, and actually undercut yourself by doing so. It's really a test of 8th-9th grade level math, and some general "math intuition" that's really about number sense and arithmetic more than anything else. College statistics might actually hurt you, as you discovered.

The director of graduate admissions at Princeton told me that, due to a large number of deferrals from last year and possibly a desire for a slightly smaller class, they are expecting an admit rate as low as 7-8% this year, assuming application numbers are the same as last year. That's pretty tough.