UndraftedFreeAgent

I received the following email on the 22nd of January. If you want to find if your application is complete or not, I would email the department, not the grad school admissions group. The school gets enough mail, where it really could be a volume issue. I imagine acceptances will hear pretty much any day now. Dear XXXX, Thank you very much for applying to the Political Science graduate program. We wish to inform you that your application is complete, and your materials are now being reviewed by the Admissions Committee. There is nothing further we need from you at this point. Should that change, you will be notified of what is needed by email. Unfortunately, the process of considering applicants is a long one. Please understand that we normally receive approximately 300 applications, from which we accept from 10-12 new students. Most likely you will not hear anything further from us until the end of Feburary or beginning of March. Thank you again for applying, and the best of luck to you. Sincerely, Benjamin Radcliff Director of Graduate Studies

Click on the link near the top of your screen called "user control panel" and navigate until you find where to create signature. You can put whatever you want, but they limit the number of letters/numbers.

I would have said top 20-25, but yeah, below that, placement opportunities get scarce in a hurry.

Overall rankings are meaningless anyway, because no one studies "political science" in general at the graduate level. No one is placed or published based on overall rankings, and they don't really do anything but help lay people get an idea of which schools are the leaders.

This is a common problem with ranking systems, especially those that try to weight the reputation of journal articles. Sometimes the overall ranking is based on different methodology than the subfield rankings. In other rankings, the distance between #10 and #100 in two different fields can be quite significant, so when the rankings are combined, it skews the result in favor of programs that are far ahead of other schools in a particular field. Other rankings try to get an overall picture of the department's reputation in ALL subfields. So, even though ND may be good for Comparative and Theory, its relative weakness in other categories hurts it, especially considering how far down the list it is in some other subfields.

Canadianpolisci, I apologize if I offended you. I thought I was just being funny, but temperatures are running even hotter than I guessed. I meant that in a joking manner, but I suppose text does not convey body language or facial expression.

I am similarly confused. English is one of the primary languages of Canada, correct?

I'm going to sit in denial of their existence until someone fesses up on this forum.

They seem to have gotten a bit of a reputation for waiting until the last second to reject people. A lot of people in previous years posted that they had to call in order to find out that they were rejected.

I went to a conference at George Mason back in '06 and yes, they definitely have some very impressive faculty. I didn't apply to their program because I want one with an established track record. Also, I want to go into academia and it looked like most, if not all, graduates (from Public Policy anyway) go into government or the private sector.

1. Every time someone says "crap shoot", you envision a professor throwing all applications in a toilet, aiming a shotgun at the toilet, firing, and making a decision based on what splashes out. 2. You have spies (friends) at your favorite schools "volunteer" to envelope letters for the department. 3. You've developed a composite set of department rankings based on the dozens of other rankings that are out there. 4. You know the names of the departmental secretaries at all schools by heart. 5. You're convinced that all postings on the results page regarding schools from which you haven't heard are lies, because your hidden web cams show that the committees are still meeting. 6. You begin to wonder what sort of placement you could get with a degree from University of Phoenix Online 7. You've created a text message system to notify friends/family of every decision... even if they don't care. 8. You installed an alarm system to let you know when the mail arrives. 9. People have started betting as to your odds of getting into certain programs, just so they have a reason to pretend to care when you rant. 10. You check your email so often that sometimes you don't even need to re-enter your password.

It was funny. Their acceptance email sounded almost like a rejection. They didn't invite me to visit, because they probably know that unless they offer funding, there's little chance that I'll go there, especially since I've been given a full package at a program which is likely a better fit.

March 30-April 1. I asked earlier and was told that they expect that weekend to be the most popular, so I picked that one in order to meet as many prospective colleagues as possible.

I've been labeled a quant jock, but my interests are primarily non-profits, service organizations, and (rather unrelated) international conflicts. I'm going down to interview at Emory this weekend and will visit FSU March 30-April 1. I also just heard from Stony Brook today, but they didn't mention a visitation event.

Thanks. But they're only really an option if they come through with $$. Good luck to everyone interviewing at Emory this weekend. I will see you all down there on Friday, courtesy of Delta Airlines.

In at Stonybrook (no $ yet), Out at Penn State. For some reason, it wouldn't let me post the results. I'm actually not surprised to be dinged by a lower school. My profile is the type that makes me either a finalist or an easy reject.

Brewery: The Mishawaka Brewery (app. 3 miles from campus) has great beer and OK food. Pub: Legends (on campus, South of the football field... you WILL find your way there at some point) is a great pub for grad students, student/faculty parties, and has weekly live bands/occasional comedians. Bar/Restaurant: Between the Buns, a sports bar on RT 23 about half a mile east of campus, has cable tv at every table, good burgers, a great drink menu, and lots of fun people. They have karaoke every Thursday and have lots of other activities on other nights. There is an asian market about half a mile east of campus on RT 23. I never went there myself, but am told it was pretty good. For more conventional produce, the Martin's grocery stores are really good. Coffeehouses: On campus coffee is all Starbucks, with an actual Starbucks in LaFortune (the student building). Off campus there are several Starbucks', some open 24 hrs a day. There's a Panera in the commercial part of Mishawaka (3 miles east of campus) and a smaller bakery with some coffee products on Edison Rd. 2 miles east of campus. That's really it for coffee that I found though. Just about any type of store/restaurant you could want can be found on N. Main St. or Grape Rd. in Mishawaka (2-3 miles east of campus). There is a small, OK mall on Grape Rd. My favorite place ever was a family owned bread shop in a shopping center on Grape Rd. called "Great Harvest" near a TJ Maxx and Circuit City. I don't go to ND anymore (left with an MA), but my info is less than a year old.

RE: everyone talking about funding offers (or lack thereof) Schools, particularly public ones, are likely to be pretty stingy about funding this year. Keep in mind that we are in the middle of a national downturn and possibly a recession. Grad stipends at some schools are directly financed by state funds. As sales, property, and income tax revenues are likely to be below expectations this year, that means fewer dollars available for our cohort of grad students. Other schools fund their grad stipends using the interest paid by investments, which will also be below expected values. The best places to hope for money are the ueber rich schools and those with very popular sports teams. Some of those schools are able to completely fund their grad departments with television deals for football and basketball. At my last grad school, the running joke was that we were grad assistants brought to you by NBC.

My post office has gained the reputation of being nearly a week slower... and we're not in the middle of nowhere either.

I have a friend who's in another department there and she told me that it's pretty much standard for departments there to wait until after they meet their first batch of accepted students and get an idea of how many will commit before they send out their final yes/no answers. Unfortunately, I'm willing to bet that we've been dumped, since there are so many of us and no way that we could all be on some mythical wait list. Hopefully I'm wrong. Best of luck to everyone. Sorry it takes me so long to respond, as I'm generally off at work from 7:30am til 6:15pm.

What has gotten qualitative researchers in trouble is "hand waiving" analysis masquerading as a quantitative approach. They come up with some graph to describe an index they created themselves based on subjective evaluations and spend the better part of a book defending their reasoning (example: "The J Curve" by Ian Bremmer... which I actually enjoyed, btw). I think that the rise of the quantitative approach is signaling that Political Science is undergoing the same transition that economics underwent 20 years ago. With the exception of a few holdout schools, in another 10 years, I imagine that calculus and statistics (at a bare minimum) will be required for grad school. If there were a database of hiring trends, I'm sure that it would reflect this. Ugh, I have to go to work now... but at least that's almost over.

Because we went to war before any articles could make it through the peer review process. The media also did an admittedly poor job questioning the administration, which includes asking experts to comment. "The Economist" seems to do a better job of getting experts on the record than most other print news outlets.

I applied and haven't heard anything yet, but I'm not really waiting for them anymore. Good luck!

Pfff... the tax rebate will end up covering about half of what I actually spent. And if you still file taxes as a dependent, I don't know if you get anything at all. But apparently it used to be MUCH more expensive than it is now, because they used to actually have to hire extra people to deal with the paperwork. But now that so much of the system is automated, it really costs them nothing to review an additional application, so now the fees are pretty much just there for revenue. So far only Vanderbilt seems to have realized this and removed the application fee altogether.

It wasn't until I saw your post on the results page that I realized that I never kept the letter they sent in the Fall with my ID number and everything I need to check my status with them. DOH!