Doorkeeper

I don't mean to be rude in pointing this out, but it is extremely wonderful to read a faculty member in such a great department admit to having made mistakes and being fallible. Too often I interact with faculty, even exceptionally kind faculty, who seem to have forgotten what it feels like to be anxious about one's future and one's place in academia.

I'm shocked that Harvard is waiting until March given their historical tendency to release in mid-February, but kudos to the person who called it in the results thread. I guess they deserve a week all to themselves to release decisions.

Wow. The people getting Princeton totally cleaned up this year. Congrats! Looks like there's going to be waitlist movement at the top schools if this clustering of admissions continues.

What's going on with H and P? This is the longest they've ever waited in the history of Gradcafe to announce decisions! Stop driving me crazy!

Never have I wanted a weekend to end so much as I did this weekend. Bring on the pain.

Where's the Ivy deluge? I don't want another anxious weekend.

Yikes. With HYP still on the board, tomorrow has the chance to be brutal.

What does everyone think Harvard is doing? Results history on Gradcafe says they've never started acceptances later than Feb. 25 (Monday), but someone posted on the results board that they hoped to get "decisions" out by March 4th. Perhaps acceptances will come before then and rejection letters will be mailed that week?

I'm going to be a nervous wreck this week.

I don't believe Harvard has started getting back to admits later than the 22nd in any of the past 3-4 years.

According to the results from the last few years, Harvard will either be this week or the week after.

That is a ridiculous list of schools there. Congratulations on such a successful cycle.

Ah, my apologies then as well for jumping on you. This will be a very tricky statement of purpose to pull off given what's expected of a statement of purpose, but if you do it well I could see yourself definitely appealing to departments with a critical theory leaning who also have IR theory people. I'm thinking somewhere like Johns Hopkins or Cornell here. Do you realize that there is work in political theory that's focused at the international level, yes? Without knowing more about your specific research interest, I would think that could be a good target research area for you. This being said, all of your background seems to be in IR, so unless you've done significant coursework in theory, you might want to apply for IR theory.

No, I am not a Straussian. My comments were given in order to try to get the OP to narrow (or streamline) his/her interests into a coherent statement of purpose. In many departments, there is a split between the IR theory faculty and the political theory faculty, and one's interest to work primarily with the former or later should be made evident in your statement. Now, if you're interested in combining the two subfields during graduate study, that's a bit different.

Is anyone still waiting on UCLA? Do we know what's going with them, or there an informal waitlist or something?

Brown Political Science is not a good fit given your political theory interests. It is very liberal and analytic in focus. You need to decide if you're going to be applying as an IR theory candidate, or a post-modern, critical theory applicant. The statement of purposes from these two focuses, as well as the interested faculty, will be very different for most departments.

Still no rejections from Harvard Gov yet? Why are they making me wait for the inevitable?

It might be beneficial to separate out that list based on subfield...

I understand the benefits of getting a terminal MA at a place like Tufts or Brandeis where faculty focus their efforts on grooming the MA students to apply for PhDs, but would it be at all beneficial to get a Masters from a school that also has a PhD program? Are there such MAs that might be worth it at the good departments, where MA students do get some faculty attention? I'm thinking here about places like Penn, Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, CUNY, etc. I ask because I think my application would really benefit from having a few more Phil classes on it that are outside of value theory, so I'm considering a one year MA to sure up my courseload in E&M, Logic, etc before re-applying.

Chicago groups its Masters according to the area of study. Instead of having Masters in specific departments, they have a Masters of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science. I doubt that you will have any problem going from Chicago's Masters in Humanities to a PhD. When you apply to a PhD, you submit your transcripts and they will see the classes you took.

From looking at past cycles, Harvard seems to make their acceptances and have a very short waitlist. If they don't reach their numbers from that pile, they will then take a second look at the rejected applications and accept/waitlist them. This happened in 2010 if you go back in the results surveys.

I cannot reiterate how important it is for you to increase that verbal GRE score. Many schools a low score on the GREs as an unofficial cut-off to reduce the number of applications that get serious review. I would bet you were a casualty of that cutoff at a number of the schools you applied to.

Someone in results said they called Harvard and rejections are in the mail. Oh what fun! But the person also mentioned that Harvard dips into their rejection pile to fill their numbers, if necessary. So therefore everybody that's in at Harvard needs to turn Harvard down. I'm looking at you jsclar. I'll give you a bottle of Remy for it!

No worries. Thanks for the info!

Hmm...interesting system KSG uses, what about GSAS for Government?