repatriate

To answer your questions:

Yes, I am trying to help people. I don't want people to be discouraged, but the reality in this business is that sometimes reality is discouraging.

No, I don't regret any of my choices career-wise, but I know plenty of people who do. I have been profoundly fortunate in my career.

No, no one took me aside to give me this talk. In fact, I got the exact opposite feedback when I told my undergraduate adviser that I was going to get a PhD. "Oh, you're going to get a PhD at XXX? That's a great department, you should have no trouble getting a job." No one should enter this process with misinformation like that. I also see what happens in my very own department as some of my colleagues promise the moon and the stars to prospective PhD students. I don't do this myself, but I'm in the minority here.

I feel that I owe it to you prospective students to give you an honest picture of how things work in our profession.

Unfortunately, for most people, money and a job really do matter.

I have a family to support, and we don't have any other source of income aside from my job and my wife's job. Our ability to live comfortably depends on me having a job. I suspect that many PhD applicants are like me, or at least will become like me (i.e. will have a spouse and children) by the time they are out of graduate school. These people need an honest appraisal of their likelihood of being able to support their family after getting a PhD. I don't think that you can possibly argue that this is a bad thing.

I am off overseas working on an MA while my husband has remained home to work. Since we're several time zones apart, finding time to talk depends usually on my being up a little late and his getting home from work at a decent time. We still send each other a dozen emails about little things throughout the day (a habit that developed when we were both working desk jobs) and we usually find 30-60 minutes a day to video chat in the evenings. The expense of overseas travel and our respective dedication to work and study means that there is little chance to see each other. Since my program started this year, he has been able to visit for a long weekend, and I was home for a 3 week break.

I won't say it's easy being apart for either of us, but a few things have helped make it OK. It helps that we are both pretty practical, low affect people in general. I wouldn't describe myself as having a particularly rich emotional life, anyway. So although I miss him, it isn't a weeping, sobbing, pining kind of missing. We also rarely fought before. It really wasn't worth the energy or hurt in either of our minds to fight; we'd rather just compromise or appease the other person, and that kept us both happy. This has continued. We've always been very honest and open with each other, and this has also continued. So I just about never feel angry, hurt, suspicious, or any other negative feeling towards him. This prevents me from questioning our relationship.

That he is willing to do this for me puts me in awe of him and makes me feel so grateful (and quite guilty sometimes). I don't know if it's made our relationship stronger, but it hasn't hurt it at all.

Perhaps they are applying because they have been taken in by insipid advice to pursue their whims (better known as "dreams") no matter how unrealistic or ill-suited, or they have actually convinced themselves that their love for "the game" is so deep and pure that it needs no merely external crutch like, say, income, job stability, personal dignity, or health insurance for their children--they can be happy without all these things so long as they can spend their days regressing Congressional voting data. Or because they have been strung along by the institutions themselves, which need TAs for their undergrads and RAs for their faculty just like top schools, and face no discernible disincentives to taking on far more graduate students than can ever find suitable employment on the academic job market.

It has never been clear to me whether anything but the immediate financial situation of the graduate institution and its ability to offer stipends places any constraint on graduate admission. And even that is not a great constraint--many people seem perfectly willing to dig themselves into debt at places like Georgetown for the blessed opportunity to be graduate students. What incentive do graduate programs have to peg their admissions to the academic job market and admit fewer students as fewer jobs open up?

Another thing that those perusing placement statistics should be aware of is that departments frequently include graduates in post-docs, and those working in some non-professorial capacity in higher education (for example, in administration or student services) among those placed at "academic jobs" without noting explicitly the nature of their employment. Further Googling may be prudent when dealing with these claims.

Not confrontational, it's a good question. Yes, there are people who do place--I would never claim that outside of the highest tier of schools no one ever gets a job. Some do, and you found some good examples.

However, what you didn't find on the UGA website is any information on the many who do not get academic jobs. And I don't think that you can understand at this point in your careers the extreme frustration that I see in our discipline when every year we produce hundreds of PhDs who will never have a chance at an academic job. These are people who have worked for years with the belief that there is market for the skills that they are learning, and when they enter the job market they find that the supply of qualified candidates far, far outstrips the demand for them.

Please don't misunderstand me: I love political science and I love teaching and I love research. I want everyone to succeed and I want everyone to pursue their academic dreams. But our university system in the United States takes advantage of PhD students who have very little chance of getting an academic job in order to use them as cheap labor. It does this by and large because prospective graduate students are not sufficiently informed about the likely chances of getting an academic job.

My post is designed to give you the information that will help you all make better choices. Best of luck.

I disagree with framing the pursuit of the Ph.D. in such utilitarian concerns, and the anxieties about well-being it encourages. I think most of us don't go into programs with the expectation of being millionaires, let alone the desire for status (except perhaps those who covet assiduously the repute of being pursued by the Ivies). Conversely, this user seems focused more on the maximization of wealth than the refinement of the mind's eye. If you want wealth, particularly lots of wealth, your best route isn't through academe. Let's face it. Moreover, if this poster's mindset is the one you take into the program, I fully expect you will have a quite turbulent, even tortured experience at a time when you should be enjoying the enrichment your natural aristocratism admits.

I am a tenured associate prof in political science at a large state university. I posted this several years ago under the screen name "realist" when I first learned about this forum. At the time, I read through the threads and couldn't help but think about all the things that I wish that I had known before entering my PhD program. So with that, I thought that I'd give you all some advice from an actual PhD. I've made a couple small changes from the original version but this is basically the same as what I wrote before. While some of this may be hard to read, I offer it as-is, with only the thought that more knowledge is better than less knowledge.


CHOOSING GRADUATE SCHOOL

Your graduate school choice is probably the most important choice that you'll make in your career. Do not take this lightly. There are many reasons, but they boil down to some uncomfortable truths.

1. Only the best schools place students in academic jobs. While there are thousands of universities in the United States, there are many many many thousand more political science PhDs. 5-7 years is a very long time to spend in a low-paying job (which is what graduate school is) only to realize that you have very little chance for promotion. Even at top 10 institutions, a good half of entering students do not end up with a PhD and a tenure track job. Is it fair that this is the case? No. Are there very smart graduate students that are not at top departments? Absolutely, there are literally thousands of them. But this is how the world works. And you have no chance to change it from "the inside" unless you are already at a top department.

2. Advisers are fickle beings. Especially outside of the top institutions, they are busy and pressed for time, and they cannot offer you the type of guidance and support that you may believe that you are going to get. I had a very close relationship with a very influential adviser, and saw him for about 10 minutes once every two or three weeks. This is the norm. Do not assume or expect that you will have a different experience (although there is a small chance that you will). Moreover, good scholars are often terrible advisers. I think that one of the worst aspects of our profession is that at middle-range departments, top scholars often will not even acknowledge graduate students.

3. Graduate school is an unequal partnership between students, who receive very little and give very much, and faculty, who have many other things to do but rely on students to do things that are in the university's best interests. Graduate students are (1) essentially powerless and (2) extremely cheap labor. Universities have an incentive to keep a lot of graduate students around to fill instructor slots and TAships. This means that they will keep on a lot of graduate students who will never have a chance at a tenure-ladder job. This is a pathological system of incentives, and I find it repugnant, but this is the reality.

So what sort of advice does this lead me to give? First off, above and beyond almost anything, you need to go to the best possible graduate school. It doesn't matter if you don't like Ann Arbor as much as Athens or Austin, graduate school matters tremendously for your future ability to get a job. At nearly every university or college, a PhD from Michigan will get your file looked at when applying for jobs. I know that this sounds harsh, but for most jobs, a job file from a school out of the top 25 won't even be considered. It will just go on the trash. Let this sink in.

As a corollary, you need to think long and hard about graduate school if you do not have the opportunity to go to a top one. You should understand that you may not have a good chance of landing a tenure track job. The one's available to you, moreover, will likely be at "directional institutions" (think Northern X State) or small, low-ranked liberal arts colleges in the middle of nowhere. Even there, you will be competing with Harvard and Berkeley PhDs for a job. It's hard. It's not as hard as English or History, but nevertheless it's really hard. You should know this and plan accordingly.

The academic job market has gotten much harder in the two years since I first wrote this. There are thousands of students right now chasing a couple hundred jobs, and every year it gets worse because most people who strike out in one year go back on the job market the next year. Do not assume that the academic job market will get easier in 5-7 years, when you are going onto the job market. First, there will still be a substantial backlog of unplaced PhDs. Second, trends in academia are leading to more adjunct and lecturer positions and fewer tenure-track positions in all but the very best schools (and it's starting to happen there too). I would not still be in academia if I didn't have a tenure-ladder job.

Let's say you don't want to go be professor. Maybe you want to work in a think tank or a political consultancy. OK, fair enough: but in this case, I would recommend against getting a PhD in political science. There is little that you can gain from a PhD in political science that a think tank will find attractive that you cannot also have gotten from a good MPA/MPP/etc. program. Outside of academia, the PhD has little value-added over most professional masters degrees. Given the opportunity cost, the only people who should get PhDs in political science are people who have a passion for college teaching, or those who have a passion for academic research AND who are willing to settle for college teaching if the academic research thing doesn't work out.

Do not choose graduate school based on one individual who you "want to work with." Instead, you should choose the best program (by subfield) that you can. Why? Let's say that you identify one faculty member whose research interests match yours perfectly. For this to be the person upon whom you rely for your entire PhD course of study, it must be the case that (1) your research interests don't change (which is rare), (2) that your potential adviser is a nice and approachable person (which is about a 50-50 shot to be honest), (3) that your own research is interesting to that potential adviser (which you should not assume, regardless of what is said on recruitment weekend), and (4) that that adviser doesn't leave (which is common, especially for productive faculty at top-50-ish departments). If you chose a program based on that individual and any of these don't work out, you're in trouble. If you've chosen the best program, you'll be OK because there are other options; if you've banked on one faculty member, you're out of luck.

You should be flattered by faculty who are nice and approachable during recruitment weekend. But recruitment weekend is not like the other 51 weekends a year. Remember, faculty are approachable during recruitment because you provide them with an unlimited supply of discount labor. They have their own worries and incentives, and these rarely align with yours.

Likewise, funding matters. My general advice is that outside of a top 25 institution, you should not go to graduate school unless you have a full ride and a stipend large enough to live on. Without these, graduate school is a long and expensive process with little reward. There is a constant demand for doctors, so doctors can pay for medical school and still come out ahead. $200,000 in debt and only qualified for a very low paying job is a terrible situation that many PhDs find themselves in.

It is tempting to think that a potential adviser's kind words mean that you are special. You are special, but so are many many others. Wherever you are, you will likely not even be the smartest or most successful member of your cohort. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are the one who will buck the trends that I have described. It's just not likely.

Finally, I have made a big point about top 25 schools. We all know that Stanford is and Purdue isn't, but what's the definitive list? Simply put, if you have to ask, your school is not in the top 25. And of course subfield matters more than overall ranking. Emory is not a top-25 theory department so think long and hard about going there for theory. JHU is not a top-25 American politics department but it's a different story altogether for political theory. If you need to convince yourself that your program is a top-25 program, it's almost certainly not.


YOUR CAREER

If you decide to go to graduate school, congratulations. I mean this sincerely. You are embarking on the most intellectually rewarding period of your life. (Of course, intellectually and financially rewarding are not the same, as I mentioned previously.) Here are some brief tips.

The best political scientists are the following five things: smart, creative, diligent, honest, and nice. Smart is obvious. The rest are not.

The best political scientists are creative. They look at old problems in new ways, or they find new problems to look at. A good way to land a middling job (or no job) is to find a marginal improvement on an existing estimator, or take lessons from Paraguay and apply them to Uruguay. The best political scientists show us how our estimators are incorrect, or better yet, find new things to estimate.

The best political scientists are diligent. They think about problems for years and years, they rewrite their draft papers repeatedly, they collect giant datasets from scratch, and they go into the field, learn the language, and stay there until they have learned something. There are no quick research trips, there are no obvious philosophical points, and there are no datasets that you can download with results you can write up in a week.

The best political scientists are honest. There are many points at which you might fudge your work: creating a new dataset from scratch, during fieldwork, in writing up your results. You will be astounded at how frequent this is in our profession. Don't do it, for it always hurts you in the end. Being wrong and honest about it is OK. Being wrong and hiding it never works.

Finally, the best political scientists are nice. It is tempting to be prickly to make yourself seem smart or to protect your ego. But the same person you criticize today might be in a position to give you a job tomorrow. As they say, make your words soft and sweet, for you never know when you may have to eat them.

************

I hope this helps you all. I wish you the very best of luck with your careers.

Email your referee. Explain that you just now saw that schools have not received the letter. Ask if it is possible to send one soon and resend any files/notices. Attach a draft letter and say that s/he can use that as a base if it is helpful.
Find another referee, explain that your applications are in, due dates are past, and one referee has not sent one. Is it possible to write one quickly? Attach all relevant documents and a draft letter and say that s/he can use that as a base if it is helpful.
Call the schools on Monday and ask if they will review your application. Also ask if there is an email address you can have the letters sent to in addition to the official channel (online form, snail mail, whatever) to expedite the process.

This really only works so well for the men in the forums...

Wait... You still live at home with your parents? Lol sorry, I can imagine what a nightmare that would be. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with my parents being around when the mail comes in, just like college all over again! I did get a letter from one of the schools I'm applying to just letting me know about financial aid options, they just love to make us nervous!

That's a rather interesting stereotype you're promoting there. I'm female, but I'd rather the nice bottle of alcohol, unless the person happened to hit on one of the the kinds of wine I like.

Throw the mix tape in the trash, get them, if a guy a nice bottle of alcohol, or if a woman a nice bottle of wine. This would be a very sincere gesture unless you are interviewing at a Baptist school, and in that case just give them CD.

How do you find out that they haven't looked at your applications?

You claim that my info is very misleading, but you fail to explain why or how. Why are my statements wrong? Unless I was lied to by professors on ad-comms at the very schools that you initially named, or am lying (I hope you're not going so far as to accuse of either), you might want to address my arguments. Simply stating that your claims are facts--and mine are misleading--isn't really sufficient.

A few things to note: yes, a 3.6 is "low" compared to other programs that tend to admit applicants who typically graduate with a 3.8 or 3.9. However, I was not at all suggesting that this is TOO low--I'm pointing out that a sky-high GPA isn't necessary. If anything, since there will always be several applicants admitted with a 3.9 or higher, the 3.6 average suggests there are also applicants accepted with sub 3.5 scores. In other words, a very strong GPA isn't absolutely necessary...at least at THIS program. I never indicated that the GPA doesn't matter, or that there isn't at least some correlation between well-prepared applicants and strong grades. I am suggesting, however, that there are plenty of exceptions to that general correlation that should give students room to hope (and of course, to work towards) that they can end up in a top program despite lower numbers.

As for the 620 quant GRE score, two things come to mind.

1. You confuse correlation with causation. It seems perfectly reasonable that many well-prepared applicants (strong writing, enticing statement/project, etc) would also score well on quant. This is especially true at Duke. Thanks to the program's theoretical leaning, many of its students have a math or philosophy as well as English and thus are more likely to also have the skills that would enable one to do well on the quant. section. This by no means indicates that Duke specifically selects for high quant scores. (or for that matter, place great stock in the GRE's at all). Duke's own website emphasizes--and I and several have many times--that it's the writing and SoP that will count far more.

2. 620 Quant isn't bad, but it also isn't very high. It is, as you noted, the 52nd percentile of all individuals that take the GRE. That larger pool includes students who are applying for masters (and on the whole, score a bit lower) and the many students who do not get in at all, as well as students who are shut out of top universities such as Duke. This seems to be a perfectly average score among literature applicants--not a score that is so high that it would suggest the program is specifically selecting for it.

For what it's worth, I was an admitted Duke applicant not too long ago. My quant score is far higher than the listed average. Along we (admitted students) do not routinely discuss this information, I do know that while some of my peers also had such high scores on quant, several others scored hundreds of points below that average. The statistics that are listed doesn't give you a sense of the range, and can't be used for the deduction that are stating as fact.

You might also want to leave the personal attacks out of this conversation.

As someone else has noted, people do generally know what history is- which does avoid some of the sorts of comments others seem to get.


On a more general level, I am sure we all get:

Person: What do you do?
Me: I’m a graduate student right now.
Person: Wait...so you LIKE school!?

My favourite more specific comment has been from my dear Mom, who isn’t terribly academic or interested in my area of study (Irish History).


Mom: How is your essay going?
Me: Alright. I think that I have decided to focus on Ulster this time.
Mom: Who is Ulster?

(Ulster= Northern Ireland, generally)
I nearly died laughing, which I suppose was a bit mean of me...but I couldn’t help but be amused.


The other thing one has to put up with in Irish history is EVERYONE in North America wanting to assert their Irishness.
I often have conversations like:

Person: What do you study?
Me: Irish history.
Person: Cool! My great-great-great-uncle’s cousin was Irish. And I have this awesome Celtic knotwork tattoo!

I originally wanted to make an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet to keep track of everything, but the process of gathering all of the different information seemed overwhelming. Instead, I stapled a bunch of sheets of paper together, used one sheet of paper for each school, and just looked at the websites to see what to do. Anything I did, I wrote down that I did, and anything I needed to do, I wrote down with a checkbox next to it, so I could check it off later. I wrote the deadline for each program at the top of its sheet of paper. This gave me lots of room for freeform things like my various ID numbers, usernames and passwords, email contacts, etc. It worked great, and kept me from being intimidated.

I hope you didn't use either "philander" or "malinger" in your personal statement, since - unless you had a very strange undergraduate career - they don't seem to be used correctly above. Were you feigning illness in order to sleep with many women? or were they separate events?

I have a hard time taking your comments about writing seriously when you write like this, even in an Internet forum.

I wondered about this, too! So I googled it. Here is what I came up with (specifically on whether adcoms google applicants):

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/do-phd-admissions-committees-google-applicants.html

I think the best quote is, "I think the answer's obvious: they're just not that into you."

That's a relief! But there is one faculty commenter who says she does google applicants.

No love for the occasional posters? Ouch.

Dear schools,

Please consider the restraint and modesty required not to post too much on the GradCafe and give first priority to the occasional posters.

Much love and best wishes,
Repatriate

Amended letter:

Dear all schools,

Please consider all applicants based solely on their participation on GradCafe.

Accept with full funding everyone who has more to contribute than "wut r my chancez." Those applicants' applications are to be forwarded to your law schools.

Hugs and kisses,
Sparky

Dear School.

I know you've told me not to write or call, that you needed time to think things over...
What happened? School.. Where did we go wrong??
Even before I met you, you wooed me with your promises of happy futures together. Do you remember, school? Do you?
I do. You used to make it sound so easy. You even set up an online system for me to apply, so you could receive my letters faster. Like you couldn't wait to read them! Was it all a lie?
And then... Then, you started making demands. Asking me for more transcripts, more test scores. Money even!! I spent all I had on you. School. ... I LIVE IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!!!
But did I ever blame you? Did I ever say anything hurt you?
Yes. Yes, I might have written other schools. But at least I was honest. I told you! I told you as soon as you asked if there was someone else! I gave you a list, School.
And now, this silence. Where are you now, School? What are you doing? Are you reading someone else's SOPs? Letting yourself be charmed by their heavily revised writing style, their overblown rec letters, their stellar scores? Can't you see that none of it matters?!?? Because I'm THE ONE. I'm the one, School. And you know it.
And I know it too. That's why I sit here, night after night, waiting for you to call and tell me you want me, like I know you do.
You have cost me my rent, my friends and my dignity, School. While you are out ogling other applicants, I could be doing the same with other schools, but I don't! I don't because I WANT YOU!
And you may think I'm needy, and weird, and obsessed.. And you might even call me a creep if you knew that I spend most of my time on your website, looking at pictures of your exes, and trying to picture my head on their bodies, mentally photoshopping myself into pictures of us together... But that's just because I know we're meant to be, School.
So please. Pick up the phone and call.
I'll be waiting.

Yours.

m

No love for the occasional posters? Ouch.

Dear schools,

Please consider the restraint and modesty required not to post too much on the GradCafe and give first priority to the occasional posters.

Much love and best wishes,
Repatriate