waterline

PROFILE: Type of Undergrad Institution: HYP Major(s)/Minor(s): History of Art Undergrad GPA: 3.58 Type of Grad: Area Studies Grad GPA: 4.0 GRE: 750v 710q 6.0 Any Special Courses: Letters of Recommendation: 2 strong from well-known poli sci Professors; 1 so-so, non poli sci Research Experience: Journalist in-country. Teaching Experience: Some Subfield/Research Interests: Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Quantitative Methods SOP: Half decently written -- but it was a little unfocused. I should have learned more about the discipline before sending it off, and tailored it to schools. RESULTS: Acceptances($$ or no $$): Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, all funded, Oxford (MPhil - unfunded) Waitlists: None Rejections: Harvard, Princeton, UCSD What would you have done differently? (1) Applied to places (like Yale and Stanford -- not that I would have gotten in to either) where there was no tenured person doing my area, but whose interests intersected with mine. You don't need to apply, or chose, based on area studies interests! (2) Learned more about the currents of the discipline before writing my SOP. I should have given my SOP to two people, rather than one person, in the discipline.

Fearon and Laitin are great, but Yale has a pretty strong group on political violence: Kalyvas, Wood, Sambanis, Blattman, Lawrence, Darden (and maybe Lyall or Wilkinson if you believe the rumor boards). Not to say one or the other is better, just different. Having lived in both places, I actually like New Haven a little better than the Palo Alto end of the Bay Area. The weather is worse, certainly, but New Haven has I think better food (Modern, The Pantry, Sally's and Pepes, decent Thai food), is a more diverse and vibrant place to live, and is effectively as close to NYC as Palo Alto is to SF (that is, it's just far enough to make it seem like a pain in the middle of the semester). I'm from the East Coast, though, so I'm partisan.