AmericanQuant

There's some wisdom here. If just one person would make or break a school for you, you shouldn't go. But if you are on the fence, knowing about the intentions of one person can make all the difference.

This is a totally appropriate question to ask to anyone in the department. Mid-career people sometimes burn out on advising or go into administration, or learn that they are crappy advisers. Old people retire. Young people don't get tenure. It's always legit. Just make sure you ask in a polite way. I'd suggest, "Are you taking new students right now?" Or, "What sorts of working relationships do you develop with students?"

You are definitely not disqualified from getting admitted to the best political science departments. They are willing to take a chance on good people, and are understanding that people have made mistakes. Unlike fields like physics, math, econ, etc., there aren't enough perfect applicants to go around, so compromises naturally arise. If you have very good GRE scores and take tough courses, you should be in good shape. For the GRE's, the better your quant score is the better. For most applicants, they're just looking for some minimum level of quant competence (probably about 160 ish), but since you are going to not the best university and your grades are mixed, really concrete signals of competence are important. Take lots of practice tests, and get study books if necessary. The good grades in econ courses and quant polisci courses are positive signs. Have you taken any math? American political behavior and elections are very quant-heavy areas, so knowing calculus (and even some linear algebra) will be valuable. Do you have any interest in political methodology (i.e. applied statistics for political science problems)? If so, a good grade in real analysis would help your case, AND be valuable for your career. Lastly, have you thought about taking some time off between college and grad school and working? Having your senior year grades available will probably help your case and a lot of people find it rewarding for other reasons. If you got a very good job in politics, it might also make you a better grad student.

Agreed with above. You have a profile that top programs go crazy for. As long as your letters and personal statement are comparably good, you'll get into a lot of the top places.

Ya, you'll be fine. People come from much weirder backgrounds than yours and you have a very competitive profile. Just make sure to convey in your statement of purpose that you understand the types of research questions posed in political science. Also, you should add Stanford to your list. Lots of good comparative work on Europe happening there. Scheve, Hainmueller, Rodden, Laitin etc.

All of the top programs emphasize quantitative research. The reputation for quant work and reputation overall are very highly correlated for the top 10 programs. If you're looking for a program that's a good fit, focus on finding professors whose interests dovetail with yours. They'll all be able to give you good quant training. Unless you want to be a methodologist, in which case Michigan and Berkeley are out.

It depends. What is your reason for wanting to finish unusually fast, and what do you want to do after the PhD?

Exactly. Once the letter is written, the marginal work is minimal. Plus, faculty think of it as their job. Especially if you're a good student, this just isn't a big deal. And to victorydance, OP has more recently done an MA in economics. That's going to be the most important part of the application. If he's a successful MA student, the fuckup 5 years ago just isn't gonna be a big deal. Might be good to have a letter-writer explain it, but if he just explains it in his statement, I'm sure that'd be fine.

I strongly agree with kameldinho, this is totally backwards. Many top political science professors see an econ degree as basically the best possible preparation for a Polisci PhD. And depending on the prominence of the recommenders, they may know the person. Moreover, the admissions committee will want to know what kind of a student you are now. Letters from 5 years ago won't be that informative.

Find a paper you really like, read the articles they cite. Then go on google scholar and find out what the most-cited papers are that cite the new paper you found. Repeat. Pretty soon, you'll have encountered (and possibly read), the most important stuff. Take note of who the authors are and where they are teaching. You want to study with those people.

What kind of political economy? IPE or CPE? In any case, NYU, Caltech, WashU, Stanford GSB and Stanford Political Science would all be places to look at.

As others have said, you're in pretty good shape. Having recommendation letters from well-known people seems to count for a lot, and you have them. Try to get the most out of your classes and your RA gig. I think you'd be well-served learning as much math and statistics as you can, not for admissions reasons, but because it'll help you once you're in.

Hard to say what to take because what's taught in the first semester or second semester of calculus varies from university to university. Here are some college-level math topics, in order of importance for a social scientist: 1) Differentiation 2) Integration 3) Basic Linear Algebra (Matrix Ranks, matrix inversion, bases) 4) Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors, this is usually in the first linear algebra course, taught after 3. 5) Taylor Series, infinite series, convergence (usually a second semester calc topic) 6) Computational Linear Algebra Topics (SVD, QR Decomposition, etc.) 7) Multivariate Calc (div, grad, curl, surface integrals, etc.) 8) Real Analysis I'd strongly recommend learning 1-3 in college. They'll all come up in your first semester or two of methods classes in grad school, and they're sort of essential to reading the literature and understanding what's going on when you run a regression. Very possible that you can't do your problem sets without knowing them. After that, everything is relevant, but not essential. In a math department, partial differentiation is something that is taught in a multivariate calculus class, but you can teach it to yourself pretty easily. It's not any harder than regular differentiation and you'll want to learn how to do it at some point.

Most of the programs you're applying to have some version of a math camp, where they'll go over all of the minimal math you need in grad school. It won't do it in much depth, and learning a bunch of math in 2 weeks isn't the best way to retain it. In particular, if you have any interest in quantitative research, you'll get a lot out of a linear algebra course. Also, some statistics courses will help you understand the literature better. If you want to be a methodologist, you basically can't take too many stats courses. If you're doing formal theory (i.e. game theory), you would benefit from real analysis. Have you taken any econ? In many respects, economics is the language of political science. Taking intermediate would be valuable, especially at NYU and Stanford, which have many people trained as economists on the faculty. Being a part-time student won't be a problem if you can show that you used your time well. But if you don't have much to show for it, then it could be an issue, particularly if other applicants will have more to show from there time in college. Have you asked your "distinguished" professors about these things? What do they say?

This troll was impressive.

I doubt any good program would take you. Econ PhDs regularly get jobs in political science departments, so they'd be suspicious of your need for more training. They'd assume that since you struck out in econ and couldn't get a faculty job in a political science with your econ PhD, that several more years of doctoral training wouldn't change things. If you really want to learn more about politics, find some syllabi for PhD courses and go through the readings yourself. Publish some papers in political science journals, and go on the political science job market.

Two things to bear in mind: 1) Stanford's placements page is missing a bunch of recent placements. 2) Stanford has much smaller grad student cohorts. Some discussion on the first point here: http://www.poliscirumors.com/topic/stanfords-placement-in-2013-2014-was-horrible/page/2

One thing you should be aware of is that you don't need a master's degree to start a PhD program. If you're interested in doing a PhD, you should apply to those programs straight away (assuming your GRE scores are decent). They'll pay you to attend and will give you a master's degree on the way. If you decide academia / a PhD isn't for you, you can walk away with a free master's degree.

A good story and good recommendation letters are very helpful in explaining away a bad GPA. It sounds like you've got a good explanation. You should also explain it to your rec writers so that they can emphasize what a good polisci student you are, despite any past trouble you had in bio.

The military folks do it in 3 years by lots of hard work and throwing all of their energy into their dissertation. Other PhD students do more RA work, take more classes, and are more likely to write articles with other grad students or their advisors. The military folks do a better job of getting a PhD and moving on to their next assignment, other grad students (sometimes) do a better job putting together a research program and a portfolio for a tenure-track job. All depends on what your goals are after finishing. Anytime I've floated the idea of taking less than 5 years, I've been encouraged to take the "extra" year to improve my dissertation, write some articles, and "tech up."

Most successful political scientists do sustained work on one or a few related topics over their careers. You listing a lot of weakly related topics is just setting off a lot of alarm bells, since most successful graduate students and faculty members do not and cannot sustain research in such a wide range of areas. It's hard to say whether you should get a PhD and where you should do it without a particular area of current research in mind. Political Psychology and Political Theory are both huge research areas, and schools will have many people doing different strands of work in those areas. The other topics are also areas of research in their own right, though it's unlikely that any program would be able to serve you well in all of them. I'd suggest picking out some research in the areas you're interested in recent top journals (APSR, AJPS, JOP, WP, IO) or top university presses and seeing who wrote them and who they're responding to. That'll help give you some guidance on who's working on those subjects. If you are a plausible candidate for a top-6 school, you should also look through their faculties and pick out 3 people that you'd be happy working with at each place. If you can't find 3 such people, don't bother applying to those places and go looking further down the list. In general, you want to go to a top program or the place where you'd have the best advisor. Start from the top and work your way down the list.

Undergraduate-level political science and graduate and professional-level political science are pretty different. Political Scientists writing in journals and for university presses use a lot more statistics, mathematical models and jargon than you'd see in an undergrad class. You should look through any issue of the American Political Science Review to see what I mean.

About a third of the people in my cohort at a top-6 program have master's degrees. They all got them because they were unsure of what they wanted to do and either got a professionally-oriented master's degree or one that fit with an interest they had. I don't think any were to enhance their application for a PhD program, though it's possible.

I'd suggest reading political science articles or books written by professors in your area of interest at the programs you're considering. Do you want to read and write articles like what they write? If so, then maybe a PhD in Political Science is for you. Also, you should be aware that the job market for political science professors, and political theorists in particular, is pretty bad. Very few people get jobs in political theory.

Is the military going to be paying for your tuition? If you come with your own funding, that's a HUGE help.