Profile Evaluation: Comparativist - weak grades but publishing experience and stellar recommendations

[casbahboy]

Felt admisable, might delete later.

Unusual profile. Undergrad GPA is weak but my research experience, publications and references are strong.

Type of Undergrad Institution: Oberlin College

Major(s)/Minor(s): Political Science and Physics

Undergrad GPA: 3.35 (would have been a 3.5 but failed a course senior year because of clerical mistake)

MA: none

GRE: 180 V, 171 Q, 4.5 

Languages: Arabic (professionally proficient, lived in the Mid East 2 years now)

Teaching: none

Publications: I am currently publishing two articles. The first is a political geography paper on water policy in a mid-east country. It is in a European journal and would probably be seen as more political geography than comparative politics. I was the lead author and lead the project from inception, building coauthors, finding the literature gap, building a network of in-country informants, qualitative data collection, designed remote sensing analysis component. It passed internal review and is waiting for external. My best reference is my coauthor from this project, a post-doc at Oxford in IR. I am also publishing a working paper at a British development institute, on urban governance and how aid actors see local politics. It passed peer review and is in editing. I published another article right after graduation, but the research was less intensive because I used user generated content from the Syrian Civil War and it was just an undergrad journal.

LOR: Highlight of my application. I can get a very detailed reference from my coauthor on the water paper and from me coauthor and the British development institute that hit all the things the programs want. I also have a good undergrad professor to recommend me from college.

SoP: I aim to apply in the area of comparative politics with a regional focus in Mid East, and a substantial focus in authoritarian politics, development, and natural resources. I have a very clear proposal, mapping groundwater regulation to understand how authoritarian regimes approach resource exhaustion. I have based much of the methodology of the proposal on Michael Albertus's 2015 book on Land Reform, although the theory to evaluate is very different.

Unpublished Research Experience: I have worked the past 8 months doing Monitoring and Evaluation in the aid sector in Jordan. Organizing surveys of refugees, needs assessments, writing reports, etc.

Quant Experience: Mainly my physics degree (very quant intense) and my work in aid sector survey analysis. I'm currently working freelance in R on the web, hoping to add a bit.

It seems like relatively few people on this site talk about their publications before they apply. I know my grades are a red flag for top 25 programs, but I think it would still be worth applying given my strong publications and my research experience. I have a few questions

1. I could really use someone to read and critique my SoP. Pm me and I will send it to you.

2. Is it worthwhile to retake the GRE's - I can't get the Verbal up, and I can't get the writing up (ADD, slow writer). But I could get the quant up, since I didn't even study last time. But I'm also looking for work so it would take time away from all my other responsibilities to rush that this week. Is it worth it just to improve the quant? My verbal would probably be lower the second time.

3. I'm going to be applying for more positions as a fieldworker in developing countries based in the Mid East. In my last job I got to do academic work (my aid worker colleagues didn't want to do it), so that'd be super fun. It seems like the research experience component of the application couldn't be stronger, but why not grab a few more.

4. I have not actually done much social science quant yet, just physics quant and survey analysis. I am considering Columbia's MS in quantitative methods for social science. But I think my political geography paper is a good writing sample even if it doesn't include regression analysis.

5. Is there anything you would change about the reference letter? People often talk about the name of the referencer, but I am hoping the content of these two will make a big difference.

reference letter.docx reference letter.docx

[uncle_socks]

Uhhh GRE scores are out of 170 

[Ethanf]

Damn... you have the highest GRE scores in the history of GRE scores

[casbahboy]

yeah I miswrote them, 170v, 161 quant