How to gain valuable experience before starting PhD?

[teathatisiced]

Hi everyone! I'm currently doing a Master's in an interdisciplinary program (consisting of several political science courses; my major was also in political science) in Canada. My program is only a year long and will conclude next summer, and for variety of reasons, I've decided to take a break before applying to PhD programs. I know my situation is a bit unique; if people take a break, it's usually after undergrad, and I understand in the US most people go directly into their PhD. Nevertheless, I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on the kinds of work I should focus on during my year off. I'm hoping to study at a top political science program in the States. I already have experience with teaching and research and am currently waiting to hear back on articles I've submitted to journals. If you took a break before your PhD to pad your CV, what did you dedicate your time to? Research fellowships? Teaching? Working on articles? Internships? What makes me more attractive to PhD programs? Any advice would be appreciated! Thank you. 

Edited December 2, 2020 by teathatisiced
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[guest789]

Try and get an RA gig - there are more in econ than in poli sci though... Sometimes you can find political scientists in policy schools who are looking for full time RAs as well. To get these gigs, you need to be good at R/Python/maybe Stata and usually have some evidence of this, e.g. a GitHub profile. They are awesome for your development as a scholar. I would say these RA positions are at most major universities in the US -- check out some political science labs, like the democracy-focused lab or the lab focusing on immigration in CP/IR at Stanford. MIT has several labs as well, including the election and data science lab and the political methodology lab. All hire full-time RAs. If you're more interested in field work JPAL should be hiring, but I'm not sure how COVID has affected that.

If you can't get one of these jobs, look into beefing up your quantitative skills. Learn R, get good at it. You can do this in your spare time. Other alternative ideas are something in a think tank like the Brennan Center or a public opinion company like Pew. 

Princeton also has a post-undergrad RA program where you can take methods courses in poli sci and work as an RA for a Princeton professor.

[uncle_socks]

2 hours ago, timeseries said:

 I would say these RA positions are at most major universities in the US -- check out some political science labs, like the democracy-focused lab or the lab focusing on immigration in CP/IR at Stanford.

...

Princeton also has a post-undergrad RA program where you can take methods courses in poli sci and work as an RA for a Princeton professor.

I don't have familiarity with the MIT one so I'm not commenting on that. But most major universities (unless CHYMPS is all that is "major" to you) do not have tons of RA positions, and when they do, they are often very informal and go to graduates of that department/people who know someone. Political science faculty at R1 (CHYMPS types excluded) by large do not have money for an RA. Also the IPL at Stanford does not hire a full time RAs. The Stanford democracy focused lab hires a single RA. 

The Princeton one IIRC is for underrepresented minorities, so not too many people are eligible for that anyway. 

If you really want to stay close to academia, consider RAing/many of the other job titles that mean "person who does data work" in business schools, law schools, and economics (though again these will mostly be available at top schools only). RA hiring is generally incredibly strange in that 1. those who do them very often already come from very elite schools and 2. those who do them probably could've gotten into a top PhD program without it.

 

My take on this is that postgrad RA work, especially if you already have experience in political science, doesn't matter all that much. You're not expected to have papers published or in R&R when you apply. PhD programs don't really care about how you are outside of your research ideas and what your letter writers say about you. It sounds like you already have a solid background, and unless you need more letters of recommendation, I don't think having an RA job will necessarily help you all that much. Many people in my program came from policy research or polling (so stuff like Pew or thinktanks), but some also came from irrelevant quantitative jobs. You get paid much more in the latter. 

 

To answer some of your other possibilities: Teaching? No, unless teaching is a job that generally interests you. Teaching experience is not very important for getting into a top PhD program. Working on articles? I mean sure this is okay but with the caveats that you're going to learn a lot in your first few years of grad school that your views on your current papers will evolve drastically.  Also try not to be unemployed. Internships? Don't bother interning for like a politician or anything, but quant/policy/polling work in any field is marginally helpful and also pays money. 

[munch22]

2 hours ago, BunniesInSpace said:

I don't have familiarity with the MIT one so I'm not commenting on that. But most major universities (unless CHYMPS is all that is "major" to you) do not have tons of RA positions, and when they do, they are often very informal and go to graduates of that department/people who know someone. Political science faculty at R1 (CHYMPS types excluded) by large do not have money for an RA. Also the IPL at Stanford does not hire a full time RAs. The Stanford democracy focused lab hires a single RA. 

The Princeton one IIRC is for underrepresented minorities, so not too many people are eligible for that anyway. 

If you really want to stay close to academia, consider RAing/many of the other job titles that mean "person who does data work" in business schools, law schools, and economics (though again these will mostly be available at top schools only). RA hiring is generally incredibly strange in that 1. those who do them very often already come from very elite schools and 2. those who do them probably could've gotten into a top PhD program without it.

 

My take on this is that postgrad RA work, especially if you already have experience in political science, doesn't matter all that much. You're not expected to have papers published or in R&R when you apply. PhD programs don't really care about how you are outside of your research ideas and what your letter writers say about you. It sounds like you already have a solid background, and unless you need more letters of recommendation, I don't think having an RA job will necessarily help you all that much. Many people in my program came from policy research or polling (so stuff like Pew or thinktanks), but some also came from irrelevant quantitative jobs. You get paid much more in the latter. 

 

To answer some of your other possibilities: Teaching? No, unless teaching is a job that generally interests you. Teaching experience is not very important for getting into a top PhD program. Working on articles? I mean sure this is okay but with the caveats that you're going to learn a lot in your first few years of grad school that your views on your current papers will evolve drastically.  Also try not to be unemployed. Internships? Don't bother interning for like a politician or anything, but quant/policy/polling work in any field is marginally helpful and also pays money. 

I strongly disagree with this. First, there are plenty of RA or research related roles at a number of universities that are not specifically working for professors. Look at different universities that have social science research institutes. Even if it is not in political science explicitly, learning something substantive about another area is really useful and will give you great research experience. 
 

Second, there was some discussion on academic twitter yesterday about the increasing importance of research in PhD applications. The application process is going to get significantly more competitive these next couple of years. As mentioned by a few (see below), having significant research experience is becoming the norm. You and other should focus on getting research experience in an academic setting as an RA even if it not for a faculty member directly. 
 

 

[uncle_socks]

@munch22 I don't think we disagree with each other on the macro scale, these tweets are absolutely right. Top PhD programs want extensive pre-PhD prep that entails knowing how research in the field is conducted.

However, OP already has a fair amount of research experience (evidenced by their saying that they have experience with research and are in the process of submitting articles to journals). RA work/senior thesis/relevant post-BA jobs are important for people coming out of undergrad, but this person already has that via a MA with political science work and enough research experience to submit research to journals. I don't think another post-MA gig will help them much, they've already ticked the box for "has a sense of what doing original research is like."  Also, RA work isn't just about these full-time fellowships where you're an RA for a year. Being an RA can also mean working 5-20 hours with a prof during the school year or doing a school-wide summer research program. This whole twitter discourse (even beyond these two tweets) is about how there's an expectation that PhD applicants know how to political science, not that they've literally worked full time as an RA.

I've gone through the process for the top schools and met tons of people at admit days. Most of us (the subset of people who aren't applying straight out of undergrad or an MA program) did not do full time academic RA work before getting in. Most did quant-type work for think tank/polling (non-academic) types of groups, which is the most common. Another subset did quant-type work for corporations. Another subset is the Teach for America and law-adjacent types. Even fewer had university affiliation(beyond those applying straight out of undergrad or straight out of an MA) were doing things like full-time RA/postbacs, and again, these people were already highly qualified and could've gotten in just as well if they had gotten any old job. 

I'm not super familiar with what kind of RA/research related roles you're thinking of. Immediately my mind goes to the roles already covered in this thread, the Stanford and MIT ones. I think there's a Dartmouth one too. I'm familiar with people who did full time RA type work at business and law schools at highly ranked schools. I'm also familiar with people who work in faculty-related sorta interdisciplinary labs (though again mostly at tippy top schools). I know econ predocs exist but I don't personally know of anyone coming into political science PhD programs with one of those. I'd love to learn that there's more out there, however, I'm not too familiar with what else is out there. 

tldr: Research experience is indeed vital, but OP already has this experience so I think they can do whatever they want in their off year and be fine. 

Edited December 3, 2020 by BunniesInSpace

[munch22]

16 hours ago, BunniesInSpace said:

@munch22 I don't think we disagree with each other on the macro scale, these tweets are absolutely right. Top PhD programs want extensive pre-PhD prep that entails knowing how research in the field is conducted.

However, OP already has a fair amount of research experience (evidenced by their saying that they have experience with research and are in the process of submitting articles to journals). RA work/senior thesis/relevant post-BA jobs are important for people coming out of undergrad, but this person already has that via a MA with political science work and enough research experience to submit research to journals. I don't think another post-MA gig will help them much, they've already ticked the box for "has a sense of what doing original research is like."  Also, RA work isn't just about these full-time fellowships where you're an RA for a year. Being an RA can also mean working 5-20 hours with a prof during the school year or doing a school-wide summer research program. This whole twitter discourse (even beyond these two tweets) is about how there's an expectation that PhD applicants know how to political science, not that they've literally worked full time as an RA.

I've gone through the process for the top schools and met tons of people at admit days. Most of us (the subset of people who aren't applying straight out of undergrad or an MA program) did not do full time academic RA work before getting in. Most did quant-type work for think tank/polling (non-academic) types of groups, which is the most common. Another subset did quant-type work for corporations. Another subset is the Teach for America and law-adjacent types. Even fewer had university affiliation(beyond those applying straight out of undergrad or straight out of an MA) were doing things like full-time RA/postbacs, and again, these people were already highly qualified and could've gotten in just as well if they had gotten any old job. 

I'm not super familiar with what kind of RA/research related roles you're thinking of. Immediately my mind goes to the roles already covered in this thread, the Stanford and MIT ones. I think there's a Dartmouth one too. I'm familiar with people who did full time RA type work at business and law schools at highly ranked schools. I'm also familiar with people who work in faculty-related sorta interdisciplinary labs (though again mostly at tippy top schools). I know econ predocs exist but I don't personally know of anyone coming into political science PhD programs with one of those. I'd love to learn that there's more out there, however, I'm not too familiar with what else is out there. 

tldr: Research experience is indeed vital, but OP already has this experience so I think they can do whatever they want in their off year and be fine. 

With admissions getting more and more competitive, yes research experience or an MA will become the norm, but the more the better. There is an added benefit of more research experience, both in terms of having a better substantive knowledge base, being more competitive for admissions, and more prepared for research once arriving. The more research experience, the better. The number of admitted students to top 20 programs is probably going to be cut in half over these couple of years. 

The places I was suggesting are those such as Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences or Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. There are numerous other institutes of this kind across the country that have large scale research projects on grants requiring full time employees doing research related work. 

[uncle_socks]

34 minutes ago, munch22 said:

With admissions getting more and more competitive, yes research experience or an MA will become the norm, but the more the better. There is an added benefit of more research experience, both in terms of having a better substantive knowledge base, being more competitive for admissions, and more prepared for research once arriving. The more research experience, the better. The number of admitted students to top 20 programs is probably going to be cut in half over these couple of years. 

The places I was suggesting are those such as Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences or Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. There are numerous other institutes of this kind across the country that have large scale research projects on grants requiring full time employees doing research related work. 

On the websites for both the Stanford and Michigan program, I don't see any indication that they have staff who aren't either {postdocs/people with PhDs} or {already affiliated with the university, be it current grad students, faculty, or a couple of university BA/MA graduates}, nor do I see any job postings related to these research institutes/a few of the affiliates that I bothered to type into the institutional job postings pages, though perhaps maybe you have insider information that I don't have. Which maybe speaks to a broader part of the problem is that those who know these jobs exist/when these jobs open/how to get these jobs are not representative of the applicant pool as a whole. 

I genuinely don't think that admissions committees are comparing strength of research experience beyond a certain threshold. Yes the threshold is getting higher, but it sounds like OP has met this threshold to me. They don't care nearly as much about your resume as they do your letters or your writing sample, where things like research experience (and more generally "does this person know what political science is and what they're getting into") are better conveyed. Assuming good GPA/GRE, They're only reading your ~1000 word SOP, 3 or maybe 4 letters, and skimming your writing sample. If those are good, then you're good. If you already have a solid writing sample and 3-4 awesome recs, taking a year to work on new projects doesn't add much because it won't really translate to much in your application beyond a CV line and maybe one sentence in the SOP. What it comes down to ultimately is not the number or even quality of research experiences that you've had, but rather adequately conveying that you belong in political science. 

Besides it's not just research experience that is becoming more and more vital for admission to top programs. Quant skills (which do sometimes come hand-in-hand with research experience, though tbh a lot of RA work is very menial) are also becoming more and more the norm as well and we could make a similar argument there. Almost everyone came in knowing R or Stata, like being really good at them. Everyone has had enough stats to the point that the regression course is not fully new information to anyone. Everyone (but NYU) tells you that it's okay to come into the PhD program having last taken high school stats/calculus but the reality is that that's becoming less and less true for top programs. The same goes for regional specialists: you're already expected to know the language well (if your research involves knowing another language). The same goes for regions generally, that you're expected to come in knowing about political systems and institutions of the places you're studying. They're not letting anyone in saying "I want to be a formal theorist" without proving that they're strong in formal theory and already have the math background. Yes, previous research expectations are higher, but so is everything else. 

 

Anyways I'm not saying that doing more RA work is bad, I'm just saying that there are other things (particularly higher paying industry work in polling, think tanks, or corporate quanty analyst work where the skills are also directly transferable to the PhD) that they could do that would probably yield them the same results, where the jobs are more plentiful and less cabal-ish. Like yeah, if you get the MIT predoc, absolutely take it if it pays well enough, but that's not necessarily an easy job to get. You're not doomed or anything near it if you have to go work in policy/polling/industry, which is the modal thing to do prior to the PhD anyways. 

[munch22]

17 hours ago, BunniesInSpace said:

On the websites for both the Stanford and Michigan program, I don't see any indication that they have staff who aren't either {postdocs/people with PhDs} or {already affiliated with the university, be it current grad students, faculty, or a couple of university BA/MA graduates}, nor do I see any job postings related to these research institutes/a few of the affiliates that I bothered to type into the institutional job postings pages, though perhaps maybe you have insider information that I don't have. Which maybe speaks to a broader part of the problem is that those who know these jobs exist/when these jobs open/how to get these jobs are not representative of the applicant pool as a whole. 

I genuinely don't think that admissions committees are comparing strength of research experience beyond a certain threshold. Yes the threshold is getting higher, but it sounds like OP has met this threshold to me. They don't care nearly as much about your resume as they do your letters or your writing sample, where things like research experience (and more generally "does this person know what political science is and what they're getting into") are better conveyed. Assuming good GPA/GRE, They're only reading your ~1000 word SOP, 3 or maybe 4 letters, and skimming your writing sample. If those are good, then you're good. If you already have a solid writing sample and 3-4 awesome recs, taking a year to work on new projects doesn't add much because it won't really translate to much in your application beyond a CV line and maybe one sentence in the SOP. What it comes down to ultimately is not the number or even quality of research experiences that you've had, but rather adequately conveying that you belong in political science. 

Besides it's not just research experience that is becoming more and more vital for admission to top programs. Quant skills (which do sometimes come hand-in-hand with research experience, though tbh a lot of RA work is very menial) are also becoming more and more the norm as well and we could make a similar argument there. Almost everyone came in knowing R or Stata, like being really good at them. Everyone has had enough stats to the point that the regression course is not fully new information to anyone. Everyone (but NYU) tells you that it's okay to come into the PhD program having last taken high school stats/calculus but the reality is that that's becoming less and less true for top programs. The same goes for regional specialists: you're already expected to know the language well (if your research involves knowing another language). The same goes for regions generally, that you're expected to come in knowing about political systems and institutions of the places you're studying. They're not letting anyone in saying "I want to be a formal theorist" without proving that they're strong in formal theory and already have the math background. Yes, previous research expectations are higher, but so is everything else. 

 

Anyways I'm not saying that doing more RA work is bad, I'm just saying that there are other things (particularly higher paying industry work in polling, think tanks, or corporate quanty analyst work where the skills are also directly transferable to the PhD) that they could do that would probably yield them the same results, where the jobs are more plentiful and less cabal-ish. Like yeah, if you get the MIT predoc, absolutely take it if it pays well enough, but that's not necessarily an easy job to get. You're not doomed or anything near it if you have to go work in policy/polling/industry, which is the modal thing to do prior to the PhD anyways. 

These jobs do exist. I worked in one. They will not be posted every second of everyday, but they are out there and plentiful. They just take a little bit of digging. I don’t think you should be so dismissive. 
 

OP’s original question was “what more can I do to become a more competitive applicant”. Industry is a great path for some people, but for many, especially someone who studied outside the US, developing a network and working with known quantities is one of the most beneficial things you can do. Hence why I am recommending work at an academic institution over industry. The faculty and work you do will be much more known among those on admissions committees. Further, I think you need to drop the notion of what you think an RA is. Yes, undergrad RAs do menial data collection most of the time. A full time job at one of these academic roles are way more involved and generally can pay similarly to some roles in industry. 
 

I think you just need to chill out with your responses a little bit. I am not trying to bash on industry because I don’t have personal experience with it. Rather I’m just trying to explain the benefits of working full time at a research institution. Don’t bash it or dismiss my points because you have no familiarity with a different path you didn’t take.