How do you find departments that are a good fit?

[Quarex]

Somebody might want to move this to the "Applications" subforum, but I thought getting specific advice from other people in your same field would be more useful than opening it up to posts like "well, in theoretical analytical practical professional bio-org-sub-unionized physiochemistry, we usually just pass around a hat with our names in it. Hope this helps with learning about your field."

Now, this is obviously a strange subject to bring up in the waning days of acceptances, rather than in the early days of applications. However, since it looks increasingly like I am going to end up doing an M.A. in the Fall rather than a Ph.D., and am certainly not the only person who is striking out, it may be a good time to bring it up while the board is still active.

What is the most direct course of action to actually find the best fit? Obviously, if you are in the field already, your department (and maybe even your field librarian!) should be able to send you in the right direction, and likely suggest a handful of places, though they are unlikely to know every single department doing work in your area of interest. So what then?

Some interesting advice that came up on the PHDComics webpage of all places was: Go back through all the works you have considered really pivotal in your area, and boldly contact every single author to compliment their work and talk very (very) briefly about your own. Odds are good that you might offend some with your unsolicited inquiries, and that you will not hear back from plenty others, but that likely some percentage of these academics will be fascinated by what you are doing and either give you advice or even suggest you apply to their program. Their advice will logically lead to other people and departments, who you can then contact and keep the ball rolling.

A simpler version of that would likely be to just analyze where they work, and who they worked with, and aim your applications accordingly. But it seems like personal contact can really make (or break) an application.

Regardless, there has to be even better advice out there amongst all the brilliant people on this forum, and it is clearly currently going to waste.

*** Feel free to stop reading and respond to that "general purpose utility" part, but if you do have any specific suggestions for me, I would seriously appreciate it ***

Now, my situation was different than many of yours, since I was coming out of a different field entirely. None of my professors or advisors had any concrete suggestions as to what schools might be good for me. My dad is a political science professor, but the overlap between our interests is minimal. I basically had no-one working in the field on my interests to talk to about it, and even my quest to go to one of the institutions represented by the works I cited in my thesis failed when they were almost all retired, dead, or not political scientists in the first place.

As far as my research (possibly best described as "national security via identification systems/privacy/civil liberties/surveillance with some communitarianism thrown in for flavor"), the exact field I belong in seems to confuse everyone (which may be part of the problem), even though TO ME it sounds definitely like public policy/political science. Until I actually find someone else anywhere (and I do mean anywhere; no luck so far) working on this, which in my mind should be a huge issue but is evidently infinitesimally small, I just have to keep hoping to find departments who are kind of vaguely sort of generally interested in these issues instead.

Feel free to post a link to the big Internet extravaganza encyclopedia of departments doing exactly this research. I will love being horribly shamed in this particular circumstance, particularly given how many months of my life I gave to trying to find such a place (and how every few months a news story comes out with a headline like "$5 BILLION TO BE SPENT IMPLEMENTING WHAT QUAREX TALKED ABOUT IN HIS THESIS" [FBI biometric surveillance database] yet nobody cares).

[browneyedgirl]

I had a hard time finding anyone in the US doing exactly the sort of research I want to do, so I had to get a bit creative. thankfully, I had a wonderful MA advisor who guided me through the process, which included many hours of me doing some cross-researching. I looked for two things: departments able to give me funding both as an incoming student as well as when I want to travel, etc./departments more likely to help me obtain a position at a top-tier university (I know there are various debates on the merit/importance of this, which I won't get into, except to say that this is what I want to do when I finish my PhD and, thus, it's influenced my school choices) AND professors who were interesting to me. I went through my MA thesis and my senior thesis and picked out names I cited multiple times, and started there. where did they teach? where did they themselves go to school? I spent many hours browsing department websites, reading literally every bio of every professor to see who stood out as a good match for me.

then, when I combined these two things (good people + good departments), I made a chart to begin the application process. I included all sorts of important details (addresses, deadlines, fees, requirements for samples/LOR/etc) as well as the names of any professors of interest to me and their contact information. and then I got to contacting them. I was impressed with the number of responses I received, and indeed flattered by many of their contents. I would be remiss in saying this didn't somehow affect the application cycle for me.

also - I submitted conference proposals. I went and talked to people. I solicited feedback from everyone, everywhere. I sought as much advice as possible and tried not to take any of it as "life or death."

in sum, I guess I'd say you should first determine where you want to go after you finish - do you want to teach, to research, to move into the private sector? if you're looking to leave academia, it's often the case that the name on your diploma will be much more important than the name of your advisor or the work you produced there. another piece of advice I received was to pinpoint the schools or types of schools where I'd want to teach, and look at where all of their faculty members were schooled. I knew I wanted to be able to go to a top-tier research university. my advisor cautioned me that it's terribly difficult to go tenure-track even when graduating from the top schools, and that I would do best to set myself up accordingly.

helpful? maybe?

[rising_star]

Hey Quarex,

I'm going to describe how I found MA programs, since it'll maybe be more useful to you. I changed fields (from humanities to social sciences) and only had a vague clue of what I wanted to do my MA thesis on. There was no geography department and no geographers at my undergrad so I went about the search perhaps unconventionally. I didn't know what I was doing and I had no one to talk to. So, I used google. I found a list of pretty much every geography dept in the country on this website and it listed some of the program foci. So I used that and narrowed my search geographically. Then I looked up faculty and applied to the schools that really interested me (6). My criteria included warm weather and good football. I had no clue about rankings and, as it turned out, I got admitted to two top 15 programs with funding. So I'm at the lower-ranked of the two now because it was a better fit for me.

My PhD search was much more traditional. I thought about programs that had good reputations at conferences, talked to faculty around my department and other graduate students, made email contact prior to applying, and applied to a total of 7 programs (including to do the PhD where I am now). In some ways, it was harder this time because I knew what I wanted to do, which eliminated a lot of programs. There aren't a lot of geographers doing fieldwork in Africa so I expanded my own interests to the Caribbean where, lo and behold, not a lot of geographers do fieldwork. *sigh* I played up the theoretical angle in my SOP and made it clear that while these regions and topics are of interest, I know that interests can change through coursework and stuff and that I'm open to that. (After all, I came to do a master's on development in Africa and ended up doing a case study of an American urban park.) I think presenting some flexibility and maybe focusing on a theoretical approach could help...

[Quarex]

Thanks, you two, and the people who e-mailed/PMed me. That was all definitely helpful. I have added quite a bit to my "notes on how to do this right next time" file, which admittedly I am secretly hoping I will not actually have the occasion to use.

Rising_Star, I did the exact same major-field switch from undergraduate to graduate (in my case, English Literature to Criminal Justice) before doing the less drastic social-science-to-social-science switch for my next round of graduate studies.

Google can certainly work wonders for this process; I sadly never found a comprehensive political science/public policy list like the geography list you described, but I found that spending three months of my life scouring every English-speaking university (from unixl.com's list of English speaking universities, naturally) for Ph.D. programs in those fields was the kind of experience that really showed me how determined I was to do this right. I highly recommend it to anyone completely wrong in the head.

I wonder if it will make you a pariah or a "good student" to try to fanatically get involved in every conference you possibly can?

Anyway, c'mon, now, everyone else. Everyone else.

[eve2008]

I think it's hard to know before you get in. I applied to several plausible options (based on contacting faculty and reading websites), but it wasn't until after I was accepted and that I visited that I really knew. People die or move or retire, and what I once thought was my first choice turned out not to be the best choice.

Also, I think that there are probably most definitely people working on your interests, but that they might be at policy schools rather than in political science departments. If you want to do policy work eventually, a policy school may be a better choice for you; of course it is more difficult to get an academic teaching/research job with a policy PhD. What exactly interests you about identification/surveillance and national security? (Feel free to PM me.) If you want to look at which surveillance policies best balance national security and the protection of civil liberties, then you're probably asking a policy question, and you may even have a hard time getting into political science programs.

If you're a comparativist, and you're comparing say, the effects of increases in ethnolinguistic and religious fractionalization over time on public support of surveillance policies in Canada, the US, UK and Europe (with the hypothesis that members of heterogeneous communities are more likely to support spying on their neighbors) that would be a political science question. There are any number of different ways to approach this from theory, American, comparative or IR. What is your subfield?

I think if you worry less about the specific substance of your research question (national security and surveillance) and think more about how the questions that interest you fit into larger theoretical debates, you will probably find faculty who fit your interests. So, for the example I just gave above, there's lots of people who have studied migration in Europe, social capital, the concept of racial threat and its effects on policy choice, the determinants of public support of X policy in advanced industrialized democracies, etc., even if they are not explicitly researching your substantive area.

There is not a single faculty at any of the schools I applied researching my specific topic. However, I framed my topic in the context of large, important, ongoing debates in the discipline. Getting too specific, or rather discussing your specific substantive interests without connecting them to larger questions, can hurt you. So you're interested in national security, civil liberties, and surveillance. So what? What about the interplay of those interests, and the possible questions you might ask about them (and you can include a few), will help leverage larger insights and attract the interest of others around the discipline, and outside it?

Good luck with your MA!

[FuzzyDunlop]

"As far as my research (possibly best described as "national security via identification systems/privacy/civil liberties/surveillance with some communitarianism thrown in for flavor"), the exact field I belong in seems to confuse everyone (which may be part of the problem), even though TO ME it sounds definitely like public policy/political science. "

I would echo some of Eve's advice. If you are thinking about these issues in terms of how to balance different rights in the crafting of policy, then a policy school may be the best choice. If you are thinking about them in terms of the rich ethical and theoretical questions they evoke, then you should be looking at either a sociology program or la way to study this within the political theory subfield. The only way that you should be looking to do this in terms of comparative politics is if you are intent on framing the question along the lines Eve mentioned (the effect of X variable on your outcome of interest) or along the lines of "Country A and Country B are similar in many respects, but have implemented far different approaches to national ID systems, with attendant important substantive differences emerging in the civil liberties of citizens. Why this difference?" If those don't sound like framings of your question that interest you, then you should look outside of comparative politics.

[Quarex]

Oof, look at me not come back to comment on Eve's great advice. Thanks for posting here, Fuzzy. You two have really helped me think about whether I was doing the right thing.

Without getting too much into incredibly boring specifics, your responses do make me feel as though comparative politics is certainly not the wrong place for me, even if I might end up changing my focus a little bit to fit better there. A lot of the master's thesis I wrote on the issue focused on comparing erstwhile similar countries (mostly English-speaking modern democracies) in their attitudes toward and implementations of identification systems. The U.K./U.S.A. divide is particularly fascinating to me, since it seems largely a European "government good corporations bad" vs. American "corporations good government bad" schism. I did not just want to focus on those two, though, and also brought Iceland, Australia, Germany, and Canada into the mix, and analyzed why American ideas of civil liberties/legitimate authority/etc. were so different than those of most other quasi-similar countries.

My goal for further research was to narrow my focus, both in terms of what regions I was studying and what issues I was analyzing. Some degree of policy analysis seems a necessary side issue/outcome of this work, certainly, but it was never the primary focus (plus, no public policy programs accepted me, so that is easy). I discussed the sociological ethics of privacy vs. legitimate surveillance as well, all the more reason criminal justice was surely the least logical field in which to do this work in the first place.

I probably would have thrown out at least a couple of sociology applications if I had found any departments working in the area, just in case, but I devoted far less time to researching that field than to the other two (and less even than criminal justice, which proved to be a bust pretty quickly).

[FuzzyDunlop]

Quarex,

It sounds like comparative politics would be a good fit if that is the way you are approaching things. I don't know much about your topic, but my general advice is that (again, echoing Eve) your general task is to take an issue that is relatively unexplored and contextualize it within larger theoretical debates in the discipline. For example, much of the literature on welfare capitalism tends to group the US and UK together under a "liberal" rubric, with policies in the two countries reflecting more faith in markets to protect citizens from risk than in continental or northern europe. So in some sense I'm not sure the UK fits the "european" orientation that you describe in your post. Yet despite these similarities, you find that approaches differ widely among "liberal" welfare capitalism cases with respect to the regulatory issues with which you are concerned. So what explains that? Different legal traditions? Different pressures in terms of immigration and domestic security threats? Etc.

In terms of looking for programs that fit you, another idea is also to look at the research interests of IR scholars. The line between comparative and IR is pretty fuzzy sometimes, and the substance of your research interest may be more up the alley of an IR guy interested in security and terrorism than a comparative guy who studies congressional institutions. It could be that the best fit for you would be a program with a Western Europeanist who could advise you about the cases you are studying and an IR guy who has more substantive interest in the policy issues.

[ontrack]

Which active political scientists do you cite in your literature review? And/or which current political science debate(s) does your project speak to? Once you pin down answers to those questions, you should be able to identify some programs that would be a reasonable fit for you. If the answer to one or both questions is "none," though, you might consider reframing the research or even rethinking whether political science is the discipline that will be most open to the kind of research you want to spend the rest of your life doing.

[Quarex]

I like you, FuzzyDunlop!

When applying to any department that did not make you specifically pick one focus, I talked about how comparative politics and international relations both seemed within the scope of what I was doing--hoping they would not sense that I was clearly a neophyte in the field. In regards to America and Great Britain, I focused on how the dialogue in English politics is generally more accepting of their surveillance and centralized identification system, a system that would basically have the majority of people and politicians alike on both sides of the aisle up in arms here (as evidenced by entire states refusing to comply with the Real ID Act, a which itself is a hollow shell of a pale imitation of the already-in-place British system).

Ultimately, this specific scenario may go no further in the future, for all I know, in terms of my research. I just know that I want to compare aspects of the paradoxical and confusing American political system, particularly in light of the issues I mentioned, with other modern democracies.

Which active political scientists do you cite in your literature review? And/or which current political science debate(s) does your project speak to? Once you pin down answers to those questions, you should be able to identify some programs that would be a reasonable fit for you. If the answer to one or both questions is "none," though, you might consider reframing the research or even rethinking whether political science is the discipline that will be most open to the kind of research you want to spend the rest of your life doing.

Well, that is part of the problem. I came out of a Criminal Justice program, and the works that my professors recommended to me/that I found on my own reflect that. Many of the people outside of my own field whose works I cited were in computer science or law, given the highly technological nature of, and difficult legal challenges involved with, modern/future identification systems. I otherwise have no interest in those fields. The political scientists I did cite (I learned after the fact when trying to see if I would be able to work with them) are mostly dead, retired, or not at academic institutions. There were exceptions, but one was at Yale; Yale did not seem impressed by my application. Not much of a surprise. The other ones are faculty in programs that were otherwise poor fits for me (be it because the department does not even have a doctorate, or the professor is the sole person on faculty at all interested in my work, etc.).

My interest in the subjects I wrote about is so great that I am nearly positive it would survive any amount of directional focus-tinkering brought upon by its necessary alterations for a political science paradigm. The debate between the politics of governmental authority vs. public autonomy, in regards to identity documents, has been relevant for at least 150 years already, likely continuing to be so in the future as well (particularly in light of the continuing pro-authority push response to terrorism), and will always be interesting to me. If the basic issue there is not a crucial political science debate, then I suppose I do need to re-think this. As mentioned in my response to Fuzzy, I hope to continue examining this question and other related issues by analyzing the political impact of differing implementations of centralized surveillance.

My knowledge of political science is quite admittedly not what it should be; I did not expect to get accepted directly to any Ph.D. programs without some remedial M.A. coursework (though I have been, somewhat surprisingly). Maybe I will figure out after a couple of semesters there that I made the wrong choice again. Sure, my work could seemingly fit in political science, public policy, public affairs, or sociology, and I have had professors say as much to me. Criminal justice, too, if I could find a department that researched the issues behind the standard policing/courts/corrections triumvirate. I just think political science is the best choice for my future goals, and my research indicates there is plenty of support for this idea. But I also like having to defend my choices, so this is all excellent.