PhD in PoliSci - and unusual situation (med school spouse)

[poliscihopeful]

My problem is generally this - my spouse (in med school) and I are jumping into the next stages of our lives at the same time, and we're having trouble matching up residency programs and PhD programs for political science (Comparative). Residency programs, as you may know, are matched up from a list of preferred locations, say, twenty, but once the computer matches you, that's it! You are stuck. This process occurs between the deadline for PhD program applications and when one receives an answer.

I'm trying to apply to top 20 schools - including the real tough ones. But I have to be uber competitive, because if my spouse lands a residency at Michigan, for example, I better have been accepted to Michigan! So we have to coordinate the match list to what I can reasonably get into, in order to ensure we land at the same place. If Michigan is out of my league, then we should just kill the idea.

Here are my stats and recent work: GRE verbal of 700, quant of 720, with an undergrad (Vanderbilt) GPA of 3.7 and an MA (Georgetown) of 3.9. I've been working in a DC think tank for two years, and most of my regional expertise is Russia/Eurasia. I don't think this is too bad, but here's the question: are there any schools that are just too risky? That is, are there schools in the top 20 that I should just forget about and strike off my spouse's match list? I'd appreciate any advice for this, thanks!

[demondeac]

I know your pain...I'm going through the same situation with my spouse applying to residencies while I am applying to PhDs in religion, philosophy, and theology. The best part is that match day comes before you'll likely know anything about your application status, let alone when they require the prefs in February. Our plan is to focus our efforts on major cities where we both have multiple options (from top tier to lower tier) and hope that the probabilities work out in our favor. If not you may just have to move to whatever city your spouse matches in and apply again the next year; If that happens to me I plan on taking some courses at the school to get my foot in the door.

A lot also depends on how competitive your spouses' residency of choice is; if it's derm or another competitive program, then it may be difficult to match anywhere let alone where you both have good programs available. You'll just have to feel out how competitive the residencies are and how competitive your spouse's board scores and grades are. Come March there will be much jubilation, or weeping and gnashing of teeth old testament style.