Welcome to the 2012-2013 cycle

[polisciapplicant210]

Will Michigan and Duke send out their acceptances as early as last year? That would be tomorrow.

[CafeAuLait12]

If I'm not mistaken, they usually have a welcome dinner, meet and greet with faculty and other grad students, and a tour of campus. Not sure what else is involved.

 

This is all correct. Usually you stay with a current grad student to get a feel for grad life. There is a night out to one of the bars to hang out with all the current students as well as your future cohort-mates. At my visits, I met with a few of my POIs to discuss our interests and ask any more academic/professional questions. None of the schools I visited had campus tours because you really are only in the Political Science building and maybe a few others that you can find on your own. In general, I really enjoyed my visits and I think that they are crucial to making your graduate school decision. 

[Mnemonics2]

Here's a question: when people say "full funding" on the results forum or on here....what, on average, is meant by that?

[stich09]

Normally that means tuition and 17-30 thousand I believe. Although I imagine schools like stanford would have to give more for the living cost of palo alto

[CafeAuLait12]

Here's a question: when people say "full funding" on the results forum or on here....what, on average, is meant by that?

 

 

Normally that means tuition and 17-30 thousand I believe. Although I imagine schools like stanford would have to give more for the living cost of palo alto

 

 

Wow, $30 thousand would be nice! Full funding generally means tuition remission, health insurance, and some sort of stipend, which depends on the offer. The base offer is for a TAship which varies from school to school. Many of the graduate school main sites will list what the base pay is for that. Other than a TAship, you could be offered a research assistantship or a fellowship, both of which frequently pay more than a TAship. Some schools even have a signing or moving bonus, but those are pretty rare in our field.

[polisciftw]

For the poster who asked about ranking versus match with professors, here are my two cents on this issue:

 

1) Exact research interest match with a potential dissertation chair is not essential. A good chair should understand the contours of the debate within your topic area of interest, but need not engage in that sub-tranche of the literature exactly. For instance, if you are interested in the politics of austerity and international organizations, a chair who has worked on the political economy of trade and international organizations would suffice. In making this decision, consider whether the people in five years' time who will be reading your chair's letter of recommendation for a job will be familiar with the name.

 

1a) A correlary to part 1: What is far more important when considering a department is whether you get along with your potential chair or professors you think you will work with. Even if your potential chair is a true star, and your research interests match perfectly, it will not help you if they are unwilling to give you the time of day. Conversely, falling five places in the ranking but working with someone who will co-author with you and push you towards better work is not a bad trade off.

 

2) Given my answer in part 1, there are other considerations that I think are more important than an exact match of research interests. For instance, does a potential department offer extensive methods training and encouage students to take them? There is a lot of variation in the amount of methods training on offer in departments. Even if you see yourself as primarily a qualitative researcher, there is absolutely no way you can be dinged for learning more methods in terms of future career trajectories.

 

Another good question is whether departments allow you to take classes in cognate fields AND if they count those classes towards your requirements. Harvard, for instance, encourages its students to get a masters of statistics and counts many of those classes towards their governemnt requirements. Stanford also encourages students whose interests include political economy to get a masters of economics. Other topic areas include computer science (for computational social science), psychology (political behavior/psychology), sociology, etc. Also consider, if you see your interests veering across disciplines, the ranking of those departments. Even if your department allows you to get a masters of economics, the quality of these degrees varies like political science degrees.

 

Other considerations include funding for graduate research. Every department offers pretty much the same fellowship amount (somewhere between 16k and 28k with large standard errors), but not every department funds graduate research activities. Do they fund trips to conferences? Are there small grants you can apply for to do fieldwork/work over the summer? Do they pay faculty members to co-author with graduate students? One way to answer this question is to look at any potential POI's CV and check for co-authorships with graduate students. I cannot stress how important co-authorship is to your standing in the department and your standing in the discipline. Is the professor willing to put the time and effort in to training their students how to produce good work? Or do they let them fend for themselves? 

 

Finally, beyond rank (which is a fuzzy measure and frankly, as the joke goes: "if you have to ask, you aren't a top ranked program") look at placement. Look at where any program has put students in the past five years. Would you be willing to work at any of those schools? Outside of the top 10, every department that you visit will tell you that they are on an upward trajectory. If the answer to the above question is "no," don't count on the upwards motion carrying you to Harvard/Stanford.

[polisciftw]

I'd also add to my previous answer that another way to look at graduate programs is how much teaching they expect you to do. If they assume that you will TA for every semester, this should indicate to you that their expectations for the quality of your research are quite low. The responsabilities of TAing are so great that is enormously difficult to conduct original research, take courses, and TA.

 

Keywords to look for are whether the department will ask you to TA while you are taking classes, or offers you fellowships for the first 1-2-3 years of the program.

[poliscistudent12]

Does anyone know (or can confidently speculate) if UW-Madison has sent all of their acceptances already?

[geitost]

Hi all, I am another long-time lurker. First of all: congrats to all who have already been admitted and good luck to those who are still waiting!

 

I've been admitted to Penn State and Pitt (still waiting to hear back from Brown, though they won't announce till mid-March). Who is planning to go to Penn State's visiting weekend? And does anyone know if Pitt has a visiting weekend as well? My admission letter did not mention one, but it sure would be nice to visit the campus and the program before I make a final decision! I am an international student, so ideally I would like to do just one trip.

 

Anyway, I am VERY excited and would be happy to hear from any other Penn State and Pitt admits

[polisciftw]

Here's a question: when people say "full funding" on the results forum or on here....what, on average, is meant by that?

 

Take a look at the discussion here: http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/topic.php?id=86569.

[tlh0223]

Hi all, I am another long-time lurker. First of all: congrats to all who have already been admitted and good luck to those who are still waiting!

 

I've been admitted to Penn State and Pitt (still waiting to hear back from Brown, though they won't announce till mid-March). Who is planning to go to Penn State's visiting weekend? And does anyone know if Pitt has a visiting weekend as well? My admission letter did not mention one, but it sure would be nice to visit the campus and the program before I make a final decision! I am an international student, so ideally I would like to do just one trip.

 

Anyway, I am VERY excited and would be happy to hear from any other Penn State and Pitt admits

 

Hi! I'm a Pitt admit as well and the visit weekend is March 22. It's odd that your letter didn't mention it as mine seemed pretty formulaic and it was a whole paragraph. Perhaps your letter didn't mention it because they didn't want to fund an international visit? Haha I will definitely be there so maybe we'll see each other there!

[PoliSwede]

Hi all, I am another long-time lurker. First of all: congrats to all who have already been admitted and good luck to those who are still waiting!

 

I've been admitted to Penn State and Pitt (still waiting to hear back from Brown, though they won't announce till mid-March). Who is planning to go to Penn State's visiting weekend? And does anyone know if Pitt has a visiting weekend as well? My admission letter did not mention one, but it sure would be nice to visit the campus and the program before I make a final decision! I am an international student, so ideally I would like to do just one trip.

 

Anyway, I am VERY excited and would be happy to hear from any other Penn State and Pitt admits

I'd go to the Penn State weekend if they just accepted my application!

[TakeMyCoffeeBlack]

My guess is that Pitt's done now... bummer. I've wanted to go there since undergrad, but couldn't afford their out-of-state tuition.

[balledematch]

Hey Gang, congrats to all those who have been admitted the past couple of days! I've been gone most of the day and was excited to see 5 more pages were added to the forum. Can't wait for more good news to start rolling in for everyone. I have a feeling that Fridays are big days.

[Quigley]

My guess is that Pitt's done now... bummer. I've wanted to go there since undergrad, but couldn't afford their out-of-state tuition.

Yeah, I went through that this week. I've wanted to go to Madison since my undergrad and I think they're done too. Only for a few minutes though because I'm so incredibly thankful and appreciative to have received other offers.

Edited February 1, 2013 by Quigley

[ThisGuyRiteHere]

Any guesses for tomorrow

[bright on time]

Really hoping for the rest of UNC!

[balledematch]

Any guesses for tomorrow

 

Maybe UCLA? I think in the past they have released some funded offers by now.

[ahandphd]

Hi all, I am another long-time lurker. First of all: congrats to all who have already been admitted and good luck to those who are still waiting!

I've been admitted to Penn State and Pitt (still waiting to hear back from Brown, though they won't announce till mid-March). Who is planning to go to Penn State's visiting weekend? And does anyone know if Pitt has a visiting weekend as well? My admission letter did not mention one, but it sure would be nice to visit the campus and the program before I make a final decision! I am an international student, so ideally I would like to do just one trip.

Anyway, I am VERY excited and would be happy to hear from any other Penn State and Pitt admits

[ahandphd]

I'm a Penn State as well and will be attending thr weekend at the end of February. Very excited

[ahandphd]

I have a friend who just found out she was wait listed at Duke, so I am assuming they are making decisions .

[RiffRam]

Really hoping for the rest of UNC!

Same here!

[CautiouslyHopeful]

Hey everyone! New poster here. I was just accepted at UC Boulder and I am one of the applicants invited to interview/visit at Emory this weekend. Not having majored in Poli Sci, I wasn't sure I would get into any program, so needless to say, I'm really excited to get good news from the first couple of schools (judging from the board, my other schools haven't made decisions yet). I'm anxiously waiting on Duke and UCLA as it seems they might be extending offers soon. This has definitely boosted my confidence a little. Anyway, just wanted to share that, and I'm sincerely hoping that everyone gets good news from their schools!

[mutatismutandis]

My guess is that Pitt's done now... bummer. I've wanted to go there since undergrad, but couldn't afford their out-of-state tuition.

It's not over until you have the rejection letter.

[TakeMyCoffeeBlack]

Yeah, I went through that this week. I've wanted to go to Madison since my undergrad and I think they're done too. Only for a few minutes though because I'm so incredibly thankful and appreciative to have received other offers.

 

It's a bummer, but I've got 5 other schools I'm waiting on, and I'm a Fulbright finalist. As my adviser said today, if I'm lucky enough to get the Fulbright but not a Ph.D. acceptance, I've got a chance to apply again with more direction and a Fulbright. So, regardless, fingers crossed that something comes around!