Welcome to the 2012-2013 cycle

[BFB]

4 rejections DOES NOT mean you aren't good enough. For real.

 

+1

[Jeremyrgs]

So I guess I am the only one who has not heard from Chicago after 1 month since their first admissions.

I am sorry to hear that news2yous. I hope you have a better fortune next year. We are all great candidates

 

I have not heard a peep from UChicago. I'm starting to think they lost my application or forgot to reject me right out of the gate.

One of us should contact them.

[ehdrums]

I have not heard a peep from UChicago. I'm starting to think they lost my application or forgot to reject me right out of the gate.

One of us should contact them.

My guess (absolutely a guess) is that they will start with MAPSS acceptances next. Or at least it seems plausible with all the recent acceptances/PhD rejects being for CIR. 

[irfannooruddin]

I'm not sure it's as much about the process being ill-suited to select talented candidates, as much as is it is about there being so many talented candidates that it's hard to separate them from each other.

 

Bing! Or, more geekily, we're trying to predict something really really hard: your probability of succeeding in graduate school. But the data we have is crappy, and the variables we can access are few and limited:

 

1) Academic background (which institution, what major, what GPA)

2) GRE scores

3) LORs

4) Statement

 

Let's assume for sake of argument that few applicants to any given grad program are complete non-starters on (1) since typically only decent/good students apply to PhD programs. Further, let's assume that the GRE scores are mainly used to determine funding eligibility (I certainly don't care about them). That leaves LORs and the statement. 

 

I've said this elsewhere, so won't repeat myself here, but LORs are limited, albeit still important, because most letters are positive. Where they vary informatively is in the level of detail the letterwriter chooses to provide. But you don't control that, and you can't necessarily predict who will write a "good" good letter and who will write a "bad" good letter. So you're hoping, and it's fair to assume that some great candidates are undermined by less than great letters (again, where great means informatively great).

 

So the statement looms very large, and here's the blunt truth: Most statements suck, and it's the single area where even good candidates could make the greatest improvement to their probability of acceptance. When my undergrads apply to graduate school, I make them write up to a dozen drafts and then help them rewrite it once more. But that certainly wasn't done for me when I was a college senior. I wrote my statement; I sent it off. No feedback, no edits, no revisions mandated by my advisors. And I'm quite sure that my statement was far less effective as a result.

Edited March 6, 2013 by irfannooruddin

[irfannooruddin]

Some interesting stuff from the faculty contributors! As a thought, if any of you wanted to post some general advice on admissions in a separate thread on this forum, it might be more easily accessible to future applicants than finding it through this thread. Also, I'm going to count the fact that both Irfan and Bear are Michigan Ph.Ds as a win for Ann Arbor...

 

+1 Go blue. 

[hanging tough]

I went ahead and sent an email to Chicago inquiring about my PhD application. Within an hour, they sent me an email accepting me to CIR with funding. I would recommend emailing them if you still haven't heard anything. 

Edited March 6, 2013 by hanging tough

[GopherGrad]

I'm not sure it's as much about the process being ill-suited to select talented candidates, as much as is it is about there being so many talented candidates that it's hard to separate them from each other.

 

 

Bing! Or, more geekily, we're trying to predict something really really hard: your probability of succeeding in graduate school.

 

Okay. I'll revise:

 

Without disagreeing with this in any way, there's a reason it's hard for us to accept. The discipline seems to value admission to top programs. If the admissions process is selecting a somewhat random group of lucky students from a sea of similarly qualified ones, the concentration of placement results among graduates of the most competitive programs is a puzzle that has only arbitrary and depressing answers.

 

Whether we are all so similarly talented that even a reasonable process can't identify those that are slightly better, or whether the process is not sensitive enough to pick those who are slightly better from a pool of somewhat similar candidates, the same result obtains. After passing some threshold of hard work and achievement, a threshold a great many seem capable of achieving, your fate passes into God's hands.

 

Despite this, there is a strong correlation between pedigree and placement. The judgments of the admissions committees, recognized as "low information", nevertheless create a trajectory that is extremely difficult to break.  Students who have worked so hard for so long will resist the conclusion that their success or failure is arbitrary and search instead for meaning in the tea leaves. Chance is an unacceptable explanation for the disposal of our effort and talent, even if it is the true one. Distinctions made with low information should logically be low consequence; we expect distinctions with high consequences to be meaningful.

 

This resistance strikes me as natural (maybe even healthy) and a decent explanation for the applicants continuing to tilt at the windmill of building an improved application despite the repeated advice of faculty members that doing so is anything but straightforward for reasonably qualified students.

[dworkable]

I have not heard a peep from UChicago. I'm starting to think they lost my application or forgot to reject me right out of the gate.

One of us should contact them.

 

I haven't heard either! So don't worry, it's not just you. Maybe they lost the top part of their list

[dnexon]

I know this is out of context... but I'm a big fan of you(r works)!!!

Just saying.

 

Don't worry, I won't hold it against you.

[didoo]

Come on, Harvard....

 

 

Don't you think they're done admitting?

 

I'm starting to think so. I wonder how those admitted were notified? Was it an official notice? GSAS emailed  you? DGS's email? or Chair of Govt Dept's email? Or you contacted Thom Wall for an answer?

[rkmattson]

I went ahead and sent an email to Chicago inquiring about my PhD application. Within an hour, they sent me an email accepting me to CIR with funding. I would recommend emailing them if you still haven't heard anything. 

Who did you email there?

[irfannooruddin]

Okay. I'll revise:

 

Without disagreeing with this in any way, there's a reason it's hard for us to accept. The discipline seems to value admission to top programs. If the admissions process is selecting a somewhat random group of lucky students from a sea of similarly qualified ones, the concentration of placement results among graduates of the most competitive programs is a puzzle that has only arbitrary and depressing answers.

 

Whether we are all so similarly talented that even a reasonable process can't identify those that are slightly better, or whether the process is not sensitive enough to pick those who are slightly better from a pool of somewhat similar candidates, the same result obtains. After passing some threshold of hard work and achievement, a threshold a great many seem capable of achieving, your fate passes into God's hands.

 

Despite this, there is a strong correlation between pedigree and placement. The judgments of the admissions committees, recognized as "low information", nevertheless create a trajectory that is extremely difficult to break.  Students who have worked so hard for so long will resist the conclusion that their success or failure is arbitrary and search instead for meaning in the tea leaves. Chance is an unacceptable explanation for the disposal of our effort and talent, even if it is the true one. Distinctions made with low information should logically be low consequence; we expect distinctions with high consequences to be meaningful.

 

This resistance strikes me as natural (maybe even healthy) and a decent explanation for the applicants continuing to tilt at the windmill of building an improved application despite the repeated advice of faculty members that doing so is anything but straightforward for reasonably qualified students.

 

I can not and will not disagree with any of this. I think you're correct in most of what you say. It's one of the reasons I place perhaps outsized importance on the statement: it's the one part of the file that should arguably be untainted by things like pedigree.

 

Believe me also when I tell you that those of us who serve on admissions committee, and, more generally, work with PhD students, spend a lot of time worrying about the fact that our admissions processes are less than perfect. With attrition rates as high as 60-70%, graduate school is a very inefficient allocation of resources. If inventing a better process would allow us to "predict" better and therefore to allocate resources more "efficiently", we'd jump.

 

One option, which I know schools like Emory and Colorado use in some form or the other, is to incorporate in-person interviews for some shortlist of candidates, either to determine final admission status or final funding. 

 

Do people have other ideas? 

[upam]

Any chance Harvard is not done? Thoughts?

[hopefully2013]

Bing! Or, more geekily, we're trying to predict something really really hard: your probability of succeeding in graduate school. But the data we have is crappy, and the variables we can access are few and limited:

Why not interview potential candidates?? This would seem feasible to me once you narrow down the pool...

Edited March 6, 2013 by hopefully2013

[cooperstreet]

Do people have other ideas? 

 

 

I think you should have the ability to check your application status online. Then, only admit people who checked their online status over a thousand times. You'll be sure to admit the most neurotic, obsessive, and passionate students. Probably as good a rubric as any!

[PoliSwede]

I think you should have the ability to check your application status online. Then, only admit people who checked their online status over a thousand times. You'll be sure to admit the most neurotic, obsessive, and passionate students. Probably as good a rubric as any!

Now this I can get behind!

[GopherGrad]

Do people have other ideas?

 

Is there any connection between age or work experience (or even prior graduate school completion) and attrition? My biased and completely unsupported notion is that the interests and ambitions of the college senior are more volitile and less informed* than those of older, more experienced candidates. If this is the case, simply signaling to candidates that work experience is valued would drop attrition. You could also consider asking a supplemental question or crafting the SoP prompt to have the candidate discuss why they believe they are a good fit for the grad student lifestyle.

 

*When I say "less informed" I'm less focused on whether the candidate has the passion or curiosity to remain animated by social puzzles. I'm more referring to understanding of work routines, work/life balance, family ambitions, whether one really wants to be a self-starter or an employee, etc. Some time ago, many top law programs started to notice that JD candidates that came in with work experience achieved more in their careers and were more satisfied as attorneys than students straight from undergrad. A lot of ink has been spilled musing, at least, that candidates with work experience 1) better understand how "being a lawyer" will affect their other interests and goals and 2) distinguish better between different types of legal careers and choose one that fits their life rather than chasing white-shoe salaries and prestige. As a result, some of the top programs explicitly list work experience as a desirable qualification. Some, like Northwestern, even require it.

 

There is a trope repeated to grad school applicants (doubtless it's at least partly undertrue) that schools want interesting researchers, not interesting people. Since we recognize that an applicant's interests are highly likely to change during the program, shifting the concept of who "fits" slightly away from research interests and toward temperment, personality and maturity might help.

 

Another hunch, put forward only partly out of self interest: pay grad students more. It probably doesn't even need to be much. Relatedly, require some counseling in money management for high-potential, low-income earners. I'm sure the faculty here remember this, but being broke is really stressful. If some job offer comes knocking when your checking account is showing double digits (and both those digits are behind the decimal) it's going to look sweeter. I'd be shocked if a meaningful portion of attrition wasn't influenced by a feeling of financial duress. Drawing an analogy again to law school, some programs have started providing some counseling on money and health management at the outset of the program.

 

Not only is graduate school stressful in a direct sense, the time and opportunity costs involved in completing it can have serious indirect effects on health, finances and relationships. The Methods series is hard enough without also feeling sick, poor and resented by your partner. Equipping students better to deal with these indirect stresses might go a long way to increasing completion rates.

 

Any chance Harvard is not done? Thoughts?

 

The probability is one. In the case of every other elite program, there came a day or two in which the board clearly lit up with results and at least three or four regular posters claimed admits in this thread in short order. I would buy a hat so I could eat my hat if Harvard turns out to be any different.

[cooperstreet]

Another hunch, put forward only partly out of self interest: pay grad students more.

 

I would like to second this emphatically. For someone with no familial wealth or outside financial support, its really really hard to go back to a PhD program, especially in your late 20s, when things like starting a family start entering your head. You also have every incentive to leave the program for a job that pays the bills.

[Carlinoncampus]

I went ahead and sent an email to Chicago inquiring about my PhD application. Within an hour, they sent me an email accepting me to CIR with funding. I would recommend emailing them if you still haven't heard anything.

Do you (or anyone here) have any idea how funded CIR offers might interact with the waitlist? Like, being on the latter shouldn't disqualify one from receiving the former right? (indeed, I'd think it more likely they'd give that offer to someone they waitlisted, but I'm just curious as to whether the wait for a decision re: waitlist might take so long that they don't have any funded CIR offers left or something). Just hoping to keep all options open given the somewhat lackluster results I've gotten this cycle.

On that subject, to the faculty that have been so wonderful as to post on this forum, how do waitlists tend to work in the political science field? Is getting off them relatively common or a once in a blue moon occurrence? And what separates an accepted candidate from a waitlisted one? This is particularly important for my nerves (and I'm sure the nerves of many others) right now given that I have waitlists from the programs I most want to attend.

Edited March 6, 2013 by Carlinoncampus

[chaetzli]

I would like to second this emphatically. For someone with no familial wealth or outside financial support, its really really hard to go back to a PhD program, especially in your late 20s, when things like starting a family start entering your head. You also have every incentive to leave the program for a job that pays the bills.

 

I totally understand why not having enough money is such a big concern for some of you and why people are worried about their financial situation but I believe that the PhD is an investment that will pay off at some point. Furthermore, I’m so passionate about research and so excited to become a researcher that I do not mind having no money for the next 5-7 years as there is nothing that would make me happier than pursuing a PhD.

 

Edit: Offering students a better funding package would probably also mean that schools have to accept fewer students and I am not sure whether this is desirable

Edited March 6, 2013 by chaetzli

[zzzzzz]

If Harvard hasn't contacted you, shoot Thom Wall an email. He responded to me within five minutes yesterday with a nice rejection email

Edited March 6, 2013 by zzzzzz

[BFB]

Is there any connection between age or work experience (or even prior graduate school completion) and attrition? My biased and completely unsupported notion is that the interests and ambitions of the college senior are more volitile and less informed* than those of older, more experienced candidates. If this is the case, simply signaling to candidates that work experience is valued would drop attrition. ...

 

Another hunch, put forward only partly out of self interest: pay grad students more. It probably doesn't even need to be much. Relatedly, require some counseling in money management for high-potential, low-income earners. I'm sure the faculty here remember this, but being broke is really stressful. If some job offer comes knocking when your checking account is showing double digits (and both those digits are behind the decimal) it's going to look sweeter. I'd be shocked if a meaningful portion of attrition wasn't influenced by a feeling of financial duress. Drawing an analogy again to law school, some programs have started providing some counseling on money and health management at the outset of the program.

 

I've looked at attrition numbers a fair bit. We don't record age coming in, but impressionistically I don't see a clear relationship.

 

Since becoming DGS, I've realized that attrition is pretty multifaceted. Some people get stuck on a dissertation topic and go around in circles endlessly until their funding dries up. That's bad, when it happens, and we want to do what we can to avoid it—but it's not the main source of attrition. More often, people find that grad school didn't interest them as much as they thought, or another, irresistible opportunity arises, or a spouse has a career change, or family draws people elsewhere... in short, all sorts of stuff. When that kind of attrition happens, while it's regrettable, things are as they should be: we don't want to keep you in graduate school if it's the wrong thing for you to be doing. It's very much like Louis CK's take on divorce: there's no such thing as a bad divorce. It's not as though a happy couple was walking along and all of a sudden, bam!, they get divorced. If they split up, it's because they shouldn't be together, for whatever reason. Same principle applies to most attrition.

 

Edit: That said, I'm 100% on board with the "more money for graduate students" idea. Our Grad School came through on that front this year, happily enough. But here at least, we don't have much control over that.

Edited March 6, 2013 by BFB

[GopherGrad]

Did I miss the flurry of Harvard admits or something?

 

When that kind of attrition happens, while it's regrettable, things are as they should be: we don't want to keep you in graduate school if it's the wrong thing for you to be doing. It's very much like Louis CK's take on divorce: there's no such thing as a bad divorce. It's not as though a happy couple was walking along and all of a sudden, bam!, they get divorced. If they split up, it's because they shouldn't be together, for whatever reason. Same principle applies to most attrition.

 

Well, sure, but it does beg the question of whether the couple should have been together in the first place. The problem my post was hoping to help solve was the high attrition rate, so I was taking as a given that we see this as a problem. Whether age or experience is a decent predictor or not, and accepting without reservation that attrition decisions have a lot going into them, I'd be a little surprised if some careful study of who quits and why wouldn't help departments design an application process to better evaluate that risk.

 

 

That said, I'm 100% on board with the "more money for graduate students" idea.

 

I'm both unsurprised and happy that faculty sees grad students as good value added at the price. I'm also not surprised to find its mostly out of your hands. The money issue, like the suggestion of some intake counseling, would I guess require a little bit more of a political shift at the university level.

 

 

I totally understand why not having enough money is such a big concern for some of you and why people are worried about their financial situation but I believe that the PhD is an investment that will pay off at some point. Furthermore, I’m so passionate about research and so excited to become a researcher that I do not mind having no money for the next 5-7 years as there is nothing that would make me happier than pursuing a PhD.

 

Edit: Offering students a better funding package would probably also mean that schools have to accept fewer students and I am not sure whether this is desirable

 

1) My suggestion would be to increase the grad student salary budget and keep roughly the same number of students. I might be wrong about this, but I believe there is a general impression that grad students add more value than their compensation seems to credit. Budgets are tight and that is a real problem, but we are really cheap labor and it's not totally insane to suggest higher wages from a labor relations standpoint.

 

2) I have yet to speak to a PhD candidate or faculty member whose passion hasn't waxed and waned over time. The investment in a PhD is clearly one of passion; lots of us could make more money doing something else AND not lose the 5-7 years of income opportunity.* If your passion is weak at the same time as your finances and a job comes knocking ... A program policy of slightly higher salaries coupled with counseling on proper financial management (as well as health and relationship management) means that students feel better about their incomes, family lives and health a greater percentage of the time, some people who become discouraged would stick it out.

 

*As an example, pretend that you were set to graduate at 31, retire at 71 and could have saved $10,000 for retirement per year on average over a six year PhD if you worked instead. At 7% interest, you're sacrificing a million bucks. These types of things will occur to you when you're sick of ramen and Stata.

[raptureonfire]

2) I have yet to speak to a PhD candidate or faculty member whose passion hasn't waxed and waned over time. The investment in a PhD is clearly one of passion; lots of us could make more money doing something else AND not lose the 5-7 years of income opportunity.* If your passion is weak at the same time as your finances and a job comes knocking ... A program policy of slightly higher salaries coupled with counseling on proper financial management (as well as health and relationship management) means that students feel better about their incomes, family lives and health a greater percentage of the time, some people who become discouraged would stick it out.

 

*As an example, pretend that you were set to graduate at 31, retire at 71 and could have saved $10,000 for retirement per year on average over a six year PhD if you worked instead. At 7% interest, you're sacrificing a million bucks. These types of things will occur to you when you're sick of ramen and Stata.

 

To piggyback onto that ...

 

The discussion of finances can't be so easily simplified down to viewing the PhD as a commitment, nor as a labor of passion.  The PhD is a commitment in the same way that investing 5+ years into a career-path position is a commitment.  As Gopher says - people's passions wax and wane with time and experience.

 

How one views the prospect of limited finances will likely be related in some way to one's age, level of work experience, and  prospects for a top-paying position after the degree.  It will also have to do with one's expected outside financial support.  It's easy to be enthusiastic about an additional 5+ years of 'student life' when one is directly out of undergrad, and can count on outside funding from the family.  That calculus becomes a bit more complicated when one already has commitments, or perhaps can't truly count on outside help.

 

From where I'm sitting, the issue of passion for research really doesn't come into play at all; presumably, we're all passionate about research ... that's why we are pursuing research degrees.

[Guest hopefulfool]

On that subject, to the faculty that have been so wonderful as to post on this forum, how do waitlists tend to work in the political science field? Is getting off them relatively common or a once in a blue moon occurrence? And what separates an accepted candidate from a waitlisted one? This is particularly important for my nerves (and I'm sure the nerves of many others) right now given that I have waitlists from the programs I most want to attend.

I second these questions. I know that the last question was answered somewhat (it was mentioned that fit and funding are factors for waitlists), but I have no idea as to how they work. I am sure that it varies greatly from department to department. However, if you can provide a general picture, it would be appreciated.

Edited March 6, 2013 by hopefulfool