Introduction & a question: poli sci vs. public policy

[Parisienne]

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking on this forum for a while now and have always found the information available here to be very useful, so I finally decided to jump in and join the fun! Hope I'll be able to make useful contributions to this board too.

Before I dive into my numerous enquiries, here's a bit of info on my background/profile:

- French;

- Education: Research Masters from Sciences Po Paris in Comparative Politics & Middle Eastern Studies (Summa Cum Laude); MSc in Economics from HEC Paris Business School (overall program grade: A). Spent a year abroad at Columbia U. as a visiting student, took classes in the poli sci department & at SIPA; final GPA: 4.0.

- Research: got top marks for the two Masters dissertations I wrote while at Sciences Po & HEC, & did 6 weeks of fieldwork in the Middle East with over 20 interviews for the ScPo one. A paper I wrote while at ScPo under the supervision of a prominent American comparativist got selected for presentation at a Franco-American grad student conference.

- Work experience: currently working as an economist at the French Ministry of Economics for two years. Interned at UNHQ, did freelance translation for the UN, interned at 2 think tanks & a law firm.

- Languages: fluent in English, French, Arabic; some Spanish.

- Research interests: Political Econ & Comparative Politics

- Professional goals: to be able to navigate between academia & the policy world throughout my career. I'd love working in institutions (IFIs, UN, ministries) for a while, then taking several years to teach & write a book and such. Open to working & living in the U.S or Europe.

That's a lot of info (!) but I thought it might be useful given the questions I'm asking, and they are the following:

1/ Given all this info, which sounds like it'd "fit" better -- poli sci or public policy? I'm leaning towards public policy given my professional goals.....

2/....... but on the other hand, I wonder whether I don't actually have higher chances at getting into top 10 poli sci programs versus public policy, because the latter all seem to be very quant oriented. And while I'm not disastrous when it comes to quant (one year of intense math after high school, about 12 different macro/micro classes with mostly A's, 2 classes of game theory), I'm not stellar either (bad grades during my one year of intense math & mediocre grades in stats & econometrics), so I am looking for a program that's just as balanced when it comes to that. And the reason why I'm shooting for top 10 is that, being French & having 2 masters, I'm not gonna move to the US & go through another 5 years + of school if it's not a school that has name recognition in Europe & elsewhere.

3/ Finally, do you think that gunning for top 10 is too ambitious given my profile? I know it's a total crapshoot, but I want to have a bit of an idea of what my chances are.

Thanks if you've even read thus far (that was a lengthy post), and for any advice you experts could give me!

[Parisienne]

*Bump*

Anyone? Anyone at all?

[Penelope Higgins]

Not all top 10 comparative programs are quant-dominated: you might look at Berkeley, Harvard, or Princeton for example as places where you could do comparative and public policy work.

But it is hard to offer any useful advice because you tell us nothing about your intellectual interests. What do you want to study? And we can't offer opinions on your chances at the top 10 schools without test scores.

[Parisienne]

Thanks a lot for your reply, I appreciate the advice

In terms of research interests: in political econ/public policy, I'm interested in the way certain institutional arrangements (such as those pertaining to the central bank and the choice of an exchange rate regime) help the state-building/democratization process in developing countries. In terms of comparative politics, I'm also very interested in state-building/democratization in general, especially in the Middle East & in Central/Eastern Europe.

So given my interests, especially in public policy, I feel like I'd need a program that does include quant & would allow me to use that as a tool, without being completely obsessed with all things quant. Do you think that the Public Affairs PhD at Princeton would fit that description? I thought that all the public policy programs at Woodrow Wilson & Kennedy were very quant-oriented? How about MIT's poli sci department?

Also, regarding chances of admission - I'm aware of the importance of test scores, but would my application's chances be really mostly determined by GRE scores? Do soft factors/undergrad-grad GPA not matter at all?

[Penelope Higgins]

Just to answer your last question: schools in the top 10 get hundreds of applications. The approach most use to narrow down that huge pile is to start with test scores, so you do need to pass some threshold to have a decent shot. After the hundreds of applications are narrowed down to a hundred or so, the other factors start to matter.

In terms of your specific interests, I don't know much on the policy end of things. But the state/regime angle would be a good fit at Princeton, Berkeley, or Harvard - less so at places like Stanford and UCSD. Yale might be worth a look as well.

[Parisienne]

Penelope,

Many thanks for the advice I'll take a closer look at these schools' departments. It also seems logical that schools would use these scores to weed out applications in the first place.

Just a last question: any idea as to what Princeton's adcom for the Public Policy PhD would consider good test scores? I'm guessing around 750 in quant & verbal, but I might be totally off track.