Helix

I'm not sure your GRE scores necessarily would drop you out of the running for all the top programs, but some places that aren't quite top 10 with good comparativists working on Eastern Europe/Central Asia might be: Indiana University Wisconsin-Madison Minnesota Cornell GWU (check out some of the folks at the Elliott School as well) Georgetown UNC

Not an economic sociologist, but previously looked into both sociology and polisci departments with a similar set of interests. My sense of economic sociology was that some of the people doing neat work in this area largely focus on micro-level phenomena (the meanings of money, participation in labor markets, ethnographies of industrialization, urbanization and transformation of cities through development, etc.). In polisci, the political economy field is pretty varied--you'd have IPE folks focusing on financial institutions, markets, and transnational financial infrastructures; CPE folks doing everything from institutional explanations for economic development to explanations of tax structures and extractive industries to varieties of capitalism. Ha-Joon Chang's work sits in a sort of interdisciplinary nexus. And it's possible that you could be happy in either field as long as you were at an institution with faculty that were a good fit for your interests. I think you're right that this isn't the project for an American economics department, but it may also (depending on how you flesh our your questions) not be a project for an American polisci department either--my impression is that departments and faculty in the UK are more pluralistic in their approach to this set of issues. My two cents: read around, see who else's work you like, who cites Chang and uses methods you like and asks questions you think are smart. Find out what departments they're in and where they got their training. It may be that you apply to a few sociology departments, a few polisci, and maybe even a few policy or development studies degrees. But probably the department fit will not be entirely determined by the discipline you apply in.

I second brent09 on this: you need to figure out what your ultimate career goal is and investigate individual schools. Many PubPol PhDs don't enter academia; they go off to work for think tanks or to be economists at the World Bank. It all depends on what you want. I wouldn't say that one is necessarily more competitive than the other because in many cases, they aren't directly competing for jobs. There has been a small trend of late for PubPol PhDs to land polisci jobs (some of the HKS people and UCSD-IR/PS people have had good placements in this respect). But I wouldn't necessarily call that a norm--in some cases it reflects the fact that certain departments find experimental methods especially compelling as a relatively "new" direction for political science research (whereas in pubpol it's the gold standard already coming from economics). The other major reason is that if you wanted an academic position, there are actually very few policy schools in the United States. And if you take a look at their faculty rosters, they tend to overwhelmingly employ political scientists, area specialists, former practitioners, and economists--all of whom have somewhat more direct knowledge of their subject matter. I don't think you can necessarily make an objectively wrong choice--but choose wisely based on what you most want out of your career. Less generally, though, if you're interested in environmental issues and security, you should pick the programs that are right for that, regardless of whether they are polisci or pubpol. I say this because environmental politics has traditionally been a bit of a niche area in political science that many departments do not address well--which presents challenges with the adcomm trying to figure out who you could possibly work with. I think you'd probably have a better shot this time around with a master's that demonstrates a commitment to your area of interest more so than it sounds like your career path might have indicated. But after that I would say some of this is about researching individual schools and programs, and getting a list of those together that make sense for you and what you want to do. You'll want to evaluate their placement, whether it's academic or professional, and also the relative productivity and engagement of faculty who do work in your area of interest (I don't mean productivity like # of articles/citations necessarily, but more about whether these people are doing good scholarly work and getting it published, and that they're ideally at a productive place in their careers, not struggling for tenure or about to go emeritus). In terms of specific programs, it depends on what you mean by climate/security issues (do you mean, for example, things like water crises? or do you mean more IR-style issues like negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol and the security implications of those relationships?) Resolving some of that ambiguity will be helpful in clarifying whether you might want to take a policy vs. polisci track. For policy, I would say, look into HKS (Calestous Juma, Meghan O'Sullivan, Robert Stavins); the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton (they have a science/environmental policy track); and Pardee Rand for sure. For political science, maybe UCLA (Michael Ross, if you're into natural resource issues), MIT (they are really strong on security and are picking up Chris Warshaw, a recent Stanford PhD with an interest in environmental issues--and they also have the TPP program and DUSP, which have students and faculty doing environmental issues), and UWashington-Seattle (Peter May).

I'll defer to someone else on the LSE question, but my sense is that it's a respectable name in the policy field if you ended up doing the degree and wanting to be employed in the US. The best way to figure this out, honestly, is to check out people whose jobs you'd want--see where they did their degrees (either by finding them on the organizations' websites or going through LinkedIn, with that neat feature to see where most employees got their degrees). As to employ-ability after MAPSS-type degrees, it depends on what you want to do. If it's a job that one could reasonably do with a bachelor's but which has succumbed to educational inflation (the master's is more perfunctory than necessary), then it won't hurt you. What I will say is that you'd want to pretty heavily scrutinize what career resources would be available to you from these kinds of programs. I can't comment on Brandeis or Columbia, but UofC career resources is not among the most developed in the world, and also isn't as well targeted for professional employment vs. academic pursuits just generally speaking. Also, not sure about QMSS, but MAPSS students do a thesis in their 2nd/3rd quarters--that in and of itself is a pretty huge time-suck that will detract from a job search, and the thesis itself may not be a huge selling point depending on what kind of job you're looking for in the end. Just something else to consider. I think one of the biggest things to remember about these kinds of degree is that they're not giving you a ton of skills necessarily; they're much more about signaling that you're a smart person who can do good work. The second biggest thing to consider about these degrees is that on the job market, they will not make up for a lack of experience. Often master's degree-required job postings will also come with caveats like "2-5 years of experience" or "5-7 years of experience" and without those in addition to the master's, you're in an uphill battle for employment--you've got the educational qualifications, but in some ways these make you more "expensive" to hire than if you only had a bachelors. Honestly, though, if you aren't certain about the professional vs. academic track, I would say to spend a year or so trying out some ideas--see whether you enjoy working at a think tank or an aid agency, take some time to develop language skills and do field research at a job, etc. Two key reasons for this: (1) It will help you decide whether you really need a PhD to get the kind of career you want, or whether you want to continue on a professional track and could get by with a master's in the near term, and (2) it will make you a stronger candidate for either degree track. Once you've been working for a year or two, the significance of your undergraduate grades fades somewhat; if you then did a master's and really nailed it, those grades are then an even better approximation of your ability. Likewise, if you applied to an (American) MPP/professional master's with a few more years of experience, you are *much* more likely to get funding/get into a better program than if you go in with less.

The short answer to this question is almost always "no." Here's why: MPPs/MPAs/other forms of policy degrees tend to be sequestered in different schools or departments from their political science programs both practically/bureaucratically and methodologically/culturally. On the practical side, many schools that offer MPPs limit the amount of coursework that you can or should take in a political science department and instead expect you to take most of your courses with faculty for that policy school or program. Many of these faculty and the program itself are targeted toward master's students, which means that the faculty are not necessarily connected to more academic career lines (they themselves might be, but often in policy programs the professors are practitioners with teacher qualifications moreso than strict academics focused exclusively on the sorts of questions that a political science department would find universally acceptable). Not being able to take those classes or work with those professors limits you in the amount of help you can get in transitioning from the MPP to a PhD in something other than policy. It also means that their expertise is not really in getting people into PhD programs--it's in getting them jobs in policy careers (one hopes). Therefore you're not in a position to expect much from the career services end, necessarily. On the more methodological/cultural side, I would say two things: policy programs can be hostile to academic language and deeper inquiry. This isn't meant to be insulting at all--if I am a policymaker, I *don't* just want to know how something might work in theory and spend a lot of time considering variously small degrees of measurement error or whether this use of IV is valid. My time is better spent thinking about how one might implement a program, and what the costs or benefits are, and what management challenges might arise, because sometimes you need to act *right now* and usually I can hire a PhD to interpret these kinds of technical materials if I need to. This situation, coupled with the fairly large course-sizes in professional master's programs, means that you won't necessarily be able to be socialized into political science language and academic inquiry. An additional issue arises in that the research being done in policy is somewhat different from that in political science--experimental design is all the rage in policy (coming from econ) and is of interest, but much newer to many political science departments, so depending on the program, you might not be getting material that will allow you to say with confidence in an SoP that so and so's foundational work on x raises interesting questions that have yet to be addressed by the literature on y, which you intend to address in z ways... Having done a policy degree, what I will say is, think *very* carefully about this before you do it. The other practical factor is cost, since professional degrees are generally not cheap ventures. Then I would really consider what options you have, reasonably. If you decided you really wanted to do the policy master's route, my vote would be to strongly consider WWS (because it's prestigious and a free ride, and you get good interdisciplinary and methodological training) and SIPA (it's a good program with slightly fewer strict requirements, so you can take courses more easily in your department of interest). If you know already that you want a polisci PhD, though, I would actually strongly second the previous suggestion and advise looking into MAPSS at the University of Chicago, some of the MSc's at LSE, and possibly the Columbia QMSS program instead. MAPSS is great and does give funding to some students. Both MAPSS and QMSS have been successful in placing students into PhD programs. And all of these are only 1 year--not great from a timing perspective, but better from the funding angle.

I second Tamboursg'sell's opinion on this one. LSE is most likely the best of the programs you're looking at and will definitely be a useful leg up on applications for PhD programs. The only caveat would be if you hoped to do your PhD at Western Ontario; I don't know anything about the school or the program, but if doing your master's there would help you make the faculty connections you'd need to do your PhD there, and it was a top choice for you, then I would choose there instead.

I think Emory's deadline is the same as everyone's: April 15th. I'm comparative.

Just turned down funded offers at Emory and Minnesota, and an unfunded offer at UT-Austin.

On qualitative work, two comments. First is, if you want to be successful in political science academically, it pays to have some familiarity with and "literacy" in quantitative methods, rather than eschewing them altogether. Second, however, is that there are some departments that have been traditionally strong in qualitative methods or are still open to students pursuing qualitative projects. Listing a few just off the bat, Harvard has a large enough department to accommodate a variety of methodological approaches and has some qualitative folks working on democratization (Ziblatt); UChicago is a very qualitatively oriented department, although there is now some recognition there that they should be more plural and they've made some effort to include quantitative training both within the department and through the Harris School; Cornell, Northwestern, and WashU all have qualitative reputations (although again, if you wanted to do quant work there are options); and despite conceptions that many have, MIT is also strong in qualitative research (they obviously have some quantitative powerhouses as well). The bigger question is, which of these places has the best support at the intersection of your methodological and substantive interests.

I don't think the AW score is a problem--my understanding is that it's usually discounted if you're also providing TOEFL scores. Re: your selection of schools, I agree with CooCooCachoo. I'm comparative, not IR, so maybe I'm missing something, but Brown is still a somewhat heavy Latin America shop (also, contrary to popular belief it is *not* a safety school with a good name, its admissions are actually quite competitive). Also not sure about JHU (whether you applied to SAIS or main campus, since I think Kellee Tsai is the only person they have in the polisci department working on China issues and she's a comparativist?). For IR/US-China relations, I think you should look at UCSD's IR/PS PhD program since they have a specialty in Asia-Pacific issues, although they are somewhat more policy-focused. Also, Columbia should probably be on your list for IR, and possibly Stanford. In terms of "safeties," although there really isn't such a thing anymore with how competitive admissions are, take a look at the faculty at UIUC, maybe the University of Washington-Seattle. I think the #1 thing you should do is revisit your SoP. You mention interests in both IR/US-China relations and in democratization, which is more of a comparative subject. Being clear about exactly which you want to address will allow you to make more explicit connections with faculty working on these issues.

This. I'll qualify this further by saying that fit isn't everything and some larger full-service departments might be able to accomodate you if you have a really interesting project that a set of their faculty could reasonably advise, but otherwise don't just apply to 5 top 10s because you feel compelled to; apply to them because they would be good schools for you. This round was my second cycle for PhDs. My first cycle I applied to 10 schools, all within the top 20. Completely struck out. From that round my advice to you is: start now on your SoP. Take a day or a weekend and write about what interests you and what kinds of projects you'd like to work on. Make it simple and to the point. Then send it to your advisor(s)/mentor(s) and have them give you feedback. You want input on ideas and style, yes, but also with that statement, which schools they think you should target. If there are ideas and works that interest you, note down where those authors are currently on faculty and bounce those departments off your advisors to see whether they might be a fit for you (author X might have had some groundbreaking theory and be the coolest mind since sliced bread, but they could also be a complete jerk who cannibalizes the work of their grad students). Make your advisors be honest with you. Cough up your transcripts and GRE scores and ask them to take a serious look and tell you where you stand. I had no guidance my first round, so I just applied to the top places that seemed like there were good faculty, with a completely incoherent SoP. Second time around, I had some faculty in my field take a look at my statement and help me refine it. Despite having struck out they took a real look at my stats and said that I could reasonably make it into a top 30 program, probably a top 15, possibly a top 10. From there I picked a set of 13 schools in that order: 2-3 top 30s, 4-5 top 12-20s, and 4-5 top 10s. To me, this was a worthwhile investment because I was not planning to make a go at a third cycle. I didn't get in everywhere I applied this round either, but the places I did get in are great fits for me--and they're all places that I didn't apply to in my first round. So in spite of the caveat I laid out previously, you should think about what kinds of places can accomodate your work first and foremost, and then select a reasonable range within those schools.

I agree with RWBG's point above--I don't think fine differences (1 vs. 2 people placed, 10 vs. 12) in this list is a huge deal. And I should've mentioned that the initial "data" on PSJR spans 2006-2010, as a side note. But I think there are other ways to interpret whether a school you're considering is passing muster using these initial numbers, and then continue to do more investigation on the "networking" aspect, which is really important. For example, Wisconsin has placed no one at a top 25 in the last 5-6 years it seems. I see that as a huge red flag if getting a top 25 placement is your goal, because however small your cohort size is (theirs are not especially small) or however many individuals choose to go into non-academic work or relocate for a spouse, it's probably not ALL of them. If it is, I think that says something fundamental about what kind of program it is and what kinds of students it is going to attract. I don't mean this to be derogatory either: I spoke with a professor at one school I'm considering recently, and was told that their students as a group do NOT aim to get placements at R1s, they aim for SLACs and other schools that focus on teaching. That's not a bad aim in and of itself; it would be a potentially bad fit, though, if what you wanted was to go to an R1, for three reasons: (1) your school might now have a reputation as producing serious teachers more so than heavy-hitting researchers; (2) your professors may not have active connections with the kinds of places you would want to pursue for placement; and (3) your cohort and fellow students may have completely different aspirations, making it an awkward social fit. Actually what I take away from this list is kind of the opposite of all of this, though. It's more about the lower half of "non-top-25s" who have been able to place people at top 25s in spite of the ranking of the school. Obviously some, probably large, component of your success in placement is you--the quality of your research, your ability to present yourself in a professional and serious manner, etc.--and not your school. To me this section is especially important for those with other considerations (for example, spouses, funding disparities) who are making difficult choices on the margins, or between top 15 and top 30 programs. Again, I would consider it to be a red flag if the program has never in its existence placed anyone at a school you might want to teach at, whether that's a top 25 or not, but on the whole if they have had even one experience with one success, it reinforces the point that a lot of the variables at play on the job market do not depend in their entirety on the school you choose.

Found the list of names, here it is: Last Name,First Name,PhD Institution,PhD Year,Employer Adida,Claire L.,Stanford,2010,UCSD Ansell,Ben W.,Harvard,2006,Minnesota Arriola,Leonardo,Stanford,2008,UC-Berkeley Bas,Muhammet,Rochester,2007,Harvard Bassi,Anna,NYU,2010,UNC Beber,Bernd,Columbia,2010,NYU Beerbohm,Eric,Princeton,2008,Harvard Bhavnani,Rikhil,Stanford,2010,Wisconsin Blattman,Christopher,UC-Berkeley (Economics),2007,Yale Blaydes,Lisa,UCLA,2008,Stanford Bullock,John G.,Stanford,2007,Yale Butler,Daniel,Stanford,2007,Yale Campello,Daniella,UCLA,2008,Princeton Chen,Jowei,Stanford,2009,Michigan Christia,Fotini,Harvard (Public Policy),2008,MIT Cramner,Skyler,UC-Davis,2007,UNC Dancygier,Rafaela,Yale,2007,Princeton De la O,Ana,MIT,2007,Yale Debs,Alexandre,MIT (Economics),2007,Yale Decanio,Samuel,Ohio State,2008,Yale Dube,Oendrila,Harvard (Public Policy),2009,NYU Dunning,Thad,UC-Berkeley,2006,Yale Egan,Patrick J.,UC-Berkeley,2008,NYU Eguia,Jon,Caltech,2007,NYU Enns,Peter K.,UNC,2007,Cornell Enos,Ryan,UCLA,2010,Harvard Favretto,Katja,UCLA,2009,Wisconsin Flores-Macias,Gustavo A.,Georgetown,2008,Cornell Frazer,Michael L.,Princeton,2006,Harvard Gingrich,Jane,UC-Berkeley,2007,Minnesota Glynn,Adam,University of Washington (Statistics),2006,Harvard Grimmer,Justin,Harvard,2010,Stanford Gross,Justin H.,Carnegie Mellon (Statistics and Public Policy),2010,UNC Hainmueller,Jens,Harvard,2009,MIT Hyde,Susan,UCSD,2006,Yale Johns,Leslie,NYU,2008,UCLA Jordan,Stuart,Princeton,2007,Rochester Jusko,Karen Long,Michigan,2008,Stanford Kahl,Sigrun,Humboldt University,2006,Yale Kasara,Kimuli,Stanford,2006,Columbia Kastellec,Jonathan,Columbia,2009,Princeton Kerner,Andrew,Emory,2009,Michigan Klausen,Jimmy,UC-Berkeley,200?,Wisconsin Kreps,Sarah,Georgetown,2007,Cornell Lacina,Bethany,Stanford,2010,Rochester Landemore,Helene,Harvard,2008,Yale Lawrence,Adria,Chicago,2007,Yale Lenz,Gabriel,Princeton,2006,MIT Lerman,Amy,UC-Berkeley,2008,Princeton Lindsay,Keisha,Chicago,2009,Wisconsin Lipscy,Philip,Harvard,2008,Stanford Lorentzen,Peter,Stanford (GSB),2007,UC-Berkeley March,Andrew,Oxford,2006,Yale Margalit,Yotam,Stanford,2009,Columbia Markus,Stanislav,Harvard,2009,Chicago Min,Brian,UCLA,2010,Michigan Minozzi,William,Stanford (GSB),2006,NYU Monteiro,Nuno,Chicago,2009,Yale Moore,Ryan T.,Harvard,2008,WashU Morrison,Kevin,Duke,2007,Cornell Naoi,Megumi,Columbia,2006,UCSD Narang,Viping,Harvard,2010,MIT Ochoa,Pauline,Johns Hopkins,2006,Yale Onoma,Ato Kwame,Northwestern,2006,Yale Owens,Ryan,WashU,2008,Harvard Pang,Xun,WashU,2010,Princeton Park,Jong Hee,Washington,2007,Chicago Patel,David Siddhartha,Stanford,2007,Cornell Pepinsky,Thomas B.,Yale,2007,Cornell Peress,Michael,Carnegie Mellon (Economics),2006,Rochester Pevnick,Ryan,Virginia,2008,NYU Platt,Matthew B.,Rochester,2008,Harvard Post,Alison,Harvard,2009,UC-Berkeley Potter,Philip B.K.,UCLA,2009,Michigan Powell,Eleanor,Harvard,2009,Yale Rehm,Philipp,Duke,2008,NYU Ringe,Nils,Pittsburgh,2006,Wisconsin Sagar,Rahul,Harvard,2007,Princeton Saito,Jun,Yale,2006,Yale Salmond,Rob,UCLA,2007,Michigan Scacco,Alex,Columbia,2010,NYU Schneider,Christina,University of Konstanz,2006,UCSD Shapiro,Jacob N.,Stanford,2007,Princeton Shimizu,Kay,Stanford,2007,Columbia Sinclair,Betsy,Caltech,2007,Chicago Singh,Prerna,Princeton,2009,Harvard Skeaff,Christopher,Northwestern,2009,Michigan Spirling,Arthur,Rochester,2008,Harvard Staniland,Paul,MIT,2010,Chicago Tahk,Alexander,Stanford,2010,Wisconsin Thachil,Tariq,Cornell,2009,Yale Tingley,Dustin,Princeton,2010,Harvard Titiunik,Rocio,UC-Berkeley (Agricultural and Resource Economics),2009,Michigan Trager,Robert F.,Columbia,2007,UCLA Urpelainen,Johannes,Michigan,2009,Columbia Von Stein,Jana,UCLA,2006,Michigan Wallace,Jeremy,Stanford,2009,NYU Watson,Sara,UC-Berkeley,2006,NYU Weeks,Jessica,Stanford,2009,Cornell Weiss,Jessica Chen,UCSD,2008,Yale Winter,Yves,UC-Berkeley,2009,Minnesota Yarhi-Milo,Keren,University of Pennsylvania,2009,Princeton Zeisberg,Mariah,Princeton,2006,Michigan

If you dig back (in the search function) on PSJR you’ll find this listing of schools by their # of placements in top 20’s. There used to be an extended discussion of *who* exactly these people are who were placed, but it doesn’t appear to be there anymore. On Yale, I can tell you that one of the three is Tom Pepinsky (at Cornell). Data: March 2011 School: # Placed in Top 20 departments TOP20 1. Harvard 11 2. Princeton 7 3. Stanford 15 4. Michigan 2 5. Yale 3 6. UC-Berkeley 7 7. Columbia 5 8. UCSD 2 9. Duke 2 10. MIT 2 11. UCLA 8 12. Chicago 3 13. UNC 1 14. WashU 3 15. Rochester 3 16. Wisconsin 0 17. NYU 2 18. Ohio State 1 19. Minnesota 0 20. Cornell 1 REST Caltech 2 Carnegie Mellon (Economics) 1 Carnegie Mellon (Statistics and Public Policy) 1 Emory 1 Georgetown 2 Harvard (Public Policy) 2 Humboldt University 1 Johns Hopkins 1 MIT (Economics) 1 Northwestern 2 Oxford 1 Pittsburgh 1 Stanford (GSB) 2 UC-Berkeley (Agricultural and Resource Economics) 1 UC-Berkeley (Economics) 1 UC-Davis 1 University of Konstanz 1 University of Pennsylvania 1 University of Washington (Statistics) 1 Virginia 1

I also wanted to mention fees. I have two really well-funded offers, but one has some component of fee remission and the other doesn't, and I was shocked to see just how expensive fees for "student activities" and "enrollment" are, even for graduate students. It made my better funded offer look slightly less so, so it's worth looking into the fine print of things, especially at the private schools that don't appear to lay them out for you in the letter very explicitly.