<p>Anyways, I've updated my list, with a lot of your suggestions and some individual soul-searching, haha. How does the following sound:</p>
<p>University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign</p>
<p>University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
American University
Rice University
Macalester College
Dartmouth College
College of William & Mary
University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor
New York University
Case Western Reserve University
Duke University
Emory University
Carleton College</p>
<p>Brown University
Washington University in St. Louis
Georgetown University
Univ. of Chicago
Northwestern University
Tufts University
Johns Hopkin University</p>
<p>Yale University
Princeton University</p>
<p>Laugh at my extreme reaches if you want, haha. I guess I should apply and see if I would get in anyways. Now my list is waaaaay too long. I so need to remove some of the universities from the list.. otherwise I'm going to be doing so many applications..</p>
<p>Your search seems to be fairly similar to mine. I had a 2090 SAT and an almost 4.0 GPA. I too am a bit of a political junkie and considered that a must in my college search. Going back through my records, I've dug up the list of schools I compiled in the spring of my junior year (I'm a senior now):</p>
<p>Brown University
Georgetown University
Columbia University
George Washington University
Tufts University
Claremont McKenna (A LAC, I know, I wasn't interested in them either, but this one really really appealed to me).
University of Michigan
NYU
UC San Diego
Brandeis University
Boston University
UC Davis
American University
Clark University
UC Santa Cruz</p>
<p>I left off UC Berkeley due to my geographic proximity, though its a school I would have been very interested in.</p>
<p>After visiting most of those schools and doing a lot more research, I ended up applying Early Decision to Brandeis and got in. </p>
<p>One question - did you apply anywhere else and get accepted elsewhere? Or after receiving your admission to Brandeis, did you not complete any other applications?</p>
<p>Nah, Brandeis ED is binding so I didn't/couldn't apply anywhere else. I did apply to UCSD, UCD and UCSC, but I have to withdraw my applications from them.</p>
<p>Political science is a broad field with many schools having specific areas of expertise. However, as an undergrad, my "top research university" list in no particular order would be:</p>
<p>Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Stanford
Berkeley
Columbia
Penn
Cornell
Dartmouth
Brown
Chicago
Michigan
UCLA
Rochester (often overlooked by politics junkies despite its historical importance to the field)
NYU
Georgetown
Northwestern
Duke
JHU
...and a few others.</p>
<p>In other words, the top 25 or so USNews research universities. </p>