<p>For years before college I knew that I wanted to go into something political and major in Political Science. However, I discovered through my volunteer work on the Obama campaign this year, that "field politics"- that is being a field organizer, etc. is something that I would NOT want to EVER do. </p>
<p>However, I did discover this year that I love writing research papers for political science and love the feel of the classroom even more than ever. After some self-relection, I have come to the conclusion that going to graduate school and going into academic is the future for me. </p>
<p>Despite just having finished my first year at college, I decided to do some initial looking so as to be prepared. In my search, I have discovered that the acceptance rates to most PhD progams are in the 10-20 % range. (according to Petersons) This brings up several questions:</p>
<p>-Are the rejected people, significantly below the other applicants or is it just a crap shoot?
-Am I competitive(I KNOW it's early) with around a 3.7 from Kenyon? I am planning on doing a junior and senior honors thesis and doing whatever else I can to prepare myself.</p>
<p>By the way, I am especially interested in American Politics. The schools that I seem to be most interested in at this early stage are Michigan, Ohio State, Northwestern, UChicago, Emory, Rochester, or Columbia. I would like to go to somewhere in the Midwest or easily accesable to the midwest.</p>
<p>This year in political science was extremely competitive due to increased applications and lower acceptance rates at many schools. Chicago, Duke, UNC, and Michigan drastically decreased the number of acceptances this year and other programs also cut back significantly. It doesn’t look good for the future, either. </p>
<p>I would highly recommend that you work with your professors at Kenyon to get involved in legitimate political science research (i.e. try to avoid just doing literature reviews) as soon as possible. You might have to start out doing boring stuff like coding or data entry, but it pays off if you can learn the ropes of research design and how to write a good political science research paper. If, as an undergrad, you can do even just a few presentations at major conferences that will be an excellent addition to your resume as well as a good networking opportunity. </p>
<p>I can’t emphasize enough the importance of proving that you know what a PhD is all about, that you understand how to write a political science research paper and are willing to put in the time and effort to do academic work. </p>
<p>Also, taking classes in microeconomics/game theory/statistics will be EXTREMELY helpful. Much of modern political science has its foundations in economics and understanding the basics of research design will be very useful in your own research. Good luck!</p>
<p>^ what he said. Though those numbers are actually to large for the top 20 anyway. Most programs had a < 12% acceptance rate. Literally each department has 6 to 20 seats max they are trying to fill and anywhere from 400 to 1000 applicants.</p>
<p>I’ll also put the caveat that admissions numbers vary significantly year-by-year and field-by-field. At the top-10 program I’m attending next year they admitted about 18% of total applicants while some lower-ranked programs admitted fewer than 10 students total and only 2-3 in very popular fields like IR or Comparative. Next year, with budget cuts looming, I expect the number of funded acceptances to be even lower and we’ll see more stuff like what MIT did this year (they offered a number of admitted students full funding for only 2 years instead of 4-5). </p>
<p>There’s a strong bit of luck in the whole process, but you can reduce it by building up your own research repertoire and getting involved in the discipline early on. </p>
<p>Also: the GRE is not nearly as significant as most people (including myself!) thought it would be. It can help, especially if you do well on the quantitative part (which might be counter-intuitive at first, but makes sense when you realize a lot of your methods courses are essentially high-level stat and econ courses), but it seems to pale in importance to the rest of the application.</p>