<p>I'm an incoming freshman at University of Wisconsin - Madison in the field of political science. Unlike at the start of high school, I am ambitious. I am considering trying to get my PhD and teach the subject. I am going to try to graduate in three years, and I am going to try to take as many political science classes as I can. I have already started thinking about Grad school, and I will likely try to go in a major city. While I know it is likely this list will dramatically change in the next two and a half years, this is a shortlist of schools I would likely want to go to:</p>
<p>University of Chicago
Northwestern
NYU
Columbia
Georgetown
American
Cal
Texas
Washington
Harvard (I sound so ambitious)</p>
<p>or short of schools like that, maybe some small big city public school in the New York, Chicago or San Fransisco area (Like UIC or SFSU).</p>
<p>What GPA Should I shoot for to get into a great grad program? and what would be the diffence in Performence between MA and PhD?</p>
<p>And by the way, wanting to teach PoliSci and taking as many classes as possible won’t get you into any of those schools.</p>
<p>First, if you mention teaching being your prerogative for getting a doctorate, you’ll be shut out of all those schools you mentioned.</p>
<p>Second, PoliSci, whether you like it or not, is becoming an increasingly quantitative field (in my opinion, this gives credibility to the social science as it approaches the same standard for economics). Having a double major or at least a minor in mathematics or statistics is becoming more and more common for admits of top schools.</p>
<p>Third, graduating in three years will hurt you if you’re not getting quality research experience in the meantime. From what I know, it used to be quite rare for undergraduates to have any research under their belt before applying to doctoral programs in PoliSci, but my friends who are now at some top schools (UCLA, Rochester, Penn State) all had at least a few years of working with a professor, and those 3 particular ones had at least a paper in R&R at top journals. If you’re cutting your pre-application period from 4 to 3 years, you’re going to have to justify that by doing some pretty incredible stuff in your time at Wisconsin.</p>