MA then PhD, or just PhD?

juillet
Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:34:32 +0000

the UCLA student told me not to get an MA because he felt it was a waste of money, it would further delay getting my PhD, and that there could be other things I could do to bolster my application without having to get an MA, such as doing research work at a think tank, trying to publish articles online or in scholarly journals, and doing really well on the GRE and writing an exceptionally well written statement of purpose.

Well, yes, an MA would delay getting your PhD by 1-2 years because you’d have to finish it first. And it’s true that there are other things you can do to bolster your application without having to get an MA, but the question is how accessible those things are to you and how much they fulfill your needs versus an MA.

Research work at a think tank is a great idea. It still wouldn’t fully satisfy the course prerequisites for political science if you were missing some, but some top PhD programs might be willing to overlook that or admit you conditionally if you had some think tank research experience.

Publishing articles online would be mostly useless, but publishing articles in scholarly journals would be helpful as long as they are in political science. The issue is that publishing in scholarly journals as an independent social scientist unattached to a research group is difficult. What will you publish? You’d need an ongoing project with data, or a really solid theory or literature review paper. (Working at a think tank as a researcher could help you publish in journals).

Doing really well on the GRE won’t really help allay the concerns here, which is that your political science background is a bit shallow. It can’t hurt. Writing a really good statement of purpose would be compelling and is definitely a good companion to (but not a replacement for) attaining more research experience.

You also really need math classes, especially for some top PhD programs in poli sci.