<p>Hello I am currently a senior at a small Midwestern liberal arts school majoring in Political Science. I really enjoy the field and hope to pursue a Ph.D. I know that overall the University of Nebraska Political Science Ph.D program is not an elite program of any sorts. However recently they have been conducting novel research in the field of BioPolitics (BioPsychPolitics). The idea that a person’s genetic makeup affects one’s politics is really interesting to me. I would like to study this but the overall lack of prestige I fear may limit my ability to be placed at a prestigious university thereafter. Am I just overly worried or is there validity to this supposition? Also does anybody know anything about Nebraska’s Political Science program?</p>
<p>oops, got lost I guess</p>
<p>There’s definitely validity to the belief that it’s more difficult to work at a prestigious place without a prestigious degree. There’s an old saying that you can work at a place that’s one step down from where you got your PhD. While I don’t think it’s as prescriptive as that, if you look at professors at top schools they do tend to have PhDs from other top schools. And it’s true that while top PhD-holding applicants can apply to academic jobs virtually anywhere, it’s difficult for someone from a mid-ranked program to work at an Ivy League or something. I clicked through the poli sci faculty at my university (Columbia, a top 10-15 program) and all of the faculty had come from other top 20-25ish programs. Even clicking through the faculty at UNL, most of their faculty - especially new hires - had come from top-ranked programs like UW-Madison, Michigan, Wash U and Columbia.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that students at mid-ranked programs don’t get good jobs. Sometimes a mid-ranked program has a powerhouse subfield in a particular area. Sometimes, students gain a particular in-demand skill at a mid-ranked program. For example, in one of my fields (psychology) the University of Southern California is a mid-ranked program (around 40ish) but they have a strong quantitative subfield and quant psychologists are in demand, so they get hired. And all the prestige in the world won’t get you a job if you’re not productive. Nowadays, grad students need publications and sometimes a postdoc in order to get a job (in my field, they always need a postdoc, especially if they want an RU/VH).</p>
<p>But you have to be a little bit of a machine. You’d need good publications in good journals, a well-known mentor, perhaps a postdoc at a better department.</p>
<p>The other question is WHY do you want to be at a prestigious university thereafter? I mean, there are legitimate reasons for that - top universities get more research funding; the professors are paid better and have better benefits. So if you want to be a top-flight researcher or your research is expensive (which biologically based research tends to be), then that makes sense. But examine your reasons for wanting that, and find out whether UNL’s program will get you where you want to be. Ask the departmental secretary: where has the department placed recent graduates? Are they getting tenure-track jobs, and where?</p>
<p>On a related note, find out if you need some more biology, psychology, or psychobiology in your background before you apply. It’s not 100% clear from Kevin Smith and John R. Hibbing’s CVs what they got their PhDs in - but I’m betting in order to do psychological/systems biology research they at least took some classes. fMRI techniques are rather sophisticated. They also require strong quantitative skills to analyze, so decide whether you want to do a lot of stats. With that said, I’m sure there are other places you can do this - for example, my psychology department at Columbia has strengths in cognitive neuroscience, and we had a joint student in political science the year I entered. My program is also very flexible, with very few required classes, and a psych PhD student could definitely take substantial coursework in the poli sci department, adopt a poli sci professor as their advisor and complete a dissertation in this field. Another program that comes to mind is the Psychology & Social Policy degree at Princeton.</p>