Harvard University logo Joshua D. Kertzer

Information for Prospective Graduate Students

Like all of my colleagues, I receive a large number of email queries from prospective students about the application process to Harvard's Government Department.

In case it's helpful, then, a couple of pieces of advice specific to the graduate program here at Harvard, before some more general advice about graduate school applications, including some thoughts from friends and colleagues in the discipline:

You may wish to consult the information posted on the Government department website, which has more details about the program and admissions process, as well as descriptions of research interests of current graduate students and faculty members.

Unlike PhD programs in other disciplines/countries, our admissions process does not rely on faculty sponsors: that is, if you’re admitted, you’re admitted to the program more generally, rather than to work with a specific faculty member. In this sense, because the admissions process is centralized, and there aren't particular slots reserved for particular supervisors, you don’t need to go through the hassle of contacting individual faculty members to tell them that you're applying, ask them if they're taking graduate students (we are!), or ask them to sign off on your application or research interests. (There is a misperception that contacting faculty of interest increases your odds of getting in; it does not. The application website at Harvard includes a box where applicants can indicate which faculty they've been in touch with, but to my knowledge, no one looks at this.)

Similarly, the sheer number of applications we receive (in a 1993 PS article, King, Bruce and Gilligan report the Government department was receiving ~700 applications a year) means that it's logistically impossible for us to meet with all of the prospective applicants who might wish to do so. The good news is that because the admissions process is centralized, this isn't something you need to do anyway! If you're admitted to the program, we'll fly you in to meet with us, so you'll have ample chance to meet with us then, figure out if the program is a good fit, and so on.

General Advice about PhD Applications in Political Science

One of the challenges about offering more general advice about applying to PhD programs in political science is that the process is so idiosyncratic, both across subfields (a competitive file in political theory might look very different than in American politics), across institutions (some schools care a lot about subfield divisions, and others don't believe in subfields altogether), across time (who happens to be on the admissions committee that year often determines which files make it to the top), and across space (the information below is probably the most useful for applications to schools in the United States).

Moreover, given structural changes in post-secondary education that have shrunk the size of the academic job market, there are plenty of good arguments against doing a PhD! The advice below, then, is focused less on the question of whether you should apply to PhD programs (though some of the advice from colleagues below speaks to this point), and more on demystifying the admissions process itself

In general you can think of graduate school applications as a signaling problem. Admissions committees are looking through hundreds upon hundreds of applications spanning thousands upon thousands of pages, trying to predict from your file whether you'll be able to succeed in their graduate program. At many of the top PhD programs, then, it's not about trying to figure out whether you're smart, but about trying to figure out if you're ready. So, committees are going to be looking for signals to help gauge how ready you are, both in your materials, and in letters from your letter writers. Here are a couple of things I wish I knew about this process when I was applying to graduate school.

Signaling you understand the field

Sometimes advisors will tell you about the importance of asking an interesting question in your research statement, but this isn't very actionable advice, because few of us deliberately study things we think are boring — and how do you know if your question will count as interesting to admissions committees? A better way to think about this is as an encouragement to do some reading. Academic disciplines are collective enterprises, in which scholarship is produced in conversation with others. Your research statement is a chance to show that you understand where the conversation is going.

If you take a look at the recent books published in your subfield of interest at Princeton University Press or Cambridge University Press, for example, and read the first chapters of the ones that interest you (often times the first chapters are available free online!), what sorts of questions are they about? Take a look at articles published recently in the journals where the faculty you want to work have published. If some of them seems interesting to you, read them, along with some of the other articles they cite. Read pieces written by the faculty you want to work with too. The more you read, the better the sense you'll have of the landscape of the field, and the better sense you'll have about how to "sell" your interests.

This is also helpful because sometimes the way we're exposed to the field in the introductory undergraduate classes that first hook us on the topic may not represent the state of the discipline. Similarly, when I was applying to PhD programs, the field looked very different in Canada, where I was from, than in the United States. You should ask one of your advisers to take a look at your research statement to solicit their feedback before you send off your application.

Signaling you understand the field also matters in other ways: in your statement of purpose, if all of the faculty members you indicate you're interested in working with are outside of your subfield of interest, or who do work of a very different style (e.g. you want to do game theory, and they do critical theory, or vice versa), or are all in a different department, that can be a sign to admissions committees that you haven't done your homework.

Signaling you understand how to do research

If being a successful undergraduate student is typically about being a skilled consumer of research, being a successful graduate student is typically about being a skilled producer of research. Having previous research experience is valuable not only because it will teach you whether you really want to apply for grad school in the first place, but also because it will help you better understand the field, help you produce a strong writing sample, and help you get stronger letters. Not everyone gets the chance to do a lot of research in college, but research experience can take a variety of forms, from writing a senior or master's thesis, to working as a research assistant, either in college or afterwards. The kind of research experience you'd want to have is likely is going to vary based on the kind of work you're interested in doing (e.g. in parts of comparative politics, many applicants often have spent a year working as an RA or predoctoral associate running studies and analyzing data, which isn't necessarily the norm in quadrants of the field that don't rely as heavily on field experiments), but more experience is usually better than less. There are also a number of programs that offer research opportunities to college graduates from historically underrepresented groups. If this applies to you, you should speak to one of your advisers.

What makes an informative writing sample?

Some writing samples are more informative than others. If possible, your writing sample should be a solo-authored piece (i.e., isn't coauthored with one of your advisors, whereupon admissions committees might be unsure about how much of the work you did, even if you did the whole thing!), written in the subfield you're interested in studying (i.e. if you want to study American politics, your writing sample should ideally be about American politics, not IR). Ideally, it should also be consistent with the norms of academic research in whatever subfield you're studying (for most subfields, it shouldn't just be a literature review, political commentary, or a book report, say).

What makes a useful letter of reference?

The most helpful letters come from faculty members who can speak to your ability to conduct academic research in the discipline you want to study. Letters from celebrities, politicians, your boss in a non-research-based job, and so on, are going to be less useful to you, since they can't credibly speak to what you need your letters to speak to. This is another reason why having research experience before applying to graduate school is useful, since letter writers who you work as a research assistant for are well positioned to speak to your abilities in this front.

Similarly, although it's not at all the case that you need to be a political science major in college in order to get into political science PhD programs, you do want to have at least one of your letters come from a political scientist, ideally in the subfield you want to study. (Chemists and comparative literature professors, say, can speak to your ability to do research, but not necessarily your ability to conduct research in political science).

Strong GRE scores

When I was applying to graduate school, I assumed that everyone understood that standardized tests were noisy and imperfect measures and that admissions committees wouldn't place much weight on them. Suffice it to say, the admissions committees at the schools I applied to disagreed! Regardless of how much weight committees should place on the GRE (although many critiques of the diagnostic value of the GRE suffer from some methodological flaws), however, many do take them into account (although some departments have made them optional in recent cycles).

For those programs that do require GREs, these scores are useful because they provide one of the few metrics in common across files that typically differ from one another along a large number of dimensions. (When I'm on admissions, I might not know how to compare a 3.9 GPA at school X with a 3.7 GPA in a different program of study at school Y, but I know how to compare a 168 GRE with a 160). You're unlikely to get into a graduate program just because of your GRE score (we reject applicants with 170/170 GREs all the time!), but doing well on the GRE (especially the quantitative score, since that's the part of the test that applicants tend to perform the most poorly on in relative terms) will be helpful. What counts as doing well will depend on the program to which you're applying (see some of the suggestions below for details).

Skills relevant to your proposed program of study

To some extent, your GPA matters less than the courses you've taken, or skills you've acquired. Admissions committees want to know whether you have the skills you need to do the research you're interested in. If you're interested in doing political economy-style work, a 4.0 GPA without any economics or math classes will be less helpful than a lower GPA that includes more technical coursework. Similarly, it's hard to study East Asian politics if you don't speak or have never studied any East Asian languages.

Additional Resources

Finally, a number of friends and colleagues in the discipline have put together some helpful resources with advice about applying to PhD programs in political science in general, and in international relations in particular: