Graduate Program - FAQs

1. Who can serve on an MA Thesis committee?
2. Who can serve on a dissertation committee?
3. For which non-topical research course should I register?
4. May I take courses outside the Department?
5. When are Comprehensive Exams given?
6. What are the rules for Comprehensive Exams?
7. How do I apply for financial aid?
8. Do I have to re-apply for financial aid even though I was given a multi-year offer in my first year?
9. When are Financial Aid awards made?
10. How do I apply for travel money to go to an academic conference?
11. Is there research money for IR students?
12. What should an MA Thesis or Dissertation Proposal look like?
13. Do I need to defend my MA thesis proposal?
14. How long should an MA thesis be?
15. When should I apply for Dean’s Fellowships, Presidential Management Internships, Dumas Malone, Gallatin, etc.?
16. Why should I read my UVA e-mail directly instead of forwarding it to Hotmail, Yahoo, etc?
17. How do I get an extension of time on my MA degree / PhD Degree?
18. How many hours per week may I work for the University?

Who can serve on an MA thesis committee?

Numbers: 2 – up to two from the department, or one insider and one from outside the department. All must be from UVA.

Chairs: committees must be chaired by someone who is a regular, full time faculty member of the department. Regular full time faculty means: No emeriti (unless the committee pre-dates their change of status); no adjuncts/temporary hires; no “associated” faculty (i.e. people holding courtesy appointments in the department); no “general” faculty.

Secondary members: any full time faculty of the university except adjuncts/temporary hires (thus you may have emeriti, general faculty, associated faculty).For MA theses, as a general rule, a secondary member from the department is preferable to someone from outside the department if you are planning on continuing to the PhD because the readers’ evaluations of the thesis carry great weight in the graduate committee’s decision to pass you into the PhD program (to “EPPP” you in our parlance).

Who can serve on a dissertation committee?

University policy is clear:

Numbers: four – up to three from the department, plus one from outside the department. All must be from UVA.

Chairs: Committees must be chaired by someone who is a regular, full time faculty member of the relevant department. Regular full time faculty means: No emeriti (unless the committee pre-dates their change of status); no adjuncts/temporary hires; no “associated” faculty (i.e. people holding courtesy appointments in the department); no “general” faculty.

Secondary members: any full time faculty of the university except adjuncts/temporary hires (thus you may have emeriti, general faculty, associated faculty).

In addition: there must be one person from outside the department (the “dean’s representative”). Traditionally this person is added on at the last minute. But I believe it is preferable to involve them as early as possible in order to take advantage of their expertise.

May you have people from outside UVA? You can always petition to have someone from the outside, and the best case is when that person clearly has an expertise that is not duplicated at UVA and is a regular faculty member at a reasonable university (e.g. someone from Our Lady of the Tundra is probably not a wise choice). The duplication issue is very important – if they duplicate existing UVA faculty expertise the dean will reject your petition

For which non-topical research course should I register?

To Politics Graduate Students:

This is to clarify some issues regarding research hours, non-topical research, and independent study classes for the MA and Ph.D. programs. I hope you find this information helpful. You can also find much of the same information in various sections of the program rules and regulations, in particular Section V,B and footnotes 4 and 6. I urge you to familiarize yourself with the rules of the program, as you are ultimately responsible for making sure that you satisfy all the requirements for your intended degree(s).

There are three kinds of research courses that are relevant for your progress through the program.

1) PLXX 595 INDEPENDENT STUDY. These are courses in which you and a professor make an agreement regarding what you will read, research, and produce for a grade at the end of the semester. They almost always involve producing some kind of paper on a topic that goes beyond a particular course that you have already taken with the professor. You are allowed 2 PLXX595 courses to count toward your MA degree and 2 more to count toward your PhD. You pay the normal three-credit tuition costs to enroll in these courses.

2) PLAD775 and PLAD875 SUPERVISED RESEARCH I and SUPERVISED RESEARCH II. These are courses for PhD students who have enrolled in the program since September 1999, and for students who enrolled earlier and elected to switch to the new rules. You may enroll in PLAD775 and PLAD875 only after you have completed the 8 courses (24 credits) toward the MA, and you may enroll in each of them only once during your time in the program. Unlike PLXX 595, you do not have to produce anything at the end of the semester and there will be no grade other than Pass. They are there so that you can work on your MA or PhD thesis research and to provide some course relief during the semesters that you may be serving as a Teaching Assistant. These courses count toward your 54 credits (18 courses) to the PhD. You are also charged tuition for them just like any other course you take in the classroom. I am the official instructor for these courses, but your MA and PhD thesis advisor should be supervising your research while you are enrolled in these courses. My instructor number is 1247.

3) PLXX 897, 898, 997, and 998 NON-TOPICAL RESEARCH. These are filler courses that the University requires you to enroll in so that all full-time students will enroll in 12 credit hours per semester. IF YOU WISH TO MAINTAIN YOUR FULL-TIME STATUS, YOU MUST ENROLL IN ENOUGH NON-TOPICAL RESEARCH HOURS EACH SEMESTER TO GET YOU TO 12 TOTAL CREDITS.

These courses have no implications for tuition -- you are charged only the tuition for “real” courses and not for the non-topical credits. The only exception to this is for people who register for ONLY non-topical hours (e.g. students working on their dissertation); in that case you are charged research fees of approximately $750 per semester.

To enroll in these courses, list your academic or thesis advisor as the instructor (no permission is required). PLXX 897 is for people who have not begun their MA thesis, 898 for people with an MA thesis committee, 997 for people who have finished the MA but do not yet have a PhD committee, and 998 is for people with a PhD committee.

By the time you finish your PhD, you must have enrolled in at least 18 hours of non-topical research for your PhD degree. There is no specific non-topical requirement for the MA degree.

May I take courses outside the Department?

You may take courses from any unit of the university offering graduate level courses (except foreign languages). (Let me also note that courses that do not seem in some way mission oriented will draw attention). At the MA level you may take 2 courses by right, out of your 8 total. At the PhD level you may take 2 courses by right out of your 10 total. (Thus MA-PhDs may take 4 by right). You may petition for more, but you will need a good argument.

When are Comprehensive exams held?

Comprehensive exams are given in MAY and AUGUST.

Comprehensive exam policy:

You may take comps outside Cabell Hall. It is your responsibility to obtain and return the exam. Late exams will automatically fail, no exceptions, no appeals. All exams will be picked up by hand, except for students who are out of town. When you pick up the exam you will indicate to Cassandra how you plan to return the exam and where you intend to take the exam.

If you are taking the exam in Cabell, you will have 5 minutes to find a room, and 5 minutes to return the exam.

If you are taking the exam outside Cabell, you will be given 20 minutes on either side of the exam for travel time. Hand carried exams will be considered late if you are more than 20 minutes past the exam’s end-time.

Fax: Cassandra will make sure the fax machine is working, displays the correct time (incoming faxes automatically are stamped with time of message and sender’s phone #) and has sufficient paper. However we cannot assure that there will not be extraneous incoming faxes, outgoing faculty faxes, fax machine problems or competing incoming comp exams. Please note that our fax machine has a 14.4 kbps modem… Faxed exams will be considered late if you are more than 20 minutes past the exam’s end-time.

E-mail: Emailed exams will be considered late if they arrive at Cassandra’s machine more than 20 minutes past the exam’s end-time. Although exams typically occur in periods in which email activity is low, because undergraduate students are away, lots of things can go wrong, and email transit time is inherently unpredictable. You can protect yourself by using minimal formatting in your answer (formatting increases file size) or by cutting and pasting your exam answer into your email body as text (this minimizes file size). Please be sure that your computer clock is set to the proper time (emails are automatically stamped with the outgoing time).

The rules regarding handwritten exams remain the same (you submit one manuscript copy, retain and type up a xerox). Obviously, handwritten exams cannot be emailed.

A no exception, no appeal automatic fail is a draconian rule. I remind you that it is one that a majority of the student body chose in preference to a flat “must take exams in Cabell” rule.

How do I apply for financial aid?

Every December I will email an Excel form to all graduate students. You just fill out the form and return it to me by the deadline.

 Do I have to re-apply for financial aid even though I was given a multi-year offer in my first year?

Absolutely YES.

When are Financial Aid awards made?

Typically you will hear by late March. There is no guaranteed time however.

How do I apply for travel money to go to an academic conference?

What: The Dean’s office has a limited amount of money available to subsidize graduate student travel to academic conferences. From 2002 on, funding is limited to $250 for conferences east of the Mississippi, $500 west of the Mississippi. The DGS will supplement the dean’s stipend at his discretion.

How:

Before the conference: send the DGS a brief note VIA EMAIL detailing the conference (name, place, date); what you are doing; how it relates to your progress through the program; your estimated costs; your current email address. One note suffices for both Dean’s and DGS funds.

Once a month, on the first business day of the month, I will collate requests, rank them, and send them on to the Dean.

After the conference: submit receipts to the dean; cc the total expenditure VIA EMAIL to me. Please keep a copy for yourself.

When do I get the money?: the Dean’s office has been funding requests the month they are received, I suppose on the theory that most requests exceed the limit (thus receipts are at most a secondary check on dishonesty) and also to make your lives easier. I will be doing supplementary funding a few times a year, mostly after the big conferences (APSA, ISA, MWPSA).

Caveats: not all requests will be funded; the Dean’s money predictably will run out six to seven months before the end of the fiscal year in June; please do not crowd requests for Fiscal Year 2005/06 (i.e. for 2005 APSA) into this fiscal year

Is there research money for IR students?

Several years ago, a long-time faculty member, Alfred Fernbach, established an endowment to support graduate student research in International Relations. According to the terms of the endowment, “Awards shall be given to students who are investigating international policy subjects, such as international organization, international conflict management, international law, international economics, international military control and security, and United States international relations.” These fellowships will be called the Louise and Alfred Fernbach Awards for Research in International Relations.

The Department has decided that we will use this money to support research-related expenses such as travel, data acquisition, software, etc., for students who are at the dissertation stage. There is a presumption that students will be officially “ABD” to receive the awards, though there may be cases where students at the dissertation proposal stage will qualify also.

The maximum amount of the awards will be $500.Applications for the awards shall consist of a brief (one-page) summary of your research project and a budget describing your specific plans for using the money.

Awards are made twice a year through a competitive process. The first wave of awards will be made in January, with an application deadline of December 1, and the second will be made in June, with an application deadline of May 1

 What should an MA Thesis or Dissertation Proposal look like?

There is a “five-fold path to prospectus happiness.” That is, every proposal should have the following 5 items, preferably in this order:

1. What is the question you are trying to answer? Indeed it is preferable to begin the proposal with a question. Often if you can’t ask this question in less than a paragraph, you need to do more work. The purpose here is make you be as clear as possible about what your project is.
2. What are the usual answers to this question (i.e., your literature review, but done not as a listing of authors and their individual contributions, but rather aggregated into consistent schools of thought regarding the problem. Thus for state formation you might break authors up into 3 different schools: those who say war made states (Hintze, etc); those who say domestic factors (like national character) made states (Ranke, etc) those who say it was the interaction of war making with domestic characteristics (Tilly, Ertman, etc).Describe these authors in terms of their basic premises, and briefly state their argument. You can rank order these arguments (e.g. Tilly/Ertman better than the one sided arguments of Hintze/Ranke because it incorporates both variables into one argument that does not simply split the difference).The purpose here is to prevent you from reinventing the wheel, or doing a dissertation that has already been done to death and thus will not get you a job.
3. Your answer to the question. Maybe it’s the same as the guys above. Maybe not. If not, since you don’t have any evidence yet (otherwise you would be done the dissertation already) you should tell us what you think your answer will be and why it is different from the older answers. E.g.: geography determined both the likelihood of war and states’ abilities to fight wars, and so is a master variable that explains both sides of the Tilly/Ertman argument – why this many wars + why this lack (abundance) of resources. The more you can specify the causal logic in your answer, the better. The purpose here is to prevent you from have an undoable dissertation because the logic is completely screwy.
4. Where you plan to FIND evidence to support your answer. Again, there is no expectation that you will have very much of this evidence at this point in time, nor is there much requirement to list that evidence. What we want to know here is whether there is a good certitude that the kind of evidence you need to make your answer convincing exists. E.g. if you say that you will show that the pattern of landholding in 19th century Costa Rica produced a divided elite and the result was civil war, we would want to know where you will find (the virtually non-existent) information on landholding. The purpose here is to prevent you from starting an undoable dissertation – undo-able not because the logic is faulty, but because the evidence cannot be gotten.
5. Finally, and really last and least, the significance of the project. Most times the significance will be self evident, which is why I want it last. Most people spend too much time on the significance of their dissertation / issue. There will be plenty of time to editorialize in the concluding chapter of the dissertation. The proposal is about how you actually plan to get to that concluding chapter.
6. If you want, you may append a set of short chapter outlines – very short – if your research has progressed to the point of being able to generate coherent chapter outline then you probably already have a coherent proposal.
7. A bibliography.

Do I need to defend my MA thesis proposal?

All grad students must hold a formal defense of the Master’s thesis prospectus, and file with Cassandra a form, signed by the thesis committee, attesting to that defense. The rules leave it to individual faculty to decide on the level of formality and the specifics they wish to see in a proposal. The purpose of a formal defense is to prevent students from writing a thesis on their own and then shopping around for a supervisor at the last minute.

The other - non-bureaucratic - reasons for talking to faculty before writing the thesis: this is a chance to get valuable advice and feedback before you start the thesis, and to find out if the project is feasible and interesting, which, to the extent that you are thinking of the MA as a dry run at the dissertation, is very important.

Thus I suggest that grads discuss potential MA thesis topics with faculty prior to writing either the proposal or, certainly, the thesis.

How long should an MA thesis be?

Faculty expectations about MA thesis quantity and quality (for both MA and MA/PhD students are as follows:

“A master's thesis should articulate a clear argument based on a critical understanding of the literature in a particular field. Students should gather various forms of support for their argument and organize them in a logical and elegant manner. Clarity and concision are a priority over length. We expect that most students will be able to accomplish these objectives with an essay ranging between 8,000 to 10,000 words.”

When should I apply for Dean’s Fellowships, Presidential Management Internships, Dumas Malone, Gallatin, etc.?

Please wait until you get the email announcement of application deadlines. These are generally in February although some are earlier.

Why should I read my UVA e-mail directly instead of forwarding it to Hotmail, Yahoo, etc?

I send a lot of mail using the grads e-mail list — information about funding, rules, jobs, deadlines etc. Please do not risk have this email bounce from an over-full hotmail account. UVA Web-mail is accessible world wide, just like Hotmail.

How do I get an extension of time on my MA degree / PhD Degree

The graduate school has a seven year “up or out” rule for PhD students and a five year rule for MA students.Here’s the specific language from the graduate record, located at http://www.virginia.edu/~regist/gradrec/chapter5/gchap5-6.5.html

Time Limitation

All requirements for the Ph.D. must be completed within seven years from the date of admittance into the Ph.D. Program. In special cases, upon approval of the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, work out-of-date may be revalidated by examination. In case of interruption of work by military service, time spent in service will be excluded from the computation of this seven-year period.

The language for the MA is the same, except, of course, that there is a five year limit. In order to receive an extension to either limit, you must submit a formal petition to the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Politics.

A petition must contain the following 5 elements:

1. Description of work completed toward the degree and what is left to complete.
2. Description (brief) of what prevented work from being completed and how that situation has changed so that you can now complete requirements
3. Plan for completing requirements, with a time table (important - be realistic - there will not be multiple grants of extension)
4. The proposed committee for the thesis (very important: if you have no committee, there will be no grant of extension - line these people up before you petition)
5. Supporting letters from your [proposed] committee saying that indeed they are on board and believe you will finish within the proposed time frame.

The Graduate Committee will review this petition, and if it is approved, will pass it on to the Dean of the Graduate School for final approval. The Dean has final authority over the granting of extensions.

Hours of work

You may work a maximum of 20 hours / week. Being a TA with 60 students counts as 10 hours / week. The dean has approved overloads for students at the verge of starvation, but he will no longer retroactively approve overloads so please do not violate this rule.