Admissions

As recommended by the university, we practice “holistic review” of all applications. That means we try to build the fullest possible picture of each candidate’s trajectory thus far, so as to arrive at our best guess of their future potential and alignment with a graduate career in political theory at Berkeley.

We don’t need a GRE score to do that. And we do our best to put undergraduate GPAs in their institutional and personal contexts. That means we try not to over-rely on them. We also try not to over-rely on letters of recommendation, knowing both that the implicit or unconscious biases of letter-writers may be in play, and that they may reflect very different understandings of the task of the letter-writer.

We aim to pay most attention to applicants’ statements of purpose, personal history statements, and writing samples. We read every writing sample with special care, believing it to be the most important indicator of potential to succeed in our program.

We are committed to assessing academic potential in spite of economic, social, or educational disadvantage. Relevant factors include but are not limited to being a first-generation college student, being of low income, having previous educational experiences in an under-resourced environment, primarily speaking a language other than English at home, being a member of a community that has historically been underrepresented in higher education, and being self-supporting as an undergraduate. We note that the University of California definition of “under-represented minority” is relatively narrow: “African American, Chicanx/Latinx, and Native American/Alaska Native.” We warmly welcome applications from members of those groups, while recognizing that other groups are also underrepresented in our community, and seeking to alter that as we can.

In terms of our intellectual preoccupations, we welcome applications from students interested in either historical or more contemporary material, or whose interests straddle several fields or approaches. We greatly value intellectual curiosity, in part because we see the first two years of our program as a time of intellectual expansion rather than contraction—of widening horizons and exploration prior to developing specialist work in the prospectus and dissertation. Moreover, dissertation committees at Berkeley are large: a minimum of four members, often five or even more. Most of our students work with all the core faculty to varying degrees, as well as “outside” members; and we greatly value our collective interactions at the political theory workshop.

For all these reasons, we seek students who are seeking a broad, rich, and imaginative intellectual community, and who will feel comfortable discussing their work with peers and faculty members whose interests may seem, at first glance, rather different from their own. The diversity to be found among the wider university population is also a factor to consider here. Berkeley is a large and phenomenally successful public institution, with a special commitment to serving the remarkably diverse California undergraduate student population, including a very large proportion of transfer students from community colleges. We seek graduate students who will thrive teaching, learning, and researching in this context.

Above all, we as a group seek to make offers to those who we feel we are better positioned than our peer schools to help develop into political theorists of stature and intellectual and (perhaps) political significance, given the interests, aptitudes, attitudes, appetites, and aspirations evinced in their applications. We seek people whom we can look in the eye and say: “This is obviously the best place for you!” If you think you fit that description based on the information given across this site, then we warmly invite you to apply.