Not Good Enough

Though we will all never be good enough, never know enough, never succeed enough (my therapist disagrees with this but that is for another day and another blog) There have been some key moments in my life where these shortcomings were made particularly obvious to me. I will be honest--it hurt. A lot. I am still archaic and believe humility is a virtue so while I pursue such things I thought I would submit to you all the response of one venerable mind to my unfounded hope of climbing the ivory tower:

Joanna,

I don't think you'd get much doctoral support for these topics in the Business School either. What's missing in your email is any reference to the questions (hypotheses) you want to address (test). Aside from that the 50th percentile in math doesn't bode well for admission to the political science department. I can't comment on the Business School because for us you'd have to take the GMAT, but if your performance on math in that test paralleled that in the GRE, I think you'd be hard-pressed to get in. Doctoral study at a place like Columbia, business as well as political science, places a very high premium on the use of mathematically complex methodologies to raise or test hypotheses that are grounded in an academic discipline (in the business school, psychology, sociology or economics, and in political science either political science or possibly economics). I hope this is helpful, and I'm sorry if it's discouraging, but my sense is that you need to get a better feel for what doctoral programs entail, particularly at rarified research universities like Columbia. That's not to say that you can't get a doctorate in fields or subfields like the ones you mentioned without being a methodological maven, but that's hard to do, indeed impossible, at a place like Columbia. Good luck.

Venerable Mind