Anti-Climacus

WELL: As one might be able to guess from the slightly-higher-than-normal frequency of posts, the term is pretty much over for me (an oral exam on my international relations core class tomorrow, and a paper which is unlikely to be written for at least another couple of weeks*). This also more-or-less concludes my first year of graduate school. As Claire, Camille and Dara know from personal experience, I'm periodically a fan of summing up a year's worth of experiences to try and get some grand, take-away points. I've basically got one at the moment, but maybe more:

1. In his 20 Questions Jacob Levy encourages theorists to take both some statistics and formal theory (or game theory). Having managed to do both this year (the first quite painfully for the first semester), that's a set of recommendations I can highly endorse. Empirical literature is great for political theorists, because most empirical theories tend to be under-theorized with respect to the sorts of things we care about, which raises the potential for working across fields (as I will hopefully be doing); stats and game theory can provide a much better introduction into the empirical literature, allowing you to actually read the books or articles involved, rather than just skimming the intro and conclusion and avoiding anything with an equation. Also, there's a lot of impressive-looking but dubious empirical work out there (and I don't mean just the obvious obfuscatory stuff like Bueno de Mesquita; I mean more moderate-looking things like Russett and O'Neal, where it's harder to spot what's wrong about the analysis unless you have some familiarity with the statistical approaches involved), and some stats and game theory will help separate out the complicated-but-sound from the complicated-for-complication's-sake. And of course, if you aspire, like I do, to be a political scientist who's a political theorist, rather than just a political theorist, it will mitigate the urge to see positive and normative studies of politics as essentially different (which they're not, so it's good to realize this).

Others are invited to share their feelings on their currently or formerly completed first years of grad school in the comments.

*on applying public opinion surveys and social network theory to theories of liberal democracy, and asking "what's so bad about the way things are now?" Should be fun.