Platysaurus

SECONDED. I'm going to be in Canada to sort this out and it'd be useful not to pay for a return flight back to Australia to get my visa. Anyone else has dealt with this in the past? The internet is not being very forthcoming.

radiomars, you've done ALL your submissions? Here I was thinking I was on top of things, and I haven't finished a single one. Although it's just losing sleep over SoPs, getting some transcript chaos sorted and harassing flaky recommenders to go. I'm Cultural Anthro, applying for nine schools: Berkeley, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Brown, Harvard, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Yale. Good luck everyone, rest assured I will be venting my paranoia here soon enough.

Yep I'm getting in on this action - who wants to swap?

I've seen a number of different styles, guides and examples for SOPs but nowhere can I get a straight answer on this - what do you do with references? I'm not citing heavily, just a little in one paragraph to show I know the background research and that I'm not going in blind, but does this mean putting a bibliography at the end? I'd prefer to footnote, that would make it much neater, but my discipline (anthropology) always does in-text that so it looks like I don't know the referencing style. At the same time, in-text references with just the author name and year are very non-descript and don't show enough (I'm trying to cite some stuff in other languages as well to show that I read outside the English-speaking academy). And I've seen some exemplars with in-text referencing and without a reference list at the end but I'm not sure if that's how they were submitted or if the universities just chose to upload them like that. Any thoughts?

It's a first draft but I've realised I'm a little lost as to what universities are really expecting with it. Anyone want to have a look at it? For what it's worth I can go through yours, if not, you'll be rewarded with an acknowledgement in my thesis. Lucky you PM me!

Howdy all, My GRE's in a few days now and I'm a little unsettled, I've been doing practice test after practice test and going really well for the most part, BUT my verbal scores in all three of the Gruber's ones are terrible! The test in the ETS book and the timed one on the PowerPrep CD gave me estimates of 750-800 on the old scoring system for my verbal, princeton review I did pretty well at as well, then I get to Gruber's and I'm getting 14 or 15 questions right out of each section (25 questions)! That puts me on like 550 or 560 on the old system, something like 155ish on the new scale, and since I need at least 160 I'm freaking out a little bit. Maths is fine, but since I'm applying for anthropology programs I doubt they'd count it much. Is it Gruber's or is it me????

That's true, I was more worried about the e-rater system than the actual person - it'd be very plausible that even if the human marker would accept me focussing instead of focusing the computer might not. But thanks for the replies, I guess I probably have more important things to worry about.

Yeah I've found plenty of sociology work, but the lack of anthropological stuff is annoying and the focus is mainly on supermaximum security prisons and the prison-industrial system, all of which basically work off the US, and a little bit of Europe. There's a few historians working on prisons in Latin America but Google Scholar just keeps throwing Wacquant back at me. But those are all good reading suggestions, any excuse to procrastinate about GRE study is good!

Anyone know any anthropologists who do stuff on prisons? I'm applying for Grad school in the US in the next few months and I'm interested (at least for the purposes of a Statement of Purpose) in prison systems particularly in a Latin American (Brazilian and/or Bolivian) context - but in terms of finding a good fit with departments I'm lost because I can find next to nothing about prisons outside of Foucault and Wacquant, and nothing by any anthropologists at any rate. Obviously they're not quite the typical fieldsite and I'm not looking to entirely emulate another academic's work, so I guess I'm asking if anyone knows any good anthro departments in the field of law, justice, punishment etc., especially outside a US context. I'm Australian so I'm a little lost wading through all these universities aside from the big-name ones.

Hi all, I'm booked in to do my GRE October 11, study seems to be going pretty well but I've been wondering since I'm Australian whether the markers for the analytical section consider British English spelling to be ok or not - especially now that they have the e-rater system, I don't really want to put an extra u or an s instead of a z in somewhere only to have it picked up as a mistake. I actually emailed GRE about this and pretty much got a non-answer, they said content was more important than spelling and grammar, which is fine but (somewhat ironic for a response about the analytical section) doesn't really answer the question. Anyone else know about this?