gilbertrollins

Several applicants have been waitlisted. Is there any progress? I hear there is a last minute scramble during which many slots will open up while attendees accept offers from other Winter Receptions. There is no further information on the Eventbrite.

MAPPS only recommends students who do what they say and who they think they have strong chances. The published statistics do not reflect attrition. Many MAPPS students subsidize the division of social science and Ph.D. stipends.

Departments don't mind bringing you in as an interdisciplinary type and even trying to sell you on how they're more open than other places as long as you have competent reasons for going outside the department (see Jacib's finish), and as long as you signal that you understand the limited scope of doing so and that your greatest benefit will derive in learning the methods and theories common in sociology.

Most empirical studies in economic sociology that I've read concentrate on art, legal, and financial markets. Economic sociologists usually look for situations where the assumptions of neoclassical economics break down, and art and financial markets are nice expositions of that (changing tastes, lots of persuasion, network effects, difficult or impossible to measure and pay marginal product, etc). I think given your interests in cities (assuming that transportation falls under that rubric too), you should focus on learning about urban sociology. You will find that a lot of the methods are not quantitative, but a lot has been learned with the qualitative methods used, and you will probably find the theories about cities and neighborhoods a lot more novel and interesting than the criticisms of neoclassical economics in economic sociology, which since most of them have been done by heterodox and institutional economists, you're likely familiar with. Work like Mark Granovetter's and Richard Swedberg's is considered seminal in economic sociology, but so far as I understand it, this kind of (mostly) arm chair theory is just not salable on the academic job market anymore, so you're right to look for more applied stuff. Viviana Zelizer's work provides an outstanding example. James Montgomery comes to mind. @RefurbedScientist: I should have been clearer that, like you recommended, I was saying that she should find fields and faculty in sociology to which she'd like to apply statistical estimation ("[applied] statistical generalist").

Econ soc is roughly split into "try to prove economics is wrong" Marxian econ soc and "enrich and amend economic thinking with sociology" econ soc. For the former: Berkeley, Wisconsin (others?). For the latter: Duke, Cornell. There are pockets elsewhere. If you can land in the top 10, do that regardless your specialty because you'll be able to branch out and be enterprising. Computational soc is a tiny field. Math soc is almost dead. Proving theorems, even creative theorems, will get you nowhere in sociology. Clever applied rational choice models can gain traction with empirical validation; nobody is interested really in the "look what else I can show is rational" kind of stuff that's popular in sociological and behavioral economics. Statistics are welcome in just about every subfield of sociology. Don't focus on topics and applications, just say you love statistics, are really good at it, and want to apply to other general fields in sociology. Research people in various fields who are working on a (relatively broad) sample of topics you're interested in, and express an interest in learning more. Aim at the top 20 at a statistical generalist and you should be ok, with a relatively strong possibility of top 10 if your letters are good or you have sociological research you've done, is in R&R, etc.

None of the other links will work for you, but clicking "Syllabus" and then clicking through until you get the PDF should. https://chalk.uchicago.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_113983_1%26url%3D Good luck.

Also, I find the indictment that one or another analysis or mode of analysis is "limiting" to be really pretentious. The statement implies that the person saying it has access to truths that are beyond the bounds of the very mode of reason her opponent is thinking within. It's a fancy way to call someone stupid, and in that, not a particularly constructive argument. If one wants to invite people to see things their way, a better way to do that then indicting the entire mode of logic the other person is thinking within is to address their claims and show how they fail. Otherwise we just start lining up into philosophical camps, accusing one another of subscribing to the wrong ism, and essentially name calling.

To be fair, jmu, you have access to top scholars in your field at an otherwise low prestige university because you work in a relatively low prestige field. I say that as someone who worked with a top scholar in a low prestige field at a low prestige university, so I'm not knocking the strategy or the importance of intellectual variation, but the strategy for getting ahead in Geography or Heterodox Economics is not the same for that in mainstream sociology, to which the modal reader on this board aspires.

If the elite conversation in sociology is a sham, I don't understand why you seem to have taken the majority of your position from it. The positions you're espousing have been popular and in many facets central to the scientific conversation in elite sociology for decades. I apologize for not engaging the particulars of what you said further. For the kids at home: your taste or distaste for the social structure you face in the academy notwithstanding, it would be wise to take into account the situation as it is. No matter what rank of graduate school you get in to, your ability to influence the academic job market and rate at which other people cite papers from which journals is about zero in the limit, so it would be wise to make your career choices based on how things are versus how you would like them to be.

You get paid to read books, fly to San Francisco and get hammered this summer, and post and read articles on the internet. After completing the requirements of your program and convincing your mentors and students that you're sufficiently amiable to be around, you will get a teaching position somewhere and get a captive audience to discuss things that you find satisfying on a personal, political, and intellectual level all day long. In what sense are you being dominated currently?

This is true, and the absolute minority of what jobs at lower ranked institutions entail. There are also opportunities to influence for instance municipal policy with white papers and government consulting when working at small liberal arts colleges and so forth. But the vast majority of what you will do is teach. And the vast majority of people who end up with jobs outside the top 30 or 40 will not have a substantial impact on the scientific conversation. Many (most?) people enter graduate school with precisely that goal in mind. I am trying to convey when it is reasonable to have that expectation or not, not to tell everyone to give up on studying sociology altogether if they don't get into Harvard.

Many status distinctions exist as a result of, not in spite of, the best efforts of well meaning and intelligent but constrained individuals to behave in an ethically sound manner and evaluate one another based on transparently proscribed criterion. Many status distinctions exist because of arbitrary and harmful efforts of either ignorant or willfully malicious people to exploit others. There is a profound difference between these mechanisms, and deciding which one is operating in any number of contexts will be one of your professional responsibilities as a social story teller. On my estimation, graduate school admissions and the conduct of professional scholarship manifests the first sort of status distinctions. Discontent with academic institutions is ripe among all disciplines because academics are a bunch of self referential whiners who have a lot of time on their hands and extremely high ideals. So be it; I'm guilty. But our hierarchies emerge because thinking, reading, and writing take an enormous amount of time and energy and people are only so smart and there is only so much time. So people use status distinctions on the front end to decide whether or not an intellectual resource is worth investing further in. In almost no other employment situation will people go to such great pains to evaluate the individual product of a worker beyond these group affiliations. This is the best we can do. It works the same way in the street. We have a division of labor in cultural and intellectual specialists who tell social stories because not everybody hast the time or desire to sit back and contemplate the world. So some people dedicate their entire day to writing journal articles or reality TV scripts or campaign speeches. Accepting these kinds of realities and understanding their functional significance, while understanding that other hierarchies and specializations (say, military hierarchies specialized in murdering people with remote control airplanes) have different functions and arise for different reasons is how we become nuanced thinkers and make better science.

We're saying the same thing largely. "Model to be copied" = "right tail of the distribution." "Typical student" = "mode or mean of the distribution." So I'm saying, like you, that people should ignore the superstar bid, because both they and the department have mutually reinforcing incentives to focus on the right tail. You want to dream big and think you're above average, departments want to sell you on the program. But the chances are best, actually, that you will fail the program and not even end up on the market, or land on the left tail of the distribution of the department's placements. So I think you really want to focus on how bad it could be, and if you'd still be happy with that -- then go for it. You marry someone who you're pretty sure you can still love even when you're out of control angry. Etc. I think the point about reference groups is overstated, but this I'm sure links back to a theoretical disposition about where agents derive their welfare from that we probably disagree on. Even still, your point I think adds to mine rather than contradicts it: if you end up at an SLAC or bean counting job in the government after struggling at Princeton, can you still be happy? If you can -- then go for it.

I just got off the phone with a friend who is deciding between two MPP programs, one which is lower status and giving her a lot of money; one which is higher status and charging her as much as a couple luxury vehicles. I ended up saying that she ought to consider what her career outcomes will look like if she is two standard deviations below the mean outcome at either program, and what that will mean for her in terms of career fulfillment and the expected salary she will receive less her loan payments. I think that is decent advice for deciding where to apply as well: "if I end up at the bottom of my class, struggling through my program, and really sucking it up on the job market compared to my peers, will I still be happy with the life I'm living and feel like I've achieved upward mobility compared to my current situation?"

This view is not supported by the literature on the distribution of academic citations.