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.

Well like I said I think that's the plan unless you're ok with not being very engaged as a researcher. I think if you can get an unfunded offer from a T20 and the department can also provide students for you to talk to who have made it work through RA/TA pay, that's a good bet too (lots of people have noisy signals, and you may be stronger than other candidates who got funding that year - things change a lot after year 1 and 2). And I want to stress that if you're interested in being mainly a teacher, then getting a Ph.D. and going onto the market for lower ranked programs is absolutely worth your while, because there are indeed jobs out there further down in the ranks, and there are a lot of kids out there lined up to pay you to teach them. In a perfect world, people who want to research would bifurcate into different doctoral programs than people who want to teach, and researchers would have to fend for their own money (and not siphon off teaching revenues), leaving college teachers getting paid much more than they currently do. I don't like the situation where teaching is low status, and think it's rather disastrous for kids who have to wade through bad teachers. But it's the world as it is now.

Fabio Rojas's advice is extremely sound. For the vast majority of people, the best graduate school advice is: don't go to graduate school. The jokes about discontented graduate students are all a wonderful laugh until you actually are a person in their mid-twenties or early thirties borrowing money to finish a dissertation, having a first child while make 14k a year, unable to land on a dissertation and teaching intro courses at local community colleges, and so forth.

Oh, yeah, that's mixing issues -- but the problem was I think my lack of clarity. When I said upward mobility, I meant upward mobility among tenured and tenure track professors in R1 research universities. General economic upward mobility is far and away much better in economics; you're absolutely correct. APs starting at T60 state satellite schools can make as much as 100k right out of graduate schools. The only people making 100k out of graduate school in sociology are getting hired in the T10, and I think not even most of them clear that starting. And you're right about the outside options for economics students. Now, I think there are a shit ton of opportunities in private industry that sociology Ph.D.s largely do not tap because of their political and social preferences, but they're there (and would boost our salaries inside the academy if people would exercise them, jussayin). Economics, on the other hand, is very hierarchical. People like John List, the experimentalist who started from I think Montana and ended up climbing all the way up to Chicago, are so rare as to not count in the trend at all. Among sociologists, though, there seems to be a small trend of people moving from T40 programs up. Again, this is all very vague so please take it with a grain of salt. And if you're in the position of deciding what to do with your life right now, be conservative in your estimates and pick a path that you can be happy with given the worst possible outcome stemming from the institution you pick. For many or most people, that will include teaching something you may not even like that much in 5 years to students who are being forced to take your course for general education credits for about as much money as a public school teacher makes, fewer benefits, no Union, and quite likely, a city you'd prefer not to live in. For many people, the rewards of the job will swamp those concerns, but it is difficult to overstate how competitive the academic job market is, and how little support you will get (under even the best circumstances), in getting there and succeeding on it.

I think the important choice, concerning ranking cutoffs, is not placement statistics or other exogenous factors, but your own preferences about research and teaching. If you want to change science and be a researcher, that is going to be unbelievably difficult to do outside of top of the pile career tracks. Prospects for upward mobility are better in sociology than say economics, but not great in absolute terms. If you love sociology, and want badly to teach, and are willing to do so for about as much money as a high school instructor, I think it's probably worth it to go to just about any Ph.D. granting department. If you want to change the science and are considering programs outside the top 30 or 40, I think you should reconsider your preferences.

This is great advice. If you like writing programs and proofs because of the elegance and gee-whiz factor, then you're going to need to get connected to some of the debates in sociology, economics, or political science, if you're going to import computational methods, because it's a struggling subfield in all three of those disciplines. Economists are not impressed with agent based modeling because there have not been any really huge breakthroughs (in terms of solving fundamental problems in the mainstream), and agent based models require way more assumptions about agents than does traditional modeling in econ, where parsimony still rules. I can't say a lot about political science, but they're still catching up to econ in terms of formal theory. There is better reception for quantitative work, i.e. more of it and more people who understand more sophisticated levels of it, in general in political science than in soc, though. In soc there is a small and vigorous crowd of math and physics orphans who got bored with pure logic and wanted to switch into something that is more applied to people and all their big feels. There is a lot of solidarity among these people, but their main concern right now is how to get the stuff into some relevance in the mainstream of soc. Outside some statistics, sociologists are not fans of thinking of behaviors themselves in formal terms. Rational choice died a slow and painful death in sociology, and people still stop by its grave to take a piss every now and then. If you're coming from the quant side into soc, your biased sample will make it look like sociologists do a lot of social networks stuff - and that is incorrect. There is, again, a nice solid crew doing networks in sociology, but it is a somewhat nascent subfield. Most people who talk about "social networks" in sociology are just using it as a techno-jargony way to refer to more traditional sociological theory. One option for you is to get yourself in a computer science PhD program. Those guys can pretty much go wherever they want and do whatever they want, is the impression I get, and they have tons of options in the non-academic job market. Doing that and getting some crossover in social science would put you in a really good position for private employment doing data science.

I would send a very polite and short email to a secretary asking if the committee has come to a decision.

Some people are able to achieve significant upward mobility with an MA. Depending on your preferences, I would say it's totally worth it if you're confident that you can get it done without going 50k into the hole and you can crack the top20 afterward. I wouldn't recommend it if you think you're going to end up in the t50 or t40, and potentially experience downward mobility from there, which will likely mean almost no research, enormous teaching, and not much money when you hit the job market (lower tier liberal arts college or state satellite campus).

I'd say about a 6 out of 10 on a scale of formality is best. Maybe 7. What you would wear to a job interview at a retail store is fine -- not what you'd wear to a job interview at a bank. Sociology is pretty egalitarian, so don't worry about it too much. Mostly what you want to do is relax about the impressions you will or won't make on anyone (nobody really cares), and just focus on getting as much information out of faculty and students (especially upper year students) as possible.

Scholars are time constrained and barely get to read 5% of the things they want to. Scholarly judgments get made on status signals in order to economize on time and reasoning costs. The rich get richer. Go to a top program so that your work gets read, emails get opened, and job market package looked at. Beyond that, you have to perform, and being surrounded by a lot of other smart people will help you do that. People who think that status hierarchies are purely vapid Mathew Effects are lying to themselves.

I shared my acceptances with all programs I visited, five of them, and had transparent, detailed, and helpful conversations with faculty at all of these programs about the comparative advantages of each program. It was a great opportunity to get lots of advice about planning my career. I attempted to negotiate my finances at two of those programs, by citing higher (cost of living adjusted) offers from other programs -- neither of those attempts worked, and neither of them resulted in uncomfortable or unprofessional conversation.