gilbertrollins

I'm 86th percentile verbal, 81st quant, and 96th analytical writing. Do you think those are low enough to get me department-secretary trashed at a top 10?

What about discussing tutoring and a teaching internship I did? They'll be mentioned in a line on my CV already. I don't want to waste space on the SOP talking about noob interests in Spreading the Good Word, and figure teaching aspirations are an implied, and merely necessary but not sufficient condition for admittance anyway. So I'm thinking of cutting it -- but if soc programs are particularly interested in teaching ability, I'll keep it. Thoughts?

I wouldn't crack jokes right at the beginning of a job interview, and I don't think it's an appropriate way to start the SOP. That the general public is either mystified or turned off or both by primary research is widely known, and will likely make you sound naive or immature for pointing out in the SOP. Generally, any tactic to get attention in the SOP other than explaining in a clear tone which mimics that taken in the professional journals of the field you're applying to is not wise, I think. The content of your research and interests should speak for themselves, and window dressing, humor, personal fluff, etc are probably taken as signals of weakness in research and training, and a need to compensate for them. That's a cynical analysis, but at least true for the most cynical reader on the committee -- who may be the veto you need to convince.

I'm not discussing my personal background -- at all.

I'm in social sciences. I would say, as long as you're not using a bunch of jargon that's deeply specific to a subfield of com sci that committee members aren't likely to be familiar with, it's fine to be technical. You want to strike some balance between signaling that you have a competent technical grasp, but aren't impossibly unable to communicate with colleagues and such.

Cool. I'll focus on finding as many potential advisers as possible in potential departments. Somewhat off-topic, then: I'm applying to do (Removed at Users Request). So far I'm looking at (Removed at Users Request). Any other suggested departments, especially more middle-ranked considering that list is heavy-hit weighted?

Thanks all. I'm taking the usual advice to throw a wide net, where I could be happy and finish even if I didn't get along with or get help from someone whom I thought (at this very naive stage) would make my career. I don't know if this is a reasonable thought, but I'm imagining that advising and mentoring (in social science) will be much more important in year 2 and 3, than 4 and 5. As I understand it the best mentors will sort of throw you in the deep end, all by your lonesome, when you're ready to write -- and let you learn how to swim. The stages leading up to that in getting conversations, encouragement, seminar, etc are probably much more important. And I might be able to substitute *some* of that with external seminars, contact with other faculty, and independent reading if I (God forbid) find myself less taken care of in the program. Scary stuff!

I had been advised that asking if someone intended to move might be seen as uncouth, and unproductive even if the person didn't think there was something distasteful about it, as a Prof. wouldn't want to broadcast their plans to move publicly while working out details, applying, having talks, etc. I did mean assistant professors. I'm particularly interested in anyone who can comment on sociology specifically (though I appreciate Chai's comments), because institutional structure, funding, politics, and incentives are so different among disciplines.

I am shooting at middle aged advisers who are established in their field, thinking these people will be the least likely to move, as against rising AP's. Is that wise? How much movement is there in sociology? It's quite common in economics. All told I'm not putting extreme emphasis on the consideration because it will only become extremely crucial three years from now, and it's difficult to extrapolate any predictive trend that far out.

Yeah it's the committee's call. I imagine they take measured interest in recommendations from faculty who want X application given attention -- but they're assembling a cohort, which is a different task than just vetting applicants to match with faculty.

Huh -- socialgroovements is right that it's PhD only. I swear I read about an interdisciplinary masters at Chicago. Maybe just crossing wires. Anyway sorry about that.

Check out Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Two things, though. The thesis titles tell me it's a humanities-leaning culture of social scientists. Claims to be completely open to interdisciplinary study are not in my (limited) experience true anywhere. And two, their placement rates are self-published. So yes, among students whom they've recommended and supported, gobs have been accepted to good programs. That says nothing about how many students have left the program without support. I would just do a business PhD in marketing, which have competent sequences of core courses set up, advisers prepared to land within at least buck-shot range of your interests, and a yet-still broad enough field to afford you independence. Outside accounting and economics specializations in business departments, the specializations seem extremely broad.

No apologies necessary. How we went from me asking about the proliferation of mathematical proofs and statistics in different subfields of sociology to my putative naivete of the methods and models attending to the research I've been working on for two years, I don't know. In case this discussion can still be a benefit to the viewers at home, I get the impression that something like half of sociology cohorts are full of people coming from other disciplines (though probably very few from economics, as these candidates will typically go over to political science if they're not happy with econ proper). And @faculty is absolutely right that sociology adcoms aren't merely looking for orphans from other disciplines who have confused research goals and nothing better than hackneyed essays about the methodological shortcomings of their home discipline to sell themselves. But I would venture that subset of students would have struggled anywhere -- these people sound like they more had a problem absorbing material at a professional level and applying it creatively and novelly, though may have done quite well for themselves acing material that was spoon fed to them in their home discipline as undergraduates. That they came from other disciplines probably makes them more salient examples -- but uncreative, and unpersuasive research from people who don't manage to transcend their BA training in another discipline aren't any more scientifically useful than people who don't transcend their BA training in sociology -- and probably fare just as poorly on the job market. That said, considering the abysmal stereotypes of sociology one gets in the economics department, please do stop to consider that someone considering a transition who can speak even half way competently about disciplinary intersections and frictions, probably has considered his decision and former research, with some appropriate gravity. Especially if he shows up asking rather particular questions about sociological methodology. All links and suggestions are completely appreciated. Thanks.

Smiley is an unintentional artifact of typing "B" ")"

(Removed at Users Request) C) To elevator my thesis and why it fits with concerns in sociology, my claim is that long-run preference intransitivity (inconsistency -- i.e. people change their minds about what they like) allowed people to be persuaded that markets and innovation were a good thing. There is broad (if not coming to the same conclusions about the beneficence of markets) support for that idea in the sociological literature on Progress. And indeed it's fundamentally a Hegelian claim about the influence of ideas on social forms. Forgive me for thinking that my work on the formation of social norms and mores, search for microfoundations of macrosocial outcomes, and experience in doing comparative historical empirics on the early modern era don't fit into the aims of swaths of sociological research in historical and economic sociology. THE major complaint about economics in economic sociology is that preferences aren't a consistent and stable set which can then be maximized with respect to a constraint function (prices and budgets). Their claim is that preferences are embedded in social structure. And most of the work in networks seems to try to get an idea of what that structure actually looks like and how it affects the formation of opinions/preferences. Hence my interest in networks, one of the very few fruitful cross-over areas where there's any talk beyond open hostility and dismissal left between economists and sociologists. Beyond preferences I'm interested in technology, as it's the foundation of economic growth even according to economists -- again correct me if I've misidentified technology to be a hot topic in sociology. My claim on technology is that it's the result of a collective action problem, which is not just anethema to a majority of work in economics, but of course at the center of the analysis of social change in sociology. But the concern that I haven't done enough reading on my research interests, and potentially lack enough of an open mind to absorb the lessons of a graduate education in methods I already prefer is noted. This statement, "rational choice work is all considered "deductive" in sociology, as far as I know, in that you already kind of know the answer before you ask the questions," reeks of profound ignorance not just of what deduction is (you're claiming that all deductive reasoning is tautological), but even a cursory reading of any economics outside blanket dismissals of its methods as merely the reproduction of neoliberal doctrine. Economists constantly look at data to see "gee what the hell is going on here?" and that, what you are calling inductive method of research is why the discipline has made progress in the last fifty years. Take for instance Robert Fogel's work on slavery. Doug North's work on institutions. Coase on institutions. Becker on family. Demographers on population data that didn't fit Malthusian predictions. And on. And that's how I came to a sociological perspective on my research on language, preferences, social norms, and technology re: the Industrial Revolution and economic growth. Jacib's fourth paragraph is just one assertion or another, proceeding roughly as such: "You say X. You haven't read enough sociology." If you'd like to provide some substantive contrast to how sociological thinking differs from what I was saying, other than that context matters (yes, that is the whole point of Pragmatics, another whopper the Culturomics guys missed), and that statistical hypothesis testing has problems (yes, a measure merely of the signal-to-noise ratio in data says very little about the theoretical and social significance of the size of the coefficient), feel free. I was talking broadly about formalizing consistent, generalizable hypotheses about social mechanics and testing them with data. You've got quite a larger audience than me or even economists to argue against if you see gross negligence in that methodological approach. And since your a soc of religion guy, and have such a naive view of economics, you may want to read Eli Berman's Radical Religious, and Violent: The New Economics Of Terrorism. Neither Adam Smith nor Berman nor economists broadly have ever claimed people do not believe the things they do -- the argument is that people face an ecology of costs and benefits (wait! context?) which delimit their choices. Maybe the Federalist papers are wrong. Maybe the degree of competition among institutions is a useless variable in social analysis because economists are a bunch of arrogant imperialists. I seriously doubt either, though. That said, the methods in economics lack a very serious look at norms, institutions, and collective action outside some game theoretical work which barely provides testable hypotheses anyway, and are really just very fancy looking interpretive stories. So I thought I might transition to a social science which is more dedicated to empirical foundations and open to my interests in its main stream.

I'm on my way out the door and will reply in greater detail, but Erez and Jean Michelle aren't sociologists. They're applied statisticians, and early in their careers at that. What I said about their project might be naive, or misguided by my narrow undergraduate training, had my sentiments not been drawn from the incredible criticism of their project they drew from linguists, of whom have fully four corpus linguistics journals - not a paper in one of them cited. I've read Sociological Imagination. I've also read a good deal of economic sociology. If my begging for "specific, well defined assumptions about behavior to test" sounded like a haughty, veiled criticism which really meant "lacks a mathematical rational actor model which the data can then be run through econometric multivariate analysis in order to establish its fit to a production function or static equilibrium," it wasn't. And it's really not my lack of reading in sociology, methodology, and philosophy of science broadly that's to blame for the misinterpretation, though the reverse instance may be true in how you interpreted my statement.

Oh. I just looked at that powerpoint. If you're talking about working from theory down to empirics, vis a vis starting with a look at the data and working back to theory, arguably a majority of the application of rational choice in sociology started from an inductive approach. Demographers saw people having less kids as their incomes went up which seemed backwards, reasoned that the opportunity cost of time was going up commensurate to income increase, and that children were less productive as labor inputs in technologically advanced societies. So too with Religion -- Smith was the the first one to point out that state supported monopolies of religion allows religions to charge people higher prices in terms of subscription (think Crusades and Suicide Bombing). Becker's work on crime maybe started more from a theoretical perspective. In any case, I'm saying a lot about what very little I know of rational choice in sociology so feel free to correct.

Thanks for all the links. I'm not familiar with the terms "inductive" and "deductive" outside my mathematics courses, so I don't get the usage above. Maybe that's my fault for not having a foundational base in philosophy. I don't understand how "rational choice" is deductive, as juxtaposed with other behavioral theories. In a rational choice framework we assume agents face costs and benefits accruing to their actions (which not always and not even usually accrue to pecuniary interest), and maximize their welfare based on them. In a structural framework we assume agents are compelled by the path dependencies and mechanics of the social frame. Both of those approaches rely on assumptions and definitions of behavior, come to conclusions and (hopefully) test them, no? Is that not deductive both ways, then? My OP wasn't clear. That's what I get for trying to be fancy. My question is more so, how much of network theory in sociology takes a priori form in mathematical proofs, like Damon Centola's work and other economists on graphs and games? How much empirical work uses multivariate and descriptive statistics against interpretive and ethnographic methods? And on a scale 1-10, how hot under the collar is the quant v. qual debate in sociology, if much at all? (Removed at Users Request)

Can anyone enlighten me on what sociologists mean when they talk about quantitative and mathematical sociology? Mathematical anything would seem to imply logical derivations based on assumptions. Game theory. Graph theory. And their spinoffs in social sciences, networks and computational simulations. Do I safely categorize "mathematical sociology" as "mathematical social theory?" That work, however is not quantitative, as in it doesn't measure quantities, only suggests directions variables lean and interact. So is "quantitative sociology" sociology which leverages advanced statistical analyses? That would be on the empirical end, and very different from mathematical theory (though probably not mutually exclusive in authorship trends).

I think a long, poorly done letter will annoy someone a little (as @faculty pointed out) and be then forgotten at worst. Nobody is emailing their adcom colleagues saying "X student contacted me -- don't read their application." A short note that hits a faculty's research interests on the head and compels them will be mildly positive -- the odds of that happening are not great, as my experience contacting external faculty just for research questions (where there was no fawning for placements) would indicate. But the vast majority will probably just be ignored, for no better reason than faculty don't care what external undergraduates need or have to say. I'd venture an 80/20 rule here. 80% just completely ignored. 10% annoying. 10% mildly positive. @mbrown seems to be correct on filling in the question on the application, though I don't expect the signal to be especially strong. That said, the question exists because in the (rare) event one has made *strongly positive* contact with a potential adviser, the circumstance probably weighs very heavily in the admission decision. The cost for the program to ask you is near zero. The benefit, though rare, is very large. Hence they ask. I have only had luck hearing back from faculty whom have worked with, slash are close with my current adviser, or whose work I have done substantive research in and had *concise,* legitimate questions about thus.

I think committees are looking for maturity of skills and research interests. That doesn't necessarily require publications or work experience (in fact in most cases work experience is probably a detriment), it requires maturity of skills and research interests. If older candidates are preferred it is because they've done more independent research and can signal better their commitment to the task etc. Undergraduates who have substantial research experience and relationships with advisers etc will find themselves in the same position a successful MA student will on applying. Considering age on its own terms and holding everything else constant, I would imagine younger applicants are preferred as the costs of sacrifice one makes in terms of personal life, relocating, etc go up as one gets older, adversely affecting their performance in the program.

I have spent considerable time on economics applications forums, as I've considered both fields. The qualifications of most successful applicants there are pretty loony, as well. My pet theory is that demand for advanced degrees has risen at a fixed supply, and the prices (in terms of opportunities foregone to acquire exceptional credentials) have gone way up. Admissions committees have no incentive to take chances on greener applicants, when attrition is already a problem among hyper-qualified cohorts. That said, given the diversity of methods and fields in sociology, I suspect there are more ways to distinguish oneself than getting advanced degrees or doing professional research assistance before applying.

Do any in the sociology department work with the guys over at the History of Political Economy Institute? Also Rachel Kranton (economics) on networks/game theory and Timur Kuran (econ/poly sci) on economic history and institutions, do either of them attend seminar and work with the sociologists?

Ironical (joke) that you'd bring Duke up -- (Removed at Users Request) because of Rachel Kranton, Timur Kuran, and the gang at the History of Political Economy research institute.

I'm interested in technology, economic growth, institutions, and norms. I'd like to study those using network theory and computational analyses, historical data, content analysis, regressions etc. I'm doing a senior thesis (Removed at Users Request) . Can anyone suggest programs to me? I've got (Removed at Users Request) in mind. But I am an economics major so most of my reading has been of behavioral and institutional etc. *economists* as against sociologists. I'd really like some help identifying scholars sympathetic to my interests. Thanks!