gilbertrollins

Given the right mix of discussion, the forum has accumulated several thousand page views in a day in the past.

All good advice above. "4. Don't ask money-related questions," is right for this particular instance, because you're not accepted yet. Applicants who are accepted and juggling offers should not be afraid to talk money with their programs.

Visit days a great time. Some schools will even do some recruiting calls. In my experience, faculty are more than happy to help you decide where to go, and to discuss in a really beneficent manner the comparative advantages of their program relative to where else you got in. I visited all 5 schools I got in to (which is rare because I didn't know much about the field and was desperate for info). Absolutely nobody put any pressure on me to attend their program. Ultimately in this situation, you're the one with more bargaining power and it's a great opportunity to network and get information about your prospective programs. Also, pay close attention to the graduate students who take you out for drinks and dinners -- peer effects are incredibly important in graduate school -- can't stress that enough.

I don't think much started rolling in until mid to late February. If you guys want to get a better idea of when to expect what, you can click over to "results search" and construct a histogram of results postings from last year. Good luck everyone!

and the lol @ my thesis website takes submissions from people making fun of their own work

Kind or not, the points are widely agreed on among leading sociologists. Undergraduate training in sociology is generally poor (which is why sociology programs eagerly admit from other disciplines). Personal stories are almost totally irrelevant to scientific qualifications. Students rarely research sufficiently the faculty at programs they apply to. Students often forget to customize the school name on form SOPs they've written. Admitted students almost always choose higher ranked programs over ones that specialize more heavily in their field. SOPs are often overly flowery and not written in the tone of tier-1 journal articles. The absolute majority of students will not get academic jobs. Sociology does not hire or promote armchair theorists whose preoccupation is with re-interpreting classic texts anymore. Professorship is one of the worst ways to go about "making a difference," if one is interested in solving social problems. Sociology has been overloaded with interview studies of racial, gendered, and national cultural issues and only rarely do extremely creative cases of these yield top tier employment anymore. Students have a tendency to identify with and like seminal works they've been exposed to as undergraduates, and hence mistakenly apply to programs hoping to work with very old faculty rather than mid-career faculty. Students often recapitulate and summarize sociological concepts and research in their SOPs, when the audience is a person who has been reading such research for decades. Many students apply to graduate school because they like and were good at college, without realizing that primary research requires a set of skills almost totally removed from those required to succeed in undergraduate coursework. Many people apply to graduate school for lack of imagination of where to go after college. I agree that these realities are unkind, but I think having a sense of humor about them and venting such information is a massive improvement over politely pretending that such realities don't exist while people invest enormous money and emotion into graduate applications, and while professors on the other side of the bargain spend enormous time vetting application packages.

lol @ everyone's thesis

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23truthfulstatementsofpurpose&src=hash&f=realtime

Bad Hessian is good. Also take a look at Michael Macy and his lab at Cornell, Fabio Rojas at Indiana, Chris Bail at UNC, and James Evans and his lab at Chicago. Computational people are having a bit of trouble making inroads into sociology - there's a lot to get worked out. But there is sufficient excitement and useful enough results coming out of the methods that it will gain ground and likely tip into more mainstream hires and pubs.

I exchanged edits of my SOP with a friend last round and had wonderful admissions results. I also got feedback from professors and current graduate students.

I think what Karl32 means is that MA/MS degrees in sociology are very low value for private industry and public work, and that unless you complete rather astonishing work at one of the programs, they're not a great portfolio booster for upper tier programs either. I think *very* briefly mentioning that you had insufficient time to prepare for the quant GRE because of the exigencies of your work life and country of origin is appropriate in your SOP. One sentence. Two tops. Anything more and you're getting into falling-over-yourself excuse making and just make the situation worse. Ultimately I don't think it will be a huge problem. Good luck.

Your verbal is definitely strong enough for the cut, and I really have no idea how sociology programs look at the quant score, but my sense is that sociologists use it as a generalized proxy for analytical reasoning more than anything, considering the low demands of baseline quant training in soc programs.

Most of what I heard is that nobody cares about the AWA because they're general audience essays graded by, first a computer, then PhD English students.

Like has been said above, applying to interdisciplinary specialty programs requires more foresight on the part of the applicant, because they are connected to very particular faculty networks and journals. One can start from a generalist main-line program like sociology or economics and branch out into a specialty from there, potentially ending up in a policy school or specialized school of education as one develops one's own research network during the dissertation. The reverse is not generally true.

I get the impression that stating a definite research interest and some clear-headed sense of how you would study it empirically is important mostly for signaling your competence to the committee, not for committing to a long run research agenda. This is the general advice for the NSF GFRP research proposal, and I think it applies pretty well to graduate school applications as well. So finding something reasonably specific to focus on, and work that angle. "I don't know what I want to study and not really any idea how professional research works, but I really love sociology and got really good grades," is the application you don't want to send.

Those scores likely aren't low enough to exclude you from first-pile competition at any of the universities you mentioned. It's hard to overstate how bad the GRE results of sociology applicants are. If you have a strong package otherwise, shoot at as many programs as you can afford.

If you're already interested in structural models as an undergraduate, you're going to end up taking metrics courses in the policy, stats, or economics departments even at a T5 university. If you can get into the T10, you should probably just go because of the peer effects and faculty sponsorship. If you can't land there, you should pick a program on topical fit, not the statistical sequences offered in the department, which will be insufficient for your research long run.

I've definitely heard of people studying food: a girl i met recently did an entire thesis on buffalo mozzarella. But if you're going to study rice, it will help to have a specific theoretical question going in because it is otherwise such a large topic.

I just read the original post by plznE3. Pure theory is out of vogue in sociology; in fact there are really no more proper theorists in sociology anymore. There are still strong debates and divides over which methods can and should be used in which contexts for which questions, but postmodern theory is not popular in sociology anymore, and never had the impact it did in say anthropology. Personally I think pure theory of any sort is pretty useless, so I have a hard time recommending you proceed with your interests, but if you must, you'll probably find more of an audience in the English department, yes.

If you are confident you want to make long-run professional sacrifices in favor of your locational preferences, then go for it. Otherwise I would make rank and fit your first through fifth selection criteria, followed by stipend per cost of living, department culture, campus resources, and finally location.

Econ and math majors get extra weight because they're almost uniformly harder than sociology undergraduate programs. If you got a couple bad grades in courses like Abstract Algebra that are dragging your GPA down, or if you have some bad grades from early in college when you were still figuring things out, you don't have to worry. You will need strong letters and people with some kind of tangential connection to sociological-ish research to write in confirming that it is a good topical fit for you. Feel free to PM me for more help.

As I understand it, undergraduate sociology curricula poorly represent what professional sociology looks like.

Will read more world systems theory and get back to you.

Hear it now from two grad students and one prof. Three's a party! But nothing like the NYU party at ASA. There is no party like the NYU party at ASA.

Oh, and I don't know who at Cornell is working on this kind of stuff, but my impression of the place is that you have quant people doing political soc, quant people doing inequality and gender, quant people doing simulations and networks, and quant people doing economic sociology that looks a lot like heterodox (but non-Marxian) economics. Dunno if that's going to be a good spot for your concerns.