gilbertrollins

I had three letters from economists and got 5 offers from top 20 schools -- you don't need letters from sociologists. Also, sociology takes a disproportionate number of its graduate students from other undergraduate and graduate programs. History and poli sci are perfect. Good luck.

No problem!

Everyone should take the GRE as soon as possible in the event you need/want to retake. Shoot for the 80th percentile or greater in both categories, and you shouldn't have a problem anywhere. 90% guarantees you no problems. The GRE is a reject criterion, not an accept criterion, so don't rip your hair out trying to get a perfect score (but do well -- it is important). Sol_barber: your letter writers can send essentially the same letter to each school, and most of the electronic submission systems make it relatively easy for them to click a link in their email box and upload a PDF. It's not much trouble. But you're right that they really need to contain superlatives. It's not a problem that you haven't co-published or have a masters thesis -- most, even US masters students, don't -- because I think about half or more of candidates applying are coming straight from undergraduate degrees, and masters students usually have not finished their programs before applying. Also, differences between the European and American systems are well known and accounted for in admissions, so don't bug out too much about those aspects. I think the best thing you can do is get started now on organizing a succinct, easy to read and flawless CV, and crafting your statement of purpose. The SOP will help you clarify your own research priorities, which will force you to narrow your program selection (doing it geographically is a bad idea unless you have very important external demands). And doing the SOP and thinking hard about what you've accomplished and where you want to go will help you coach your letter writers on which of your experiences and qualities to highlight. Most undergraduate research assistance in the states is a bit of either a sandbox sham, or rather menial empirical work. It's more important as a signal that you were hand-picked out of a large group of your peers, and that you're nominally dedicated to research, than it is a demonstration of a variety of technical and analytical skills. Your letter writers can hopefully convey these qualities without the RA and thesis writing comments other students may have. And like I said, committees anyway know that your access to such opportunities were more limited. Best luck.

I'm all registered and plane-ticketed for the ASA in New York on the 10th. If anyone else is going to be out there -- let's give a shout in this thread (or PM me if you want to stay down low). I hope everyone's having an amazing summer!

I don't think anyone will hate you for going into private industry, or maybe I'm just being naive because I think they shouldn't hate you for it. In any event, your long term life plans could change and are your business anyway, so as long as you don't sell yourself as a professional-school candidate and make it clear that you're interested in becoming a rigorous research professional, I don't think you'll have trouble with admissions and graduate school along the way.

That's a really solid line of thinking, and it sure sounds like you've got a straight head to go right at the PhD. Best of luck. Your comments about acting too smart for your skin color and your boss not liking it (if I'm reading your comments correctly) are interesting to me. As a white guy, with mostly black and brown friends, I actually find myself posturing-down around them -- limiting my vocabulary, avoiding making the conversation too intellectual, and so forth. But I also find myself catering a lot to the context I'm in as well, for instance getting a lot more folksy with my speech and friendly when I go back up to Wisconsin. I think there's something to be said for translating and speaking the language of those around you, but I encounter a lot of situations where I'm expected to keep my mouth shut and don't, so I totally feel where you're coming from. I think you should definitely get where you feel comfortable, and you likely possess the skills to navigate there.

I find that I end up putting so much pressure on myself that I burn out completely and associate a lot of anxiety with work. On that margin, I wonder if deliberately forcing breaks, social time, and me time, would actually increase productivity.

How do you know when you've done enough in a day, and it's ok to go relax?

More important than the entry-barrier to a US PhD program, is the long term consideration. One cannot operate as a professional sociologist without at least a pedestrian comprehension of statistical methods, even if you do not yourself use the methods in your own work. The GRE involves high school level math. The real challenge is practicing to learn how to do the problems quickly within the time limits, and getting used to solving them strategically. Like @ohgoodness said, don't stop before you've started. The GRE practice books are very good.

Reading in further -- the Grusky paper is actually excellent, and I recommend it to anyone. The historical section is poor, but the rest of the review of the field of stratification scholarship is superior, as are his cleanly delineated turns in how one development in a field led to another, and how the subfields contrast with one another.

I found the Davis and Moore paper a little haphazard. In a very vague way, they essentially lay down the principles of supply and demand as determining functional payoffs to different social roles -- going so far as to talk explicitly about scarcity and the costs one sacrifices in attaining the skills (totems?) required to assume a new social role. They give no definition of what makes a social role "important" to society, other than to say that important roles are more functional and therefore receive higher payoffs both monetarily and in terms of prestige and esteem. That definition is circular. Then they introduce some interesting bits about religion, and finish with a kind of watered down recapitulation of Marx's criterion for strata: the ownership of property and command of workers. Didn't learn a lot from that one. The race and IQ paper is good, but outlines what are now (I think, at least) pretty commonly understood arguments in the IQ gender gap debate, considering it's been going on for so long. In any event, I'm eager to get to know more of Swidler's work. I keep hearing her name everywhere. An interesting rebut to the idea that "intelligence maps to skills, which map to economic payoffs" debate, and the philosophical issues it presents for the ethics of redistribution, is Hayek's "Equality, Merit, and Value." I'm as skeptical as anyone that measured g has a large impact on social outcomes, and broadly sympathize with the position in the Swidler paper. But the Hayek paper is very good food for thought, regardless. Grusky's paper is much more sophisticated, both in language and in the pointedness of his logic, than the other two papers, which I like. But the origin story he tells about communal ownership in primitive groups, meritocracy, and equal distributions of power, is just plain wrong -- and as much has been known and said by anthropologists since at least Malinowski in the 20s. I don't agree that I'm missing "the basics," considering most of what i've read in these papers tonight I've encountered either in introductory sociology courses or independent reading. Me proffering an alternative hypothesis about the origin of inequality shouldn't by necessity signal that I've just never heard the commonly-accepted stories before. Also -- the absolute minority of what's stated in any of those papers is supported with any material evidence. Though they may be theoretically oriented papers.

Krugman's academic work is good, and I'm all for scholars moonlighting as public intellectuals. Academics should encourage journalistic dialogue that translates results. It's just pretentious and insular to sneer at anything that isn't said by an "expert." There are, anyway, a lot of incredibly stupid people with Ph.D's and "expertise." And at least half of what drives people's derision of scholars who actually make it into the lime light as public intellectuals is just -- jealousy. "Gasp! An academic with public influence! But that's what I want! And he doesn't agree with me either! What a rip!" I just took the "strat causes inequality" quote from Lisa Kiester's new book, and remember hearing it somewhere else too -- a syllabus for a U of Maryland soc course I think, from the policy school. Not totally sure on the second one.

I keep seeing this phrase over and over again, and in textbooks: "stratification causes inequality." What am I missing here? That statement looks like a complete tautology to me. Inequality and stratification could be caused by capital accumulation. Homophillic preferences. Structural characteristics of languages. But aren't inequality and stratification the same thing?

The economic explanation, which I find particularly compelling, is that kids are cheaper to raise in rural areas, and actually provide revenue to the family in the form of unskilled, and unpaid labor. The theory of demand thus predicts people will demand more kids. Clearly cultural mechanisms are at work here as well, potentially even dominating and swamping the economic, materialistic explanation. But it's an important alternative hypothesis to consider.

To respondants so far: I sincerely appreciate all the discussion and links so far. This kind of internetting makes learning go extroardinarily faster for me.

HA! Typing a little fast there. Clark's observation seems to make some sense to me. My basic intuition here is that agents aren't walking around identifying one another, exclusively or even majorly, by race, class, and gender and then deciding how to behave toward one another (e.g. discriminating, boundary-maintaining, etc). Standard sociological variables like race and gender emerged because of (necessary) political movements in the 19th and 20th century. But these historically local and therefore rather anomolous movements are not sufficient evidence to support the idea (which the conflict theorists seem to have run with, mouths frothing), that they are the generalizeable Big Variables causing social phenomena. Rather, I suspect that the groupings, or network clusters, codify by more fundamental processes (path dependencies on networks, coordinating and informational efficiencies, public goods problems, etc) -- and that we hence end up with a world where we can easily identify and label, on the surface, certain salient clusters of behavior by class, gender, and race. These clusters are merely subsets of many other clusters of behaviors, and of the regularized symbols and rituals which denote those behaviors. This would seem to explain why identifying race, class, and gender as explanatory (independent) variables actually gives quite small magnitudes and large error terms -- again these independent variables are just particularly salient variables because of quite public political battles in the last two centuries. It's worth noting that these actually ought to be poor predictors of long-run stable social structure considering what made these variables salient in the first place was the enormous variation, that is redefinition and renogotiation of these categories. How's that for a dialectical inversion? ) You make an absolutely correct point, that the point of every regression is not to just keep throwing variables in the pot in order to boost r^2. That's an undergraduate mistake, and one that's hard to shake people of. Clearly we're testing specific hypotheses, not the universe of all social determinates in every paper. And clearly race does matter, and its social-scientific reification is one of the largest and deserved accomplishments of modern sociology. But the question, empirically, is always how much, not whether. If sociologists were going to just answer whether questions, they might as well just go do existence and uniqueness theorems all day like economists (I don't recommend this; sociology is beautifully empirical -- in 1982 it was found that over half of economics papers in its major journals contained no data). And my point is that the how much in how much race matters, is not nearly as much as it's been hyped up to matter, if the Betas on race are deterministic, but small, and still leave tons of unknowns in the error term. I'd like to see how much sociologists end up exploiting natural experiements and instrument variables in order to establish causation -- it's been quite profitable in econometrics -- but there has been recent criticism that even the instrument variable exercise has gotten a little out of control, by encouraging researchers to make finding nice clean natural experiments the priority, rather than socially (or in their case economically) relevant issues (which may not yield to neat identification exercises). So yeah, my suspicion is that race, class, and gender are symptoms, not causes, of social forces, and that we have yet to really nail down social forces themselves. Frankly I suspect that the focus in sociology on deeply politicized theories of social conflict and social movements (and the edge-of-seat excitement to go out and change the world before understanding it) have slowed the progress toward understanding these underlying, generalized, social forces.

Does anyone in sociology entertain the alternative hypothesis that race, class, and gender are outcome rather than explanatory variables? I was talking to Terry Clark and he pointed out that when you throw race, SES, gender, and other traditional sociological variables on the RHS of a regression, you get pretty abysmal r^2 (I know r^2 is a touchy statistic, but still, it seems like for Foundational Causal Variables, race, SES, and gender should fit variation in social outcomes better). He also pointed out that Pearson correlations are quite small between traditional sociological variables and the different rates of participation in behaviors measured by that big survey they do at NORC (Pearsons also bad because of a lack of control for confounds, but roughly informative statistics). Clearly herds develop around race, gender, SES, and other cultural signifiers -- but it seems strange to allege that these variables cause such herding, an potentially the inequality which results as well. Also, I've seen so far a lot of statements like, "social inequality is caused by stratification," which to me sounds like a mere tautology. Maybe I'm not understanding the difference between "stratification" and "inequality" as taxa. If anyone can help me along the learning curve, it's of course much appreciated. Cheers!

That's really helpful thanks.

Only thing I know about CUNY is that money is slim, and I only know that second hand. Best luck, though!

Also -- I've taken some of the UG soc surveys kids have given on campus. They're usually awful. If you even just did a project where you made deliberate attempts (and discuss them in your write up) to control for interview bias, i.e. finding ways to disguise what you're really testing from your subject so they can't answer strategically and let you bias their answer, make attempts to select a random sample, and so forth (these should all be being covered in your research methods course), then you can likely pull an A, and learn a lot about how hard collecting primary data is. Keep in mind it's a methods class, so the topic you choose isn't the focus of the lesson, it's the methods you use and how well you execute them. Edit: right =/= wright =/= write

Shucks. Just repeating stuff I've learned from people much smarter and older than me over the years.

I would ground your project in your course materials and topics you've read on in sociology already. It will (1) ensure a better grade, because (and more importantly) it will (2) force you to apply theory you've already learned. La_Di_Da's advice is good, but you will have to do a rather elaborate dance to connect the film to professional literature, and you are likely not prepared to do that. The paper you will write will most likely come out like an interpretive exercise in literary or cultural theory, and a fledgling one (because you're completely lost and seems like only sure you like the movie). Whatever tangents your mind has wandered to while you were reading sociological literature -- I would follow one of those. Start from the literature, not from your personal interests.

That's perfect thanks!

They're planning an armed Concealed Carry Rights march in Washington. https://www.facebook.com/events/252728144871259/ There are hours of entertainment embedded in the comments section. Errbody roll up your sleeves and get ready to do some participant observation. If I don't see a paper at ASA on this I'll be disappointed.

Tell me about it. There is a tacit Bland Culture that continually reinforces for people that spicy enchiladas, curry, and even Flamin' Hot Cheetos are completely off limits -- not just for consumption, but for academic discussion. It's despicable, and clearly the result of a long tradition of food microaggressions in the occident.