ohgoodness

Not sure where you are applying but can't you just logon to the online application page, find recommenders and change his e-mail address? This worked for all of my applications when I sent one of the apps to an old e-mail...

This is most likely a whole-packet thing. Most internationals,especially non-anglosaxons, are'nt able to counter an average GRE with other parts of their applications. Our grades translate poorly, which makes it harder for the adcom to really understand what it is going on; our universities generally do not look to undergraduates for pt-positions, making it harder to get relevant experience early, and our LOR's probably do not sound everyday familiar to adcoms. In all - the GRE becomes the standardized measures of internationals and since the cohorts are so small - only the best gets in.

A professor at NW told me that they were changing the clusters - anyone else heard this? I have 0 concrete or detailed information but am interested in knowing more.

And technolognical innovation is a function of? I am not keen on this reading of Weber. Discuss status groups instead - much more fun..

"Note to International Applicants: We realize that the GRE scores of international students, particularly those whose first language is not English, may be affected by language and cultural differences. This is taken into consideration when such students' applications are evaluated. The scores are nevertheless required and must come directly from Educational Testing Service." This is from Duke. http://gradschool.duke.edu/admissions/requirements/gre.php

http://www.yale.edu/oiss/immigration/common/vs/index.html is where you find your answers

UNC about the NRC rankings: http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/stuff/nrc-slides.pdf

Just a pointer about the NRC rankings (obvioulsy they can still be the best) but if you read the asseessment made by the sociology department at UNC then they say: Proposal 1: UNC Sociology prides itself on careful methods for accurate assessment. The NRC’s decisions about how to measure productivity and quality create an unwarranted bias toward one part of our discipline and against others. Furthermore, we have concerns about the quality of the data collected. We therefore cannot endorse the methods or data behind the sociology rankings, and we encourage potential students and administrations to avoid making decisions based on these rankings You can read it here: http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/stuff/nrc-slides.pdf

The number of times that I have wanted to post one of my recommendation letters, hoping that people would say that it is not lacklustre. I was given the possibility but two of my LOR to check their letters. I just felt that after the process of writing the SOP - understanding what looks good in a LOR is beyond my energy levels..

There's always small battles between demographers and econs so you should ignore those rumours about econwannabe. I think you should probably add some understanding of the work-life(family) balance to the mix and that family sociology is very interested in most things related to family, not just fertility. In the econ world then I think that that Alicia Adsera, at WWS/POP, is doing the best work currently - I like contextuality and she masters it. You could also just go to demographic-research.org (hosted by mpidr) and see what it is new - the best of the best publish there. I'll refrain from highjacking this tread ..

I got your point up and could agree up until your last comment. I sorta feel that you're looking at this too narrowly and is too locked in on how sub-fields work in economics. E-O Wright has lots of free introductory stuff on his webpage http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/ from which you could zoom in more specifically (and no - I am not a follower...). Especially the "Approaches to Class Analysis" is good reading.

You could assign a chapter from Delilo's "White Noise". It would obviously be more patient-oriented but still it's a good read. Although non-fiction you could do "the spirit catches you and you fall down" regarding culture clashes in medicine.

Social stratification would basically be classifying positions (not individuals) into different groups (classes, social groups, etc etc) based on their socio-economic characteristics so it would be very different from org. theory which look at how x organizes to pursue certain goals? I think most inequality/strat courses start by reading the Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore text ( http://www.brynmawr....davis&moore.pdf ) so you could start there as well for further basics. There are probably spillover from org theory to stratification research but it is very different in essence. Household economics would be my way of saying family sociology - I just put it that way since so much of my understanding of it stems from Becker (New Home Economics), Easterlin (Paradox and Capacity/Aspirations) and Sen (capabilities). You tend to end up in micro-economics when you do sociology so it all ends up there.

This is what sociological demography/family sociology is all about. I, for one, applied to PAM since it gives one all the perks of Sociology, i.e. access to professors and courses, but with a much more applied and transdisciplinary focus. You give me a chance to be trained in econometrics, statistics and family sociology and I am more than happy.

I was bored and should have been doing serious work (for some of these places - I have just guessed what people were talking about..) Mich. State 2 UCLA 4 Oregon 4 Northwestern 4 UCSD 3 Madison 6 Princeton 4 Minnesota 4 Washington 2 Vanderbilt 3 Berkeley 4 Harvard 2 UC Irvine 5 Umass 2 Notre Dame 3 Upenn 3 Michigan 2 Stanford 5 UNC 3 NYU 4 Yale 3 Duke 3 Brown 4 Cornell 5 Indiana 5 Austin 6 Also did anyone apply to the policy analysis and management program at Cornell or just to the Sociology? Funny how few of us applied to Michigan - wonder if it has anything to do with the snailmail preference..

Shant have a problem if there are people who do stratification/household econ/urban etc but that's all I can vouch for

"DEFINITELY send something substantive! Most programs require a writing sample and they do not want a take-home exam, they want to see that you know how to do research and the master's proposal is about the closest thing you could get, given that the thesis is not yet completed. I'm not sure why you would remove the methodological components, however. Any good stratification scholar knows demography and also appreciates quantitative methods, especially at the level of multi-level modeling that you are doing" This is what I got from a former chair so I took it seriously and really really really fixed my sample. ps. take-home exams at my school usually equals a literature review 8-15 pages .. ds

+1 But I've got 2 more months to finish my MA thesis, take advanced event-history analysis and master Civilization 5 backwards so we'll fight this out..

All of the above. E-mail checking, feeling of overreaching, etc etc All applications are in and 2 are non-complete but I still feel like I should add some schools........

The point was about what your professor said, not about your personal characteristics. This is just trolling..

All I can say is that I've worked in a sociology department, 90+ people, and any time something unrelated to work has been gossiped about it has been shutdown and ignored by senior and lower faculty. There's always gonna be people who gossip behind your back and I get your nightmarish-feel since it is a very heavy topic but I would say that it wont ruin your career. Mumbling during your thesis defense will, however, so be careful of that one

Thanks Vertices - I'm gonna make a try and convince her to finish the submitting (rather worried that she wont... - professors...)

Yeah - sounds like the way to go about it. Let the letter speak for it and just set it at a level high enough not to warrant any negative idea.

Hey y'all, I'm wondering whether anyone can provide some insight into the ranking of students ability, academic promise, motivation etc that reference givers need to fill out for some schools? I'm at a European University, albeit with plenty of American-trained Professors, and one of my references, a senior professor trained at Chicago (Sociology), asked me to help out with submitting the reference letter. She got very nervous regarding these questions and postponed submitting until she was sure about how they were read by universities. Her worry was that there is a strong inflation in these rankings to the point where all students get the "top 2% /exceptional" designation without much thought put in to it. So does anyone know about the status of this? Does it actually matter and should one be careful with the rankings to mitigate any potential "oh she's just trying to get her student in" suspicioun

http://drezner.forei...rogram_part_one "5. Get rich. Ready for some real-keeping? If you can fund your own ticket for graduate school, the admissions standards are not nearly so high. Whether you inherit family wealth, win an NSF fellowship, or finally make sure that Nigerian e-mailer comes through, having no need for fellowship support makes you a freebie to most programs. At that point, the equation changes from "is this candidate among the best?" to "is this candidate above the bar?" The latter is much easier to clear than the former. "