ohgoodness

I'm pretty sure that this is an average for most graduate programs but it's still utter bs. 100 hours per week means that you work atleast 14 hours a day 7 days a week. Such practices were banned and outlawed in most professions some decades ago..

I think most of us have enough passion for our subjects to put in 14 hours 5 days a week and then an additional package during the weekend (in at 6, out at 8.30 is regular to me as a MA) but to assume that one does not need any rest or disconnect is just horrible.

Even if this is the way it is - it's still not an ok practice nor a good deal for either party.

Additionally - "I love my area of study. Truly, I do--and I love my research. But if it came down to a choice between working on research and sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and a good fiction novel, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. I'm putting in about 70 hours a week right now and don't think I can go on at this pace."

This attitude means that you should quit and do something else..

I'm pretty sure that this is an average for most graduate programs but it's still utter bs. 100 hours per week means that you work atleast 14 hours a day 7 days a week. Such practices were banned and outlawed in most professions some decades ago..

I think most of us have enough passion for our subjects to put in 14 hours 5 days a week and then an additional package during the weekend (in at 6, out at 8.30 is regular to me as a MA) but to assume that one does not need any rest or disconnect is just horrible.

Even if this is the way it is - it's still not an ok practice nor a good deal for either party.

Additionally - "I love my area of study. Truly, I do--and I love my research. But if it came down to a choice between working on research and sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and a good fiction novel, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. I'm putting in about 70 hours a week right now and don't think I can go on at this pace."

This attitude means that you should quit and do something else..

I've had a similar discussion with one of my recommenders once as well (also at a European university).
What we ultimately thought was the best solution was to either not fill in anything or tick the highest possible value, and then explain in the actual letter that (i) my recommender didn't think comparisons on that high a level were meaningful (top 2, 5 or 10 percent would all be within 'measurement error' of each other), (ii) our education system gave no quantitative data on which to objectively answer such questions (e.g. the university doesn't collect any data about how one is ranked within their class / year), (iii) while they couldn't say if I was in the top 2, 5, or 10 percent, my recommender held my abilities in the highest regard possible.

Not sure if this is the smartest way to go about it, but it was the most sensible thing we could think of.

I'm pretty sure that this is an average for most graduate programs but it's still utter bs. 100 hours per week means that you work atleast 14 hours a day 7 days a week. Such practices were banned and outlawed in most professions some decades ago..

I think most of us have enough passion for our subjects to put in 14 hours 5 days a week and then an additional package during the weekend (in at 6, out at 8.30 is regular to me as a MA) but to assume that one does not need any rest or disconnect is just horrible.

Even if this is the way it is - it's still not an ok practice nor a good deal for either party.

Additionally - "I love my area of study. Truly, I do--and I love my research. But if it came down to a choice between working on research and sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and a good fiction novel, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. I'm putting in about 70 hours a week right now and don't think I can go on at this pace."

This attitude means that you should quit and do something else..

I'm pretty sure that this is an average for most graduate programs but it's still utter bs. 100 hours per week means that you work atleast 14 hours a day 7 days a week. Such practices were banned and outlawed in most professions some decades ago..

I think most of us have enough passion for our subjects to put in 14 hours 5 days a week and then an additional package during the weekend (in at 6, out at 8.30 is regular to me as a MA) but to assume that one does not need any rest or disconnect is just horrible.

Even if this is the way it is - it's still not an ok practice nor a good deal for either party.

Additionally - "I love my area of study. Truly, I do--and I love my research. But if it came down to a choice between working on research and sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and a good fiction novel, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat. I'm putting in about 70 hours a week right now and don't think I can go on at this pace."

This attitude means that you should quit and do something else..

Actually this was a nice letter by your department. I put in about 80 hours and my free time is spent reading up on the literature. 2 articles should be the min. Everyone should thank your department for this letter and it shows they care about your future. If they didn't care they wouldn't of sent it. But to get jobs this is what it takes and you think it gets easier after school? A phd should be your passion and should always be on your mind. Even when I'm not working I'm thinking about my subject

How has " it[] taken the Web by storm (in a very negative way)" ? It seems like par for the course. I usually run into a post doc or two when I'm in on my late night lab sessions. Haven't seen too many profs on the weekends, but I can usually get ahold of them easily via email. Mine like to work from home.

I want to make a caveat/clarification to my statement: "Anyone who studies 'the grad cafe' message boards in some detail is likely to get a pretty good idea of his/herapproximate competitiveness in the applicant pool."
I do think that there is a general consensus that immediately quantifiable attributes (GRE, GPA) tend to be vastly overemphasized on 'the grad cafe'. Of course these metrics are important. But, as many have pointed out in the past, it's easy to get caught up obsessing over them since they're such an easy short-hand basis for comparison. Far more important are the many elements of your application that are not easily compared in on online forum. There are many other ways to get a far better picture of the type of student admitted to a certain program. These include: talking to current students, talking to your undergraduate advisor, talking to the DGS at the program of interest, etc. These are going to be your most valuable resources. Take it from a current student who has recently been around the block in the 2012 application cycle!

Too simplel. Noone, unless they are paid to, keep tabs on all the programs, professors, faculty, sub-fields etc. Just ask your LOR - most professors barely know whether their former collaborators remain at the same school as five years ago or if they moved to China.

You might apply to the top programs for one reason (resources, future possibilities etc) whereas you apply to a smaller one because they have specific faculty members that are highly relevant to your topic of interest. The most random list is the one where you simply put the top 10 programs and nothing else.

Everything that you discussed in your reply has merit. I may need some future help with framing my SOP so I don't sound like some uneducated anarchist trying to avoid doing any research!!!

Honestly this does not reflect an explicit statement of what a school wants in the letter. It is vague, non-descript and leaves anyone pondering the actual qualities of ones background, future, research and how those fit to where you are applying. Many of the programs that I am applying to have that sort of description for the SOP and it really is a great challenge. Not only do I need to boil down my entire background into a 5 line paragraph, "selling myself" whilst being focused on the future, but I also need to write a statement that is interesting, relaxed and easy to follow. And obviously in your quote - there is plenty of room for mixing in personal history - you just gotta do the right way and make it relevant in your purpose. In my case - personal history is the glue that holds all the parts together.

You write a draft, look it over and wonder "is this it?" and then start over again. And then you start asking questions to anyone who went through the same process. It sure never gets easy.

(and some of us do second-guess ourselves constantly..)

Thanks, Edgirl. I think that is a good idea. The only thing is, retaking the test ASAP will not give me the better Quant score that I need.

It is pretty clear that I need A LOT of review in this arena. My guess is at LEAST few months of steady practice and review. My instinct is to do this: to put EVERYTHING on hold and to take an online Kaplan course and REALLY review and practice the Quant, even the Verbal.

I may just do that. The way I see it (and call it blind optimism, but I prefer the term "realism) that I basically have all my ducks in a row, meaning I have my recommenders selected and willing to assist, a strong undergrad and grad GPA, and good samples. Seeing as these positive factors are not going to wither up and die right before my eyes, I feel like it might be the best thing to put everything on hold, slooooow it down, take my time now that I actually have it, and practice that awful Math and yes, the Verbal as well, for maybe a couple of months. That way I can retake the test once again, maybe even one more time thereafter. Then I will apply in the Fall of 2013.

Do you think that sounds amenable? It FEELS so!

And thank you for your honesty. I wish someone--anyone-- else would have been that forthcoming!

What I'm getting at is that the writing of the SoP should be straightforward if most of the thinking has been done. If an applicant honestly hasn't thought about their reasons, interests, goals, etc then yes, the well will be dry at writing-time.

Two things. One - you have more life experience; that means you have more to report, but you also have a much better perspective on what's important and what's not. Two - even if you know exactly what you want to say, writing a research statement is still very difficult. The thought that it should somehow be straightforward for someone with less background is puzzling to me. That is precisely when writing such a statement means stopping to consider some very basic questions about one's future, perhaps for the first time. Moreover, writing this kind of statement - the kind that is the meat and bones of any grant, job and even conference application - is a skill that takes researchers years to develop.

Not academic as such. It is rather my subjective of that school based on the fact that lots of hip young Europeans go there, spend a couple of years in London and then end up with nothing much to show for it. It's a preachin-to-the-choir kind of place.

Graeber's economic history is wrong. We have evidence of trade going back to about the beginning of language, millennia before anything even resembling a state pops up. The settled agriculture --> states --> trade --> hierarchy and social decay idea is a myth. Money was made to facilitate exchange. That's not an economics textbook fantasy -- its an empirically verified phenomenon. Natural monopolies accrue to units of account and stores of value (money) because they load onto networks. Microsoft Office becomes a standard, and national languages for the same reason -- the utility of using such a good increases in the number of people adopting the technology. Such a monopoly lends itself to State control (as do other goods accruing network externalities), but there is a gigantic difference between states capturing a monopoly and abusing it, like say debasing coin to pay for arrows to fight wars with, which causes inflations which disrupt commerce and make everyone poorer (and is why central banks are now independent -- not because of a monetary conspiracy), and the State creating money, or highways in the first place (also originally privately, and locally owned and taken care of well into the late 19th century).

OP: If you're interested in anarchy I'd suggest some work by Elinor Ostrom on stateless coordination of market failures, and an intermediate microeconomics textbook. Occupy is not anarchism. Squatting is not anarchism. Dumpster diving is not anarchism. It's confused teenage rebellion. Getting along with people without central authority and violent enforcement is anarchism -- and the remarkable thing about prosocial mores is just how much anarchy we witness in societies with enormous states.

Full disclosure: I am not authority on who's who in sociology, nor do I speak for all sociologists. His name rings a bell. From his profile at UCD's website, he's an active political sociologist, but I think 'one of the world's leading sociologists' is a stretch. It's almost impossible to say that about anyone in sociology though because the field is so diffuse (not to mention the idea of being a "leading sociologist" is a little nonsensical).

But based on his books and publication history, he does look influential in economic and political sociology, although perhaps part of the "old school."

The best metric (depending on what you're looking for) to assess a sociologist's credibility is to see where she/he has published. Recent publications listed on his UCD profile page are in 2nd-3rd tier journals, but he's a tenured faculty working in a field that is not super high profile in sociology (political economy), so his motivation for publishing in the top tier journals is diminished, perhaps.

My response is fuzzy, but I suppose it all depends on why you ask. If you ask if he's credible enough to cite, then absolutely yes.

I'm applying from Europe as well and the advice given to me was to make sure that my letter writters should have preferably be "well-known" in the states and able to translate my skills into an american context when writing my reference letter. I was also told to distinguish myself through the GRE/TOEFL (I thought 110+) since it could be hard to translate ECTS to A's and B's (for those reading my transcript).

The most positive thing I got was that my understanding of Europe and it's social issues might bring a real edge to my application, in terms of what I could be able to do as a researcher, and to try and let it shine through within my statement letters.

Regarding your grades in Canada, look at the requirements for Toronto to see where you stand:

Degree of Master of Arts (M.A.)

Applicants must have taken at least the equivalent of five full-year courses in Sociology and have a four-year B.A. or its equivalent. They must also have at least an overall B+ average in each of the last two years of post-secondary education. Applicants are also expected to have acquired basic research and statistical skills.

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy(Ph.D.)

An applicant must hold an M.A. degree in Sociology or a related field, and must have attained an overall average of at least A-. All students must demonstrate that their M.A., or equivalent, included course work equivalent to Classical Social Theory, Social Statistics, and Qualitative Methods I. If students do not have courses equivalent to those three courses, they will be required to take these courses in addition to the regular Ph.D. requirements.

It ebbs and flows but I don't think the feeling disappears for a while, if ever. Don't stress it. It's funny this has come up recently a lot in my department--personally, I feel it more now as a second year than I did as a first. One of my classmates who's a little further on than me was recently having a little kvetch and was like, "Oy, I don't think my dissertation topic is that good, I think it's a little boring, I don't know if I can switch but it probably wouldn't be worth it" and all this other stuff and I tried to confide in him, "Yeah man, I for sure know the feeling," and he was like "You? Don't be stupid. No... everyone loves you, you're doing great. Me, on the other hand..." I think the doubt's pretty universal, though it's not constant over time. For me, my doubts weren't so much after being accepted, meeting my peers, coming to school, doing our required course work, but this year as I move into a more serious project (changing from my original proposed project), I get the "impostor" thing bad, though I guess at this point it'd be fairer to call it a "how will I ever measure up" thing. Pretty much at some point everyone will get it, unless they're an asshole. Don't stress about it.

This year and last year some other graduate students in my department flipped out a little because "the admitted students are so much better than we are." But then we went through our credentials cohort by cohort, and it turns out on paper we all seem impressive. It's just once you're in the program you're not a GPA, an alma mater, a paragraph of life experiences, a bag of tricks, and a well articulated project--you're Jimmy or Johnny or Sally or Sue. People are just folks pretty much starting day 2. It's weird we had to think back and be like, "Oh yeah that colleague of ours could have had a professional career in X" and "That friend of ours came into the program with this really impressive graduate degree" or "That person speaks this many languages" and we especially forget about the parts of our own resumes that sound impressive to other people because, to ourselves, they're just normal. Like this thing:

Well of course we do! Because I mean my undergraduate degree is just my undergraduate degree; it's not a big deal because as far as I'm considered thousands of other people have it; if that's what makes me qualified, most of the people I hung out with over the course of four years are as qualified. That degree's not that special to me. Or the years I've spent living abroad--that doesn't seem impressive to me because as far as I was concerned, I was mostly just chilling, you know? A disturbing percentage of my peers and friends there pathologically drank to much. But on paper to other people it (apparently) seems quite different. But that thing that you did, whatever it was, that skill that you have, wow, I couldn't do that so therefore that's special.

Two of my close, European trained friends in my program, I'm really impressed with their math/quant skills. Perhaps "envious of" is the better adjectival phrase. I think they're big deals, and they're like "This? No it's easy." On the other hand, they're impressed with my ability to recite facts off the top of my head, and my abilities as a writer, and a lot of the more humanistic skills I picked up as an undergraduate, and to me, that stuff's just basic, "Oh anyone can do that... but math! You taught yourself how to do cluster analysis last weekend!" and they're like "Pish, exactly, I did it over the weekend... it's no big deal. The fact that you already know so much about religion and you are really familiar with a wide variety of cases in your field... that took a lot of time to develop and compared to you, I don't have that and I wish I did." It's like one of my Turkish friends would be like, "I'm so impressed with your guys' Turkish--like I can't believe how well you can speak it," and we'd respond, "You're joking right, Bestoş? We speak busted, pigeon Turkish and you just said that sentence in immaculate English" and she'd just say, "Oh c'mon, every one can speak English...but learning Turkish! I'm really so impressed with you guys."

If you go around the table in the middle of your first semester in your program, and there's someone who doesn't in some way feel like an imposter, they're either a genius or an asshole. And judging by the fact that even the most promising and impressive students in my program (at least speaking of the people in the first and second year cohorts who I know best) have confided in me that they feel/felt like impostors sometimes, I can make an educated guess about which one of the two they are.

Too late to give input but I scored rather low on the quant as well: 152 and was told by my senior advisor (from one of the top10s) that it could become a worry since most of people applying to top10s arrive with scores within the 90th percentile. I'm am applying to social demography/life course which tends to be quant-heavy but the comment was "The quantitative percentile seems low to me, even for students who would not be doing quantitative work.". The recommendation was to ask my letter writers to address this and say that it does not reflect their overall judgement of my skills and if possible - do a retake!

This whole GRE thing is just uh..

I thin someone mentioned this, but try to get recommendations from people who went to the schools you are applying to. Call it nepotism, but it works. It just makes sense a glowing recommendation from a known entity is better than a glowing recommendation from an unknown. When I was talking to DGSs at the various schools they specifically cited the recommendation of my professor that they knew, and I have to imagine that all three of my LORs said roughly similar things. Sociology is a small world. These guys meet at conferences, collaborate, and stay in touch, so a recommendation from someone they knew goes a long way.