mbrown0315
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Posts posted by mbrown0315
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Sorry about flooding the forum...
Can anyone out there with grad school experience chime in on the pros and cons of working with established names in the field and of working with up-and-coming scholars?
At one school I have the possibility of having some really big academics in sociology advise my work, but I don't know how much access I will really have to these people. They're extremely busy and very well-established.
At another school I have the possibility of working with some really smart assistant professors who have expressed an interest in joint-publication.
In material terms (getting a job), I think the most important thing with which to come out of a doctoral program is publications, so I'm sort of inclined to work as an RA with the assistant professors if it means more opportunity to publish. Does anyone have any advice to offer on the matter?
I hope I'm not coming across as too mercenary on this forum. I'm really excited about living the life of the mind, but a man's gotta eat.
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I think you might be misunderstanding the terms of your funding. Chicago requires five *quarters* of teaching, which in aggregate is less than two academic years. The norm at UCLA is to teach at least three years, or the equivalent of nine quarters. Unless you got a spectacular package at UCLA (three years of fellowship), in all likelihood you will teach more there than at Chicago.
I get that, and I guess it's a lot to assume that I'll be able to get so many research opportunities at UCLA, but I'm currently talking to professors who have expressed a lot of interest in some projects I have discussed with them. I'm still trying to get a reading on how likely it is that I will be able to find external funding and RAships.
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Thanks a lot, anthropologygeek.
For anyone else interested in this question, I should have mentioned that the answer likely depends on whether you see yourself at a four-year research university or at a liberal arts college (where the emphasis is more on teaching). I have also heard that certain kinds of sociologists (ethnographers, for example) are expected to teach more, while hiring committees care less about teaching when hiring demographers and other quant-heavy academics.
If I end up as a professor, I see myself at a four-year research university doing mixed-methods work. Anyone else out there with advice to offer?
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This is a slightly involved question...
I know I love research and want to be a sociologist, but I am not sure if I want to be a professor because I do not know if I will enjoy teaching.
I have narrowed my choices down to UChicago and UCLA. Chicago requires that doctoral students complete the equivalent of five TAs while UCLA allows students who secure external funding and/or a research assistantship to substitute that for the TA requirement.
If I end up not enjoying teaching and committing myself to a pure research job, then Chicago's TA requirement (especially grading papers and stuff like that) is probably a waste of time, at least when you take the opportunity cost (less time for research) into account.
However, even if I enjoy teaching, might 5 TAships be excessive? Speaking in terms of getting a job, how much do universities care about your teaching experience? My impression is that they measure your productivity in terms of papers published more than anything else. So, if I do 2 TAs and publish 3 papers while at UCLA, is that significantly better than publishing 2 papers and completing 5 TAs while at Chicago (assuming similar journal quality)?
Basically, it just seems that there are diminishing returns to doctoral TAs after 2 or 3 teaching stints, whereas the marginal return of published papers is at least constant.
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Anyone else out there trying to decide between UCLA and University of Chicago? I attended Chicago's visit event and was very impressed. I also visited UCLA alone and was equally impressed, though for different reasons.
Anyone else out there facing this predicament?
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I thought I'd start a thread for those of us weighing the possibility of becoming Maroons. (Can you even identify with a university mascot as a doctoral student?)
Have any accepted applicants been contacted by faculty about their anticipated research? No one has reached out to me except for Professor McRoberts, who wrote me a very nice (but sort of generic) email congratulating me on my admission and inviting me to ask him any questions I might have about the program.
Should I take this apparent lack of interest in my research agenda as a signal that I'm a marginal candidate?
I got offered what appears to be the standard five-year Social Sciences Fellowship, which I take to be a vote of confidence, but I'm still not sure what to make of this silence from Chicago faculty, especially since faculty at other programs have reached out to me.
Thoughts?
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What are the chances NYU have notified already but nobody who got in posts here? High?
I would think low.
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Anybody know when we might expect to hear from Wisconsin?
I'm assuming Wisconsin will notify accepted applicants by the end of the week. That's based on past notification dates.
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@mbrown: something to keep in mind is that in midsize-large programs, you have almost 100 phDs in a program at a given time... with 7-12 per school hitting the job market every year... so all the "placement analyses" that we see on sociology blogs comparing the placement of Berkeley vs Chicago vs Princeton vs Harvard - is very much skewed by factors that we might not be able to measure and explain, because its movement is very influenced by slight shifts among a small group of people.
I agree. A few months ago I asked Schneider for his full analysis, which takes cohort size into account, though he uses faculty size as a (reasonable) proxy for cohort size. He asked me to not circulate his report, so I can't share the data, but I will say that the hierarchy holds when you divide the number of recent top 26 hires from a department by the faculty size of that department in 2009.
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Forgot to mention something. We shouldn't just focus on sociology department hiring.
Public policy, business, social work, education, and other departments recruit pretty heavily from sociology departments. It would be really neat to see if the hierarchy holds for these kinds of departments.
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Following up on FertMigMort's post about Schneider's orgtheory post (http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/sociology-faculty-in-leading-departments-analysis-by-daniel-schneider/), I'll just highlight the main finding:
As of 2009, there were 985 regular and affiliated sociology faculty members in the 26 [top US News-ranked] departments I examined. Of these, about 80% received their PhDs from another one of the same 26 departments, 55% from one of ten departments, and 9% from Chicago alone. Just 15% received their degree from a university outside of these 26 departments and 5% from a foreign university.
Those ten departments are basically the ten listed in the above link. UCLA is strange in that it ranks at 12 for all hires and 3 for hires who got their PhDs in 2000 or later. (Does someone know what happened to that department to make its graduates so much more desirable? I don't think the cohorts got much bigger, and I don't think UCLA is known for hiring its own PhDs, at least not in the same way that Stanford is.)
Of course, Schneider's findings are a bit arbitrary. I would be very pleased to be a full professor at University of Southern California, Rutgers, Notre Dame, or any other of the many great schools that were not ranked in the top 26 sociology departments by US News in 2009, but at the same time he does not disaggregate this group of 26 into more competitive (Princeton? Berkeley?) and less competitive (Minnesota? Penn State?). If you quickly inspect the rosters at those ten departments, you'll find that the representation climbs to well above 55%.
In short, rank matters.
...ceteris paribus
- jacib and RefurbedScientist
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Give it 10 days for those Madisons.
Why ten days?
The information from past years suggests that they'll be notifying this week. I'm actually surprised they haven't already sent out notifications.
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Does anyone want to claim the UPenn acceptance? Was it an email from the system or contact from a professor?
(Should I keep hoping!?)
Seconded. What kind of email was it?
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I think mate selection is a wonderful example of an issue in which sociology really needs to draw more extensively from biology. The reification of society here is useful, but only if we recognize society's "decision" about a man or woman's desirability as partially derivative of lasting (and probably somewhat fixed) biological phenomena.
By the way, I don't see the relevance or veracity of the clip's starting assumption.
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Whereas you can do some inference from other programs at Northwestern:
Average Quantitative GRE Scores
Pol sci: 695
Stats: 783
econ: 798
Anthro: 698
Actually, no inference is necessary for Northwestern. From their admissions FAQ page:
What is the average GRE score of your applicants and of those admitted to the program?
Average GRE scores of all applicants in 2012 were: Verbal 710; Quantitative 620; and Analytical 5.5 for tests taken after October 2011. The average scores for those admitted on the University Fellowship were: Verbal 680; Quantitative 720; and Analytical 5.0 for tests taken after June 2011.
What is the average GPA?
The average undergraduate GPA of all applicants in 2012 was 3.7. The average of those admitted was 3.8.
It's interesting that the analytical writing and verbal scores are higher for the general pool of applicants than for the pool of those admitted. International applicants (like me) make the statistics pretty cloudy, huh?
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There is a growing trend among business schools of hiring sociologists, which should be an indication that there is a place for sociologists in the business world. As a matter of fact, Boston Consulting Group mentions sociologists on its advanced degrees recruitment page.
Many thinks tanks and polling institutions prefer that their senior researchers hold PhDs. Just go to the job listings posted by Gallup or Pew and check out the specifications. Here is an example (they don't specify the field in which the PhD is earned, but they do specify a background in social science research). This also applies to some extent for market research firms, though that's trickier.
Private foundations are also often interested in hiring sociologists.
Last but not least, there are plenty of government jobs available to sociologists. Go to usajobs.gov and type in "sociology." The American Sociological Association even has a program that helps to place sociologists on congressional committees.
I think it's difficult to discuss sociology seriously as a single discipline these days. On the one hand, you have those sociologists who spend much of their time describing and critiquing social constructs and institutions (family, sex, religion, race, etc.). On the other hand, you have sociologists who are doing some really groundbreaking, math-heavy work involving organizational behavior and social network analysis. The former continues to dwell almost exclusively in the academy. The latter flourishes both in and out of the ivory tower.
There are fields in sociology (generally those relying more heavily on quantitative methodology and empirical work, not so much theory) that are very interesting to policymakers and businesspeople. If you consider yourself business-minded, I would seriously consider going for an MBA and specializing in market research. However, there is plenty of room for you and your interests in sociology doctoral programs if you choose to focus on the right subjects.
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Most of us won't write formal proofs, but we may need to understand them. At the very least it's useful to become familiar with notation.
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For those without a strong quantitative background and who are nervous about doctorate-level math, I strongly encourage reading this text: http://www.umass.edu/preferen/Mathematics%20For%20Humanists/mathlit.pdf
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Interdisciplinarity is a sham.
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/ss/phds
I'm sorry to say that sociology seems to have not made the cut
The Social Science Ph.D. Program at Caltech offers the opportunity for highly motivated and quantitatively-oriented students to pursue interdisciplinary research in areas common to anthropology, economics, political science, history, law, and public policy. The program is based on the belief that a wide variety of social phenomena are best understood as the consequence of intelligent decisions by individuals pursuing their own ends, that such decisions can be modeled, and that conclusions concerning social events should be based on observable and measurable parameters of those theories. Graduates of the program have been eagerly sought and have found positions in leading departments of economics, political science, and law as well as in government and industry.
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Personally I think dogma is a good thing -- it forces someone who wants to say something new to amass an enormous body of evidence to do so (that thought isn't original to me, but I forget who to cite).
This needs to be qualified. Dogma is a bad thing when it significantly hinders receptiveness to findings based on quality data while, concurrently, making us too receptive to agreeable findings based on lower-quality data.
I assume you were taking this point as a given, but I think it's worth repeating.
I remember having a talk once with a sociologist about the developmental effects of early childhood education. She seemed all too eager to embrace the findings of the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian projects (positive effect with minimal fade out; N=a few dozens) while ignoring findings from Head Start and the Infant Health and Development Program (negligible positive effects and high fade out; N=many hundreds).
As we all know, skewed science has public consequences: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/19/163256866/episode-411-why-preschool-can-save-the-world
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So now let's talk about diminishing marginal utility.
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Speaking of economics, I'd like to call attention to the concept of opportunity cost. Don't you guys have better things to do?
- firstsight, jacib, ohgoodness and 5 others
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Anyone else seen this? http://gradschool.duke.edu/about/statistics/admitsoc.htm
Northwestern also shares data but nothing about GPA or GRE. http://www.tgs.northwestern.edu/documents/Program%20Statistics%20Files/S10PH_adm_enr.pdf
Both schools also share placement data.
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Why the frowning? Your numbers are pretty great all around. Also, what are your interests? You appear to just be applying to the top 20 on USNWR.
4.5/6 is not very good. And what's even more frustrating is that I took the GRE back in 2006 and received a 5.5.
My chief interests concern the organizational and network behavior of NGOs and empirical evaluation of service-learning programs, but I'm also exploring interests in aging and the lifecycle, modernization and post-materialism, biotechnology and the history of eugenics, and survey methodology.
All of the schools to which I'm applying provide opportunities to pursue some or all of these interests (some more than others, obviously).
UCLA 2013
in Sociology Forum
Posted
I am having a really, really tough time deciding between UChicago and UCLA. Has anyone heard not so great things about UCLA's program? I hear plenty about Chicago's deficiencies, but I've yet to hear any negative feedback on UCLA. Anyone?