mbrown0315

Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Wisconsin, Madison, Northwestern, UCLA, UPenn, Stanford, Columbia, UNC, NYU, Yale, Duke, Brown, Cornell, Indiana, UT-Austin BA GPA: ~3.9 MA GPA: ~3.8 770Q / 750V / 4.5AW

Fair enough. Regardless, you should definitely have a look at Coursera if you see yourself in academia.

Last March I decided that I was missing some critical courses to make my application competitive, so I took a statistics course and a microeconomics course through UCLA Extension and a Calculus II course through UC Berkeley Extension. These are not degree-granting institutions, but I did get credit and an official transcript (each class cost roughly $700 not including textbook). If I end up having to apply again next year, I think I would want to take additional courses to improve my application, but I don't want to keep spending money on these courses, so I was thinking about using Coursera, which is free (at least for now). Most Coursera classes award a "certificate of completion" with, I think, some indication of your performance, but they do not grant credit. Does anyone know how these classes are perceived? On the one hand, presenting records of these courses should reflect a certain level of initiative (especially if combined with credit-granting classes and an explanation of my budget constraint). On the other hand, I can see how some professors would consider it a joke.

I was going to use Interfolio, but some of my schools expressed a preference for their own recommendation systems.

Lots of recommendation forms have scales that allow the recommender to rank the recommended from poor to truly exceptional. Truly exceptional generally means top 1-2%. My assumption about the very top programs (top 10) is that there is a bit of a Laffer Curve situation when it comes to the number of traits on which you're marked as "truly exceptional." No truly exceptionals is bad because you need to be extraordinary for top programs, but all truly exceptionals is also bad because it suggests BS. Anyone have any ideas about what the perfect balance might be?

I don't want to incite a flame war, but I'd like to know (especially from the women here) if anyone thinks there might be something to the argument that children make pursuing a career harder for women simply because women are drawn more to childcare than men are. If I'm an employer, is it reasonable for me to assume that a woman who gets pregnant will be less attentive to her work because of childcare responsibilities? This question is especially relevant to academia, where work never really ends. The best academics are almost always researching, writing, teaching, or grading.

As far as I'm concerned, the relationship doesn't start getting built until after you're accepted. I'm applying to a lot of schools and sometimes don't even have enough spaces to list them all. Obviously, the information is not crucial. Give them a sampling of the schools you're applying to and that's it. But it's obviously your choice.

Yeah, so just don't list all of the schools.

I had a sick day today and passed some of the time collecting data on the 19 sociology programs to which I'm applying (all top-25 schools). I scanned through the faculty lists checking for professors who received their PhDs in 2000 or later (consistent with the methodology in the study cited above). I restricted my search to regular faculty at only these 19 schools (see list of schools in signature). Don't worry about my mental health. This actually took very little time. Here are the data on where these 119 profs got their doctoral training. Princeton: 15 UCLA: 11 U Chicago: 10 Berkeley: 9 Northwestern: 8 Columbia: 8 UW-Madison: 8 Harvard: 8 UNC-CH: 5 UPenn: 5 NYU: 5 UMich-Ann Arbor: 4 Stanford: 4 Cornell: 3 Indiana-Bloomington: 3 Penn State: 2 UT-Austin: 2 Arizona: 2 CUNY: 1 U of Minn: 1 Rutgers: 1 Johns Hopkins: 1 U of Washington: 1 Duke: 1 SUNY-Binghamton: 1

How would they find out that you're applying to 19 programs?

Seconded.

This report has probably been brought up in this forum previously, but in case no one else has seen it: http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/sociology-faculty-in-leading-departments-analysis-by-daniel-schneider/ Apparently, something very good has been happening at UCLA.

I think the expectations differ among fields. Humanities and the less quantitative social sciences may be more open to a 3- or 4-page statement of purpose, while computer science and chemistry may be less interested in your life experiences and all that. Graduate schools that house both English Literature and Bioinformatics may post a word limit for the statement of purpose that does not necessarily apply to all of the programs. For example, Harvard's application form calls for a maximum of 1,000 words, but I talked to the graduate secretary at the sociology department and found out that this limit is not enforced at all in the department. I was also told that my 4-page, double-spaced statement of purpose is just fine. In short, call your programs and find out what they want.

I just came across Princeton University's "Family Focused Initiatives": http://www.princeton.edu/gradschool/studentlife/childcare/ I haven't done a whole lot of research into this. Still, based on the research I have done, I think Princeton is unusually generous in this regard. I'm engaged and will be married by the time I start graduate school. Hopefully I'll be a father by the time I'm halfway through my doctoral education, so this is definitely on my radar. My plan is to find out which schools want me and then count this issue among the medley of factors I'll need to consider when making a decision. I am also applying to (very many) top schools, and I get the impression that most of the very good (top 20) schools have active graduate student unions and enough endowment money to provide amenities such as subsidized daycare.

I am currently contacting professors. One professor at UT-Austin mentioned that he "might let the admissions committee know that I talked with him." I took that as an indication that, as long as you handle the conversation well, talking with POIs can give you a bit of an edge during the admissions process. Also, several of the application forms I have reviewed ask specifically if you have consulted with any faculty. I think that filling in that part of the form might at least reflect your interest in the program, which certainly can't hurt. Remember, in March these programs spend a fair amount of money bringing accepted applicants to visit their campuses. You have to assume that, on top of qualifications, they are interested in accepting applicants who can demonstrate that they are serious about the possibility of enrolling. Otherwise these schools are just wasting money.