jmu

This is true for a normal grant but Pitangus is dead on about the GRFP. This was confirmed for me by a person who has sat on several of them. They actually meet in DC with 2-3 related fields meeting at the same time and reviewing the applications together. He said it takes as long as it does because they not only have to coordinate everyone but all reviewers from all fields can't be there at the same time so they have to stagger the meetings.

@blueridge - When I was accepted to Rutgers I didn't get any notification. It was posted on the application website only. Maybe rejections work the same way?

Your partner might ask but you doing it could be off putting for a variety of reasons.

I wonder if results will come back earlier this year. I know last year they were announced late-March but they weren't due until late-January or early-February. I'm getting anxious as I watch the price of plane tickets rise.

"Top" depends largely on what you want to study. In general, programs like Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, Northwestern, Penn State, Duke, etc. fall at the top of people's list but rankings are not the best indicator of what a good program for you is.

I just sent you a message.

Laura Ogden and two of her students recently published a review article on multispecies ethnography that might be worth checking out to see who is doing work in this area. (She's at Dartmouth now so no graduate program.) The citation is below. Let me know if you don't have access as I have the article saved. Ogden, L.A., W. Hall, K. Tanita. 2013. Animals, Plants and People: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography. Environment & Society 4: 5-24. DOI: 10.3167/ares.2013.040102

A lot of people interested in "new" materialities read archaeological theory, it just doesn't get cited as often because there isn't as much of it published in standalone form (like Hodder's Entangled.) Truthfully though everyone gets caught up in their own literature and misses out on a lot of work that has already directly addressed their interests. For example, "anthropologists of space" who don't read any geography.

Don't stress that at all. I have a finger tattoo and an 8-9" beard. No one bats an eye regardless of the university they are at/from.

The ICCG is pretty a well known conference among critical geographers. However, it's not an annual conference or anything and it's not the only venue to present radical/critical work. The AAG Subconference and even the main conferences are good for that kind of thing as well.

I didn't have strong feelings about Hodder one way or another but did find that, in trying to separate himself so much from a lot of the neo-materialist literature in other fields, he made his argument unnecessarily complicated. I much prefer the writing of, say, Jane Bennett and some of the other Deleuzoguattarian approaches in anthropology and geography. I figured it was just an archaeology thing that I didn't understand (we don't have any archaeologists here for me to ask.) Also, if anyone is curious, it appears Columbia will be having their graduate student recruitment day March 6.

To add to these: The Social Construction of Technological Systems edited by Bijker, Pinch, and Hughes; Evocative Objects edited by Sherry Turkle; and if you're interested in environmental history and STS Confluence by Sara Pritchard.

I know our department is empty and it's only really 1/3rd anthropologists. I think this is a pretty good bet in addition to professors just generally not being very good with responding to emails. Don't read into it.

You can also just ask about GRE scores. It's not terribly uncommon for fantastic applicants to do poorly on them and a lot of people realize this. Besides that, Graduate School cut offs tend to be fairly low and they don't always and everywhere affect funding. It's just that certain funding opportunities available to the department are affected by them. You can still get funded even with low scores in a lot of places..

Anyone still looking for places to apply who are interested in critical cartography/gis should check this out:

Kentucky is a great program. I go there every year for DOPE and love the people there. As for critical geopolitics, it seems like there is no one program that is really strong in it but a lot of programs with really good people doing work in that general area of study. Maybe try to find programs with a few people in political geography/geopolitics and people with a matching regional focus or something.

After reading your post I still don't think you get the point I'm trying to make here. Perhaps that's my fault but I don't see how I can make it any clearer. Publications matter. Publications in top journals matter more. They aren't the only things that matter, though, and you seem, at points, to agree with me on that. So if we agree on these points let's stop discussing them. It's wasting too much of our time and not really contributing anything. You argument, as I understand it, is that you are more likely to get publications at top universities (forget actual number rankings, the metrics are flawed.) You also contend that those at top universities are the ones best able to train others in getting those publications and thus jobs. My argument is that it's nothing inherent to being a top university but rather being at an R1, in general. (Here I use R1 to mean Carnegie RUH and RUVH schools.) Yes, there are programs better than others at putting people into R1 positions than others from a numbers standpoint. However, you have to consider that, while everyone who goes to Berkeley or Penn is going to be looking for a TT position, not everyone at an R1 is going to be. This doesn't mean that people at other programs aren't getting jobs just that there are less people on the market at other programs. If each program graduates 10 students a year (just an example) and all 10 from one school go looking for a TT position but only 3 from another do, 5 from the first school get TT positions, the other 5 get VAPs and Post-Docs, and all 3 from the second school get TT positions, are you going to say that you have a better chance at the first school? Or would you say it depends? That's basically my argument here. Rather than focusing on metrics like ranking actually do the work and talk to the programs and the people. Every program director I've talked to has been open about placement, about publishing, and about what they will do to prepare you for the job you want. Students in the program also know well what the prospects are because they see what happens when people graduate. By the way, the list you posted is self-selecting and far from complete. It's a pretty poor way to illustrate your argument.

Those acceptance rates are calculated by final decision only. R&R is technically a final decision and is probably on of the most common initial responses to submitting to a journal (along with accepted pending major revision.) It can often take upwards of 2 years for something to get published in a journal like ASR due to the constant revisions needed. Calculating acceptance rate without factoring those in is extremely limiting ("we only accepted 100 articles but there are ~400 more that are likely to be accepted in the future" seems to be what they are implying there. Not exactly difficult if you stick with it.) I'd like to see a source for this idea that faculty at lower ranked programs aren't publishing as much in top journals. If you're at an R1 you need to be publishing in top journals to get tenure, regardless of rank. My lowly unranked program just denied tenure to someone with a PhD from a top 10 sociology program because she wasn't publishing in top ranked journals. GRE/GPA doesn't show student quality and most programs know this. Ask them and you will see. You also failed to miss my overall point because you were so focused on your statistical argument. It's not the program ranking that matters but the networks and people you become enmeshed with during the process. This includes high ranked programs, of course, but it also includes programs that might be better suited to the individual that are low ranked or programs like mine that can't really be ranked or are too new to really have data for. Besides that, there is a flaw in your logic here. If, by your statement, going to a top ranked program trains someone on how to do research that gets published in top tier journals, and then that person gets a job at a low ranked university, where does that knowledge go? Do low and unranked programs have magical barriers that keep knowledge out? My committee has people from U of Iowa, UC-Berkeley, and two from Yale (including a sociologist with a PhD from Yale who was a full professor at Berkeley before coming here.) Because they are now at an unranked program do their networks disappear? What about their knowledge of academic publishing practices? Additionally, because of the program I'm in, I have more face time with all of them than many of my friends and colleagues at "better" programs. It's not that the things OP mentioned aren't important. I think they are more important than they lead on. It's also not that higher ranked programs don't help in these things. The point is that higher ranked programs are not alone in helping people get TT jobs at R1 schools. Rather than focusing so much on program rank, I think people ought to be focusing on the programs themselves. Who is there, what kind of networks do they have, how often do they publish and where? These are things that aren't going to show up in rankings (which have notoriously low, and dropping response rates anyway.)

We do a lot of Marxism/neo-Marxism/etc. (our first year theory course is Harvey, Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault, Butler, Latour, Haraway) and most of the department use some variation of a Marxian approach, I think. I think that's pretty common in interdisciplinary programs and the more qualitative social sciences in general. If you're interested more in bigger theory questions you might be better in a political theory program but if your want do empirical work I think any interdisciplinary social science program would suit you well. Programs like History of Consciousness at UCSC also come to mind as something that might interest you. http://histcon.ucsc.edu/

I feel I should make a quick point here in case it wasn't clear. I think all of these things are absolutely important factors to consider but considering them based on rank alone is just ridiculous. What's the point of having a great network if you don't get the mentorship needed to utilize it? Find out how the programs you are interested in stack up based on what people who are in those programs can tell you. Don't ask broad questions, ask specific ones. Are you encouraged to publish early or later? Why? Have you met any interesting people through the program? What kind of speakers come for colloquia? Who do people in the department work with? If you want the truth, ask as late in the application cycle as possible when all of the current grad students are stressed, angry, and need to vent. If, after seeing them at their stressed, they still like the program and you think it's still a good program, then that is what matters. Make the connections you need to make while you are in school and don't rely entirely on introductions from your advisor or professors. When you are at a conference, talk to people, most especially the people on your panel. This is almost certainly what your advisor did and what most successful academics have done. I actually reached out to a recent PhD about her dissertation as our interests have a lot of overlap, as it turns out she knows one of the professors in our department because our professor discussed one of her papers at a conference. We've had an ongoing conversation since. This person is an ivy league grad now at one of the top anthro programs doing a postdoc. I would not have that connection to her if I hadn't reached out to her first even though we know the same people. Grad school is, to some extent, your world. You have to fill it up with people and networks and not let someone else do it for you.

I'm going to use the example of my program, which is not and will never be (I don't think) ranked in the 'top' if only because it's interdisciplinary. One of those disciplines is sociology. There is certainly truth to the idea that programs will train and prepare you differently, but the idea that these can be stratified or utilized by some particular metric without thinking about a myriad of other factors just seems odd to me. I should also mention that, to my knowledge, no one has graduated with a degree in 'Global and Sociocultural Studies' just yet, most graduates have been in IR/Geography or Comparative Sociology and the change to the new department (which removed geography from IR and put it with sociology and anthropology) also brought about changes in the faculty that is hired. 1) Methods and theory training are not limited to the 'top' programs. We are required to take qualitative methods (ethnographic, interview-based, etc.), quantitative methods (big datasets, survey design and implementation, etc.), and an additional methods course that we can choose (can be GIS, ethnohistorical, a second level of quant, or from another department as long as your advisor and the program director approve it.) We also have three required theory courses, one in general social science theory, one in your discipline, and one in another discipline. The idea of this methods and theory training is that, regardless of what you end up using, you have the tools necessary to explain why you are using them. I will never use quant methods in my research. It makes absolutely no sense. However, I will know enough about quant methods to critique them, talk knowledgeably about the limitations to them in my research, and move forward from there. (We also just interviewed three quant methodologists as the primary one who was here did not get tenure. All three came from top programs and two had articles in SF and AJS. The one who came out on top of nearly everybody's list and was offered the position was the one who did not have an SF or AJS publication. He was also the only one who hadn't done a postdoc.) 2) I would love to see how you prove this. Considering we have people who have come here over 'top' programs, and at least in one case a person who chose a 'top' program and, after their first year asked if they were to apply again would they be offered the fellowship they were offered the first time, it doesn't seem like it would be too easy to prove such a general statement. Sure, there are less competitive programs and more competitive programs but it doesn't always correlate with rank. Even if it did, it would not necessarily mean that everyone else gets the leftovers. 3) We generally have just as good, if not better, funding opportunities than most universities including $750/yr from the department, $500/yr from the college, and $300/yr from the graduate school to attend conferences, professional development events, or preliminary research travel. While we only offer four years of funding through TA or RAships, the department has done an excellent job lately of helping students get external funding including the DPDF, IDRF, and DDIG. A visiting student deciding between us and other 'top' programs said we were the only place she visited where students weren't really worried about funding. Even the few students who have chosen to come without funding (one of whom turned down a funded offer from UPenn) have been able to find funding here. 4) I don't even follow the logic here. It's not that difficult or rare to get published in top, field-specific journals as long as you are conducting original research. If you are at a research university you should be. The idea in our program is that everything you write for publication should be submitted to the highest journal you can reasonably submit to (meaning, don't submit to a higher ranking journal just because it's higher ranking. Submit based on what the research is.) The problem, I think, is that people submit to the wrong journals too often and get rejected. Rather than thinking that it may be a case of journal fit they immediately drop journal tier. I've seen this type of thing happen and I would wager that it happens often. 5) Again, I don't follow your logic here. It's to the point where I can't even respond. Are you suggesting that non-'top' programs are neither collaborative nor competitive and instead people just sort of float around in the ether? 6) In the past two years I have met, talked to, and maintained connection with a number of top scholars including sociologists at 'top' programs. Our professors come from a number of the schools considered to be in the 'top' of their respective fields and their networks simply do not just go away once they leave. As a non-sociological example, my advisor and her husband (both geographers) just hosted Nancy Peluso, a major scholar in political ecology (my field), at their house while she did research in south Florida. I was also introduced throughout the year to a number of up-and-coming scholars in my field (i.e., people who will be on hiring committees more than likely) and was able to have lunch and really great conversations with them. I was also introduced, by one of our professors, to Diane Rocheleau (a major political ecologist) and Bruce Braun (another major political ecologist). Our graduate program director is actually leaving after 12 years here to take a position at Dartmouth. I'm sure that relationship is going to hurt me in the end. 7) Most departments at research universities know what it is that research universities are looking for. There is no magic formula that some departments have figured out and others don't. A stronger point would have been to connect this to #6 because a number of positions come down to favors (did I forget to mention that we have had people come from 'top' universities and talk to us about what actually goes on behind closed doors at search committee meetings? We had someone who had sat on several NSF panels come and talk about what it is the NSF is looking for and review all of the applications we were preparing in the department. Not everyone got awards but no one wasn't recommended by at least one reviewer which is a good sign for the next round.) Name matters but it only matters to a certain degree. The three candidates for the position I mentioned earlier were whittled down from a list of nearly 200 including a number from 'top' universities who didn't even get considered. Name alone does not get you a job unless it is a job that you probably don't deserve which will show quickly. You need a lot of other 'stuff' that plenty of departments are capable of giving you. I'm not meaning this to be an advertisement for my department. I would say only about half of our students are actually interested in jobs as research academics. Some prefer teaching, some prefer policy, etc. We dissertated 7 students this year, we'll see where the academic focused ones end up I guess but I'm not particularly worried about my place outside of the 'top' and I don't get the feeling that anyone here is. Ranking is probably the most common question asked by prospective students and we still have more highly qualified applicants than we can accept. I'm sure there are several other departments out there like mine that can share similar stories. A number of the things you mentioned are absolutely important but to suggest that they are limited to 'top' programs seems absolutely absurd.

More of a human geographer but right now I'm reading The Tyranny of Experts by Easley (interesting, if a bit problematic at points), The Whale and the Reactor by Winner (fascinating), and The Deleuze Reader (a great resource for piecing together the arguments in his many books.)

It depends on your program. It should say in your grad handbook and if not ask the program director.

The first floor of the building my office is in has a family restroom. If you put down the baby changing station it makes a great table.

Technically any rim can be laced to a fixed hub. Velomine actually sells a 26" Sun MTX set. It's just far more common that pre-built wheels are 700c since fixed gear bikes are (or are at least based on) track bikes.