Canis

Congratulations on your acceptance! And on being the first!

These are great questions! First, the GRE does nothing to eliminate 'bias.' If there's one thing all graduate admissions are, it's biased.Undergrad admissions are hidden away and standardized to a much greater degree with little if any contact between students and decision makers. Graduate on the other hand rely on the idea (for the PhD at least) that Professor and student will be colleagues, that they will spend as much as 8 years of their lives working together, that they will tie their professional lives to one another. Also, selection bias applies if you want to take a group of subjects, do a study, and then say something about the results applying to a larger community than the group participating in the study. A PhD program is nothing like this. In admissions processes, they make spreadsheets with all the students and they rank them. They include gender, race, and all the information that you might think 'shouldn't' matter. But it all does. The advisor/advisee relationship is a kind of marriage - they are choosing who they want to marry. Professors pay close attention to WHO wrote your letters, if they know them, and which theorists you use in your writing sample - how you write your statement - and so on. The pay attention to how you write your emails, how your personality comes off in emails. The very fact that there can be a 'kiss of death' in the process says that this is not a process about eliminating selection bias. What the GRE does instead is it allows admissions committees to only pay this much attention to a small number of applicants. It gives them a reason to cut off most of the applications. Again, let me say the GRE is not considered in terms of the final analysis - it is a way to reduce the number of applications that they will seriously consider. Why? Because they have limited funding, because they have limited time, because they don't want to read 200 applications, they want to read 30, and pick 5 students. So, it's an easy way to ignore all of the students below a certain score. And I've seen this process, and that's what they do. Granted it's different at every school - but the process I saw involved discussions about class, race, how much money students had, where they came from, who wrote the letters, and whether the faculty thought the students would be capable of working the way that they work in that school. They want to transform you into one of them, they are adopting you into their academic family - they don't want a bad fit. So GREs don't matter in that process. But they do matter in the very beginning when they draw a line in the list and barely consider anyone below it. And that is simply a matter of convenience, and has nothing to do with any of the studies which have alternately shown and then not shown a relationship between success in school and GRE. GPA is another great question - and also a meaningless number. In the top 15 candidates in the process I witnessed, GPA ranged from 3.3 to 4.0 - some of those with lower GPAs were ranked higher because of their statements, writing samples, or because letters came from faculty who were well respected by the admissions committee. GPA doesn't matter because it doesn't track performance across different schools. If you go to certain schools with insane grade inflation (like Harvard) you will always have almost all As. If you go to schools without grade inflation, like Reed College, you won't - in fact at Reed only 10 students in 28 years graduated with a 4.0. Overall the trend for inflation is up, but, schools are still different. So, they know they can't rely on GPA either. My suggestion is to do what the schools in Europe, UK, and Canada do - make it like a job application. Ask for a statement, a research plan, a CV, and transcripts. Require students to get an advisor to agree to work with them before applying. And then judge the applications on their merits, all of the applications. This takes time - a lot more time. And schools in the U.S. are falling apart, so they can't handle it - and as the BA has become the new high school diploma, everyone is trying to get MAs and PhDs - way more than ever before. So, applications are skyrocketing, and funding is lower than ever, so the number of places are down. The faculty that I spoke with said that in the past they would only get 20 or so good applications, and the rest they could easily ignore. Today, they get 200 great applications, so they only way they can do the process is to cut off a large number using something arbitrary. It's a sad, sad thing - all made possible by the unquestioning acceptance of the role of the GRE in the admissions process by students, and by universities. The bottom line, I think, is that standardized tests aren't an indicator of success - certainly not in the long term. I mean, look at the current situation - thousands of people who got admission to programs using GREs and have their PhDs, but can't find any meaningful work. Yes, that's an economy problem, but it's also a structural problem. All those people working as adjuncts (some of whom are fighting back) - all took GREs and then when they finish they dutifully accept positions working for free, with no job security or benefits. Clearly the GRE wasn't a good judge of their class consciousness, but it did correctly predict they would do whatever the Academy told them to do. Instead, how about we start recruiting more revolutionary PhDs?

Well, again - completely missing the point... It doesn't limit my career to go to a full funded, top school, with my ideal POIs, in a department that is well organized, funded, and smart enough to recognize the GREs aren't a useful indicator of potential student success. It's does the opposite. It ensures that I'm in a department where they don't think of students as numbers. If you're someone who loves reducing complex human lives into statistics, programs that value the GRE might be right for you! But in my case, and for other students - they're not the right programs. Part of this comes from the fact that the BA in the U.S. is the new American high school diploma. Students are not independent thinkers when they're graduating from college in the U.S. - so they're still thinking like high school students when they're looking at PhD programs. As a result, PhD programs are treating them like high school students. This is also reflected in the essays people write about their life stories instead of their research plan. On the other hand, you have a good point about working from the inside out. For example, when Timothy Leary was arrested and put in prison, they gave him a standardized test to determine what kind of person he was, and which work detail he should be assigned to. It turned out that as a PhD in psychology, he had designed some of the tests they gave him - so he filled them in appropriately so they would make him a gardener at a low security prison. And they did, and he escaped. So, yes, if you can design the system, or hack the system, all the better. But aside from the tyranny of the GRE, I'm also boycotting the tyranny of the corporations commodifying education through testing all the way from the 'teach to the test' problems in grade schools - through the GRE. Education, and your education specifically, should not be a commodity - it should be your path of bliss.

They'll know because they'll ask those professors if you've reached out to them, and they'll read your statement looking for a statement that was written for that specific school. So, the answer to your question (according to the Kiss of Death research below) is yes they are tired of reading essays like you describe: "I’m very attentive to whether a student’s interest matches our training. I expect a statement of personal interest that displays a convincing, compelling desire for what we have to offer from its start to finish. It’s a kiss of death when I read a personal essay that describes an applicant’s life-long goal of serving humankind and has a paragraph tacked on to the end that “personalizes” the essay for the particular school to which it was sent." from: http://psychology.unl.edu/psichi/Graduate_School_Application_Kisses_of_Death.pdf

Coincidentally, I just ran into this post which is a beautiful example of why GREs are a horrible scam. This post is a perfect description of what the GRE is testing for, the ability to take the GRE: So the question is, why would you trust your education to a department, or university system that believes this is a useful way to choose students? Granted, many departments only use it to 'cull' their applications - but there are some, even in the social sciences and humanities who actively describe how important the GRE is to their admissions. This might be up your alley - but for those of you who think it's BS - find a program that recognizes the BS when they smell it and doesn't use the GRE (or any standardized test for that matter) - or that requires it only because their institution does, but does not consider the score (there are many doing this now).

Well, you've missed two points. 1. I haven't taken it, and won't. Like any standardized test, I choose to boycott it. You assume that I would care if I got a low score on a test which is a test of how well you prepare for a test. I wouldn't. But, as I said I haven't taken it. 2. The rest of the world outside the U.S. is not a 'small window' - and on top of that I'm actively NOT interested in programs that use the GRE as a measure of prospective students. That choice says something to me about the program - like coursework, research interests, grad student unionization, etc. So, it's a deciding factor in the fit of the program for me.

That last sentence is TRUTH. Thanks for your thoughts!

No worries - still I don't agree - but we can disagree. Ah, the tyranny of grade inflation!

It's a small crime, but a crime nonetheless to re-animate a long dead thread. So - I'm sorry. But this thread came up when I searched on Google, so for the sake of future readers, don't believe the hype... Almost every major at Oxford doesn't require the GRE - it's not required for London School of Economics (LSE) and by the way, there are more LSE degrees working in Obama's administration today than Harvard, Yale, or any of the big american universities which all require the GRE. For future posters looking for programs that don't require the GRE - look to the UK, also look at all the top rated Canadian schools. Somehow all the huge universities with incredible reputations in Canada like UofT, UBC, York, etc. manage just fine without using the GRE in all their programs. Also, here is a great list of graduate programs that don't require the GRE - including degrees from Columbia, Penn, MIT, UC Berkeley, NYU, and Johns Hopkins: http://ainsleydiduca.com/grad-schools-dont-require-gre But there's more - I mean... haven't you ever wondered: What is the GRE? 1. It's a standardized test. What does it test? Your preparation skills for taking the GRE. Nothing else. And it's a for-profit product, sold alongside expensive tools for learning how to score well on it. If you're smart enough to go to graduate school, that much should be obvious. 2. It's also a classic tool used to maintain inequality in a nation with some of the greatest inequality in the so-called developed world/global north/whatever you want to call it. 3. It's also a way to save time if you're an admissions committee who, because you work in the U.S., are overworked, and underpaid, and will someday soon likely be made up of nothing but seasonal employees without benefits or rights (once all the tenured faculty are replaced with adjuncts). I'm personally boycotting it. I finished an MA without it, and am planning to do a PhD without it. I will teach and do research without it - and I will always encourage my departments to remove the requirement from admissions processes - as some are now starting to do.

In my search to connect with POIs for future research, I've decided there are a few kinds of faculty email styles: 1. Friendly but straight to the point one line replies, no greeting, no closing - just the facts. 2. Greetings, salutations and adjectives! Long responses, reflexive descriptions, friendly tone, casual but intelligent and focused. 3. Auto-replies, which might not be auto-replies... can this many faculty within ONE program really be on leave for the next year? 4. Grumpy faculty who don't like the process of prospective supervisor conversations and don't want to participate - General vibe: your research sounds interesting, but the admissions committee makes decisions and I really don't want to have anything to do with this, in fact I really am just ready for winter break/to retire/my sabbatical. (btw, I totally understand this, and sympathize) 5. Faculty who are subtly warning you about the program - they sneak in a little tidbit between the lines like: there's only 1-2 students admitted each year because of funding, you won't have a cohort, we focus on our MA students.. Any to add to the list?

Thank you - SFU has some great faculty so that doesn't surprise me actually.

This is an odd assessment from my perspective, and probably doesn't apply to PhD admissions at anything except the schools where you're competing against students from institutions with extreme grade inflation like Harvard. In my MA program, every student has gotten at least one B - we're a four-field program, and it's rare for a cultural student to ever get an A in Archaeology, for example. The PhD program admission processes that I've seen (behind the scenes) did not expect students to have a 4.0 at all. Research interests, professional engagements, and really strong research proposals were very important - but the number one factor in the admissions process was whether the faculty wanted to work on your proposed topic of research (and you got huge bonus points for great letters of rec, especially if they were written by someone your POI knows, or someone known for being good in the specific topic you're applying to research). If a professor said "I want to work with that student" they were basically in - regardless of anything else. That leads me to believe that your PhD application process should be based on developing a VERY good pre-application relationships with your potential supervisor(s), to the point that they say "I will supervise you if you're admitted).

Thanks for this feedback - much appreciated! My advisors have told me UofT, York, and UBC are the best Anthro programs in Canada - I wonder how Canadian students see them - and also wonder how U.S. schools see these degrees in terms of teaching?

I would be interested to hear everyone's thoughts on Canadian PhD programs in terms of 'prestige.' Of course here in the U.S. I have a sense of how to rank schools - it's easy to 'feel' the prestige of degrees from Cornell, Duke, Columbia, etc. But with the Canadian programs? How would you rank an anthropology PhD from University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, York University, Simon Fraser, and McGill? Any others within the top programs in Canada? Would McGill be at the top or would York or Toronto? This question was inspired by discussions with my advisors about the post-PhD teaching job market, and the importance of a recognizable degree from a school considered to have 'prestige.' Obviously that's setting aside research fit, interests, funding, and all the other very important factors in deciding between schools.

Think of your Statement of Purpose as a research plan - a totally academic explanation of your research interest, how it fits in the literature, what it contributes to the field, etc. And your Personal Statement as the story of how and why you are interested in pursuing that research. That might help you divide the two up more clearly.

The education you get from any grad program will be mostly up to you. What makes Columbia, and Cornell, and Duke, and all the other "top" programs high ranking is that they are fully and completely funded. The question you need to answer is: who in the program do you want to work with? figure out - what do you want to study? and then match that to a program.

Depending on the program you apply to comparing ethnographic fieldwork with marketing could be a kiss of death for your application. The real question you need to answer is: What do you want to do with an MA in Anthropology? That will limit which programs you want to go to, and which programs you apply to will determine how you craft your applications.

The MA is at a different school than the PhD - but I know the faculty at both, the cultural faculty anyway. A few have joint-appointments. Good luck!

PhD at UBC, UofT, perhaps York.

If anyone has CUNY questions, I did the four field MA there, and would be happy to answer them.

Have you looked at Multi-species ethnography? I would follow that angle toward people like Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and others. You might want to consider an STS approach also - look at some of the work being done by faculty at MIT HASTS, and also look at what you might be able to do at UC Santa Cruz History of Conciousness program. Eben Kirksey is a good example of the kind of work that has come out of these areas recently.

Anyone else applying to Canadian schools and programs?