Pennywise

I think you two are using the same word (research) in two very different ways. One means social science research suitable for academic training. The other means applied research as used in Criminal Justice agencies. Those two are both technically research, but the latter would not, say, prepare someone for a tenure track job in a tier one research institution.

I just wanted to add that I hope you realize that almost everyone with full funding and a stipend also has to work as a ta or ra. That's what we mean by full funding. So yeah, it would be crazy to turn down full funding in favor of an unfunded offer, but i think you got the message lol.

I see that you got into York Geography but would have to pay for your own tuition for 3 years. If your other option is abject misery as described above, mightn't it be preferable to take out student loans for tuition for a year? Hopefully next year you would have figured out a way to get external funding, so you'd only have an extra $30K or so in loans. Yes I realize a Marxist Geography Phd is not a sure-fire path to a lucrative job, but if your other option is so horrible, I think taking out federal loans could be an option.

Out of curiosity -- have people actually gotten straight accepted (not off a wait list) this long after the first rounds of acceptances went out? Are there programs that just withhold some acceptance decisions?

Did you ever hear from Cornell?

Well, he's one of the top rock stars of sociology right now, right? He's not just anybody, he's a sociology icon -- students (perhaps like the person who started this thread) seem to idolize him. Therefore, his behavior is held to a somewhat higher standard of scrutiny. I enjoy his writing a lot, and think his work (esp his early work) is quite important. I just think his research is super sketchy when you learn, for example, that he didn't take field notes for a lot of it -- how could he possibly remember SO many long direct quotes?

Those articles were pretty substantively damning, in a couple different dimensions. Glad to hear that not all his advisees had such horrible experiences, though.

I had heard on the grapevine that he was censured by the faculty for some sort of dishonesty. Is that true? There were two separate problems, and I wasn't sure which one he was censured for -- one being that many people think he made up many quotes and events in his sex work ethnography. The second being that he misappropriated some funds from a research center he was involved with. Knowing Columbia, they would care more about the $$ lol. This really could just be idle gossip from jelly rivals, though. Anybody have any verification? OK a quick Google found some substantiation: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/nyregion/sudhir-venkatesh-columbias-gang-scholar-lives-on-the-edge.html?_r=0 http://bwog.com/2012/12/02/venkatesh-responds-to-the-nyt/ http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2009/04/puff-magic-sociologist-review-of-sudhir/ This comment got 19 upvotes on a Columbia site: "Virtually everyone I know who has encountered him, graduate and undergraduate, describes him as an absolute monster and abusive person. There's a reason he hardly ever teaches in the department. Not a surprise." 16 upvotes: "if he's such a big advocate of ethnographic fieldwork and the 'chicago school of sociology', he certainly doesn't seem very interested in teaching those methods to graduate students or supervising their work on committees. if you flip through the dissertation cover-pages submitted to the department of sociology over the past 10 years, you'll have a much a clearer idea of how little he's involved in doctoral committee work of any sort (with research projects, ethnographic or otherwise). and i'm sorry, but field-trips to paris with undergraduates are simply no substitute for supervising actual ethnographic work in the field, which requires months if not years of a researcher being embedded within a particular community . . ."

Have you known people who got funding in their later years, after not getting funding the first year? I'm genuinely curious if this happens at all, and where it happens. I am very familiar with two top-ten crim PhD programs, and I have never heard of anything like that. Perhaps it happens at schools without as many resources? What I have heard of is students having their funding yanked after a year or two if it wasn't contractually guaranteed when they were admitted. So what you're looking for is guaranteed funding for a certain number of years (4 or 5). What everybody I have ever spoken with in academia agrees on is that you shouldn't take an offer if it's completely unfunded.

What a charmer.

If you know you want to teach in a crim dept, I'd pick Maryland. If you want to teach in a sociology or other related dept, I'd pick Penn. Penn's rep within criminology is relatively weak, but its overall rep as an institution is stronger. I would look at the placements and outcomes for recent grads and think about which type of life outcome you want. The two are quite different, and neither is intrinsically superior. Congrats on all your success you bastard (jk, I'm sure you earned it).

Hm interesting. I think it might depend on what your goal is. People get criminology PhDs for a lot of reasons other than wanting to get a tenure-track job in a well ranked Criminology or Sociology program, whereas that has been my focus. ETA: But if your goal is a tenure-track job at a relatively prestigious research institution, then I think 2 years would be generally frowned upon. What you're suggesting would involve doing your coursework while writing your dissertation. That suggests that you didn't really learn anything in your coursework, since it would be almost impossible to, for example, change your research design a year into writing it, based on PhD-level research methods that you were only learning after you had already designed your research.

Presumably it would be 4 semesters of coursework, and then at least a year to write your dissertation, right? That is the bare bones minimum I have heard of, and it's frowned upon and not considered a good path toward getting a job in academia. Perhaps if academia is not the goal, these things are different? I have never heard of an American PhD that could be finished in 2 years even with a Masters, but maybe I'm wrong.

2 years for a PhD is bizarrely fast and raises red flags about the quality of such a program -- there's no such thing as a free lunch. Truly becoming an expert in your field takes time. Four years is considered fast even if you have your Masters. As for funding in your second year, that would be a school-by-school question, but in general you are more likely to have your funding removed after your first year than to magically get new funding. I mean, of course you can apply to fellowships and other competitive awards, but if the department isn't enthusiastic enough about you right now to give you guaranteed tuition and stipend, why would they give you their most competitive awards? Not getting tuition and stipend funding is a very negative signal. If I were you, I would hold off on making any big plans until you locked in guaranteed funding. If you cannot get the funding, I would seriously consider reapplying next year. From your posts it sounds like you *really* did not do enough research about this process. ETA: 6 years is not $180,000 in tuition, because no sane PhD student who figured out how the system works would ever pay tuition for 6 years. You're not supposed to pay tuition to get your PhD, period. The worst thing to happen is getting a stipend so low that you have to take some extra money out in loans to live -- that does happen. But no, you do not pay tuition. If your Masters program is encouraging you to take out loans to pay them tuition to continue in their PhD program, then you should 1) politely decline, and 2) name and shame them so others can avoid a department that treats its students like cash cows.

[Edited]

Oh if I had known about that program I might have more seriously considered Northeastern. Oh well!

I've always been intrigued by that program but was intimidated by the fact that they only accept 2 or 3 people, mostly from their own law school (though I could be wrong about that, I'm just deducing from their site).

Before you go -- do you mean you've left academia? I'm so curious about that decision! Thanks again for all your great advice.

I'm not quite as optimistic about academic job prospects for cj/crim phds. I know a lot of cj phd recent grads bc i have 2 close friends in 2 programs. Very few are getting the first research institution tenure track job they dreamed of, unfortunately. A few got tt jobs, but many took solid jobs outside of academia (working for think tanks or state and federal government as number crunchers). One is making a lot of money because he started a quant consulting company. Two got jobs at Rutgers, but they both had preexisting connections with that department. Now, there is nothing wrong with non academic jobs. The reason they made those choices is that in balance they decided they were better options than, say, adjuncting. One great advantage of crim is that you have more applied options like working for the government (as long as you have a compatible sensibility). For the original poster her research interests seem much more crim so I think that makes perfect sense for her. I just wanted to inject my observations about the real outcomes among two recent crim/cj cohorts.

Love that withdrawal letter.

Socjobrumors is a horrifying, horrifying site.

Hey why the downvote? I'm not saying that's what everybody should do, but i thought it might be helpful to know that at least one person succeeded with the bidding war strategy.

Has anybody heard anything from John Jay? I know in the past they have done interviews, so I'm worried by the fact that I haven't heard a peep from them...

Yeah it didn't even include an application fee waiver for one of their cash cow Masters programs. Thanks for that junk mail, UC!

Thanks!