vaiseys

Hello all, We just finished putting together an FAQ page for prospective applicants. We realized that some things in the application process are mysterious if you don't know someone with insider knowledge. This document is intended to demystify that process. Although a lot of it is specific to Duke, some of you might find it useful in general. Best of luck with the application season! Stephen Vaisey (Duke Sociology DGS)

Please remember that as long as programs are selecting who (not) to admit and students are choosing where (not) to go, departmental prestige is associated with many individual-level factors related to productivity in graduate school and job "placement." I'd love to see this acknowledged at least once in a while, rather than the (implicit) assumption that incoming students are just blobs of clay "trained" by their programs and stamped by their prestige. OK, rant complete.

1. Honestly, I really had a hard time relaxing until after tenure. I'm not joking. Even now, it's often hard to switch off. That said, I tried to develop habits that let me separate my professional and personal life. I almost never worked at home during grad school, for example. I tried to leave work at work. But that also means being willing to be on campus at least 40 hours a week (more like 50-55 if TAing or teaching) and remaining really focused during that time (e.g., no [OK, very little] random browsing of the interwebs). 2. In my somewhat limited experience, students who leave PhD programs tend to do it very early or too late. Some people realize quickly that this isn't for them and they get out. Good for them! Better to know sooner. Often they though academic soc was something it really isn't (e.g., saving the world). The ones who leave late seem to just struggle to get projects together. They are often very smart and well read but they just can't pull a coherent project together for some reason. (The ability to consume knowledge and produce knowledge are hardly perfectly correlated.) So they often end up slowly gravitating toward other things and eventually end up with other jobs. 3. Maintain reasonable anxiety. Don't worry about publishing in year 1. Just really soak in your classes. For your MA paper, take on something tractable so you can get the feeling of success under your belt before moving on to a more ambitious project. You're learning the research process so keep it simple. There will be time to change direction later if you want. And finally, try to be happy! Remember that you're getting paid to do something way more interesting than most people!

Re Duke: check your spam folder first of all. A couple of our admits missed the message because it went to spam. If there's no message there, you are either not accepted or you gave us the wrong email address (it's happened!). As of now, I've either sent an email to or talked on the phone with every person who's been admitted. I don't know if all the waitlist folks have been notified though because the grad school does the notifying and they don't tell us. I know that this is a nerve-wracking time for many of you. I still vividly remember early 2002 and the stress I endured as I waited to hear back from programs. Even after I got into places I really liked, rejection still hurt. I really do sympathize. Good luck out there!

I've been trying not to post here (don't want to throw off the grad student vibe) but I've got to jump in on this one. There is NO DOUBT that it's better to be the top person at (almost) any school than a middling student at any other school. The amount of heterogeneity within departments is MUCH larger than the amount between departments. The reliance on means and best-case scenarios really obscures that fact. I could also list many examples of people who got jobs "above" where they got their PhDs (myself included). I don't want to call attention to any of my friends or colleagues but there are lots of examples out there. Last rant item: don't confuse selection effects with treatment effects. If top departments get their first choice of students at admissions time, it's no wonder they they go on to have the best "placements." We'd expect the same thing even if there was no effect at all of going to the program. An analogy: if two or three NFL teams got the first draft picks every single year, we wouldn't be surprised if they went on to win a lot of games. Don't confuse draft pick priority with coaching ability.

Could be. But there are at least 5 admits and 6 people on the waitlist that haven't yet been informed by the Grad School.

Duke DGS here. Decisions have all been made but the grad school rolls them out in batches for some reason. You should be hearing very soon. We had an amazing group of applicants this year so if you didn't make it, please try not to take it too hard. There were easily 10-15 additional people we would have been thrilled to admit if we had the room. As someone who has been directly involved in admissions at Berkeley and Duke 6 times, I can assure you that there is some "measurement error" in the process. I think we do a pretty good job, but if the composition of the committee had been a little different, for example, I'm sure the list of admits would have been a little different, too. My point is that this process is not an error-free referendum on your academic worth. So hang in there!