jacib

I thought of doing this at two schools. Berkeley specifically disallows it. At Harvard, I asked about it and they said they would take it as the mark of an "unserious student", even if I was applying with the exact same project. If you can get away with it, it's fine. To my knowledge, there's no reason the departments would find out unless you tell them. Just if you have any questions about this policy, contact the school not the departments directly.

I only mentioned one person from the sociology department in my statement, plus one by courtesy person who was in the religion department, and one political scientist. That's probably not the optimal strategy, but it turned out that it was a good one--my adviser works very closely with the political scientist I mentioned, which is not surprising since he's huge in the substantive area I was applying for. I know some of my colleagues mentioned people in our ed school and school of public health and they obviously got in. As long it clearly relates to the specific project you propose in your statement of purpose, I think it's all good. It should not read in the least like "These people are also dope, and I'm trying to find a backdoor way to work with them." There should also definitely be one, preferably two, people in the department who would be excellent advisers for your topic.

I am not a computational sociologist and have no career advice, but I can tell you my friends who are interested in computational sociology all read the blog Bad Hessian.

I went through the same decision, and applied to five religion programs and five sociology programs. After I got my first acceptance to a sociology program, I ended up withdrawing most of my religion applications. Personally, I find my research interests were much more in line and better supported by people in the sociology departments I applied to. Honestly, though, in general, sociology jobs are more plentiful than religion jobs, not just internationally but in the U.S. as well. I don't know exactly which sociology program you're talking about (I would guess it's either Rice or Baylor, if one counts Waco as a big city, but it could be somewhere else entirely) and I certainly don't know which religion program you're talking about. The sociologists of religion I've talked to, both graduate students on the market and professors (admittedly, all from top ten programs), have been optimistic about job prospects in general. Maybe they'd have to move to a far away town that they wouldn't have chosen on their own, likely at a school less prestigious than where they got their undergraduate degree, but there's a feeling there are jobs out there in sociology departments for sociologists of religion. My experience with professors and especially graduate students on the market in religion is quite different. My undergraduate university is generally considered one of the best graduate schools in the country for religion, and talking to the graduate students I knew there, none of them were optimistic about the job market. Of the two I was closest two, one ended up getting a job at a community college, the other took a while to find a job and eventually found a non-tenure track position at a liberal arts college. Both really liked me but both insisted I think about the job market realities that come with a Ph.D. from a religion department. See if you can get a real sense of placement from the religion program (not just where the stars got placed, but where everyone got placed). See if you can get a real sense of attrition (that was another big problem at the religion program I knew) and also the average time to degree. See if you can get a sense of where your adviser's last five or ten graduate students have ended up. Obviously, ideally you'd be able to do compare the answers to those things directly with the sociology program in question, but it seems like the program's too young to have that sort of track record. Last thing I'll say, sociologists of religion can get jobs in religion departments (Courtney Bender at Columbia or Mark Chaves at Duke, to pick two prestigious examples) but it's much harder for people from religion departments--even ones that have a "religion and society" or "anthropology and sociology of religion" track--to get jobs in sociology departments (I can't think of any, off the top of my head).

I went to my department for one person. I was pretty sure she was staying though, and I specifically talked to her about it when I met with her, and my concerns. Though there were other people in religion and political science I was interested in working with, there was only one in sociology. I've found a lot more, to the point where now I have to decide if either of those original "other people I came here for" are even going to be on my committee (my adviser is still my adviser). You won't just be working your adviser, you'll be part of an academic milieu that will affect your thinking. You'll find people who are great Of the two people I'm trying to decide whether or not to put on my committee one wasn't even hired when I got here (and wouldn't have mattered because I wasn't interested in his subfield at the time) and the other was a new a hire, and I didn't get the connection between his interests and my own. What you should really do is try to talk to current graduate students of the star's--and other in that program--and see what the deal is. At my program, we have one star who might retire in the next five years, one who might move (but probably won't), one who is notoriously difficult to work with, one who is great to work with but only if you have a personality match, etc. etc. If they have seemingly few students, find out why. If they have several students, find out who else they work with and how they feel about those people. But this is really information that you'll mainly get from the graduate students already in the program. The biggest name in my department has few students, but works very closely with them and I think mentors them a great deal, despite all the international speaking engagements. Honestly, though, you'll be spending five to ten years of your life in a place. That's a fairly serious prison sentence. How happy you will be in a place while you're doing your work is honestly a very important thing to consider. But it's something you can only really figure out after visiting both place. (Also, as a side note, it depends on the school, but sometimes research centers are very tied to individual professors and if they left, they wouldn't necessarily hire someone new to run the center. At my undergraduate university, there was a whole department created for one professor, and if he leaves, the department will probably be merged into a similar field).

Look at the type of school you want to work at, then find check CV's to see the trajectories of professors there. Alternatively, find scholars whose work you think you like and look at their career trajectories. I noticed that a lot of the best historical sociologists (Charles Kurzman, Charles Tilly, Andy Abbott) started out at large state schools not particularly known for sociology (except Andy Abbot was at Rutgers, which has a notable program outside the top-30) though some (Theda Skocpol, Rogers Brubaker) led touched lives from the word go. And these are probably some of the best sociological minds out there. You'll find some people without top 25 degrees at top 25 programs. I just happened to look through UT Austin because I knew Javier Auyero, who got his degree from the New School, was there. About 10% of the tenured or tenure track faculty who got their degrees in the U.S. have non-top 25 degrees (I'd guess this is particularly high, I checked with Washington as a comparison case: between 0%-10% of the comparable faculty have non-top 25 degrees, depending on where exactly Albany, Santa Barbara, and Vanderbilt were ranked in the 80's and 90's--notice no one with a degree since 1997). But often these people's career trajectories are unreal. Auyero, for instance, wrote 4 books (and edited two others) before he was promoted to associate professor. Another guy, Ken-Hou Lin who got his PhD from UMass, had two first author AJS articles, an ASR article, and then three other articles before he finished graduate school. These are truly exceptional career trajectories in both senses of the word. At schools like Tufts, or BU, or BC, or Brandeis, or Georgetown, or American (selective private schools without prestigious PhD programs in sociology), you see a bit more of a mix, but younger faculty is still mostly top 25-ish degree (but by no means totally). At SUNY Buffalo, to choose a random non-flagship state school, about 20% are non-top 25ish (again, it's imperfect because some schools like Albany have dropped), but at SUNY Buffalo you certainly do see a lot of people from elite schools. For example, of their faculty who earned their PhDs in the last ten years, you have Northwestern (x2), Wisconsin (x2), Cornell (x2), Arizona, Chicago. I tried a couple other non-flagship state schools off the top of my head but I couldn't see any other that listed all the faculty's Ph.D.s on the same page. The Assistant Professors at Cal State Fullerton were from UCLA, CUNY, Colorado, and Brown. The two assistant professors (among a sea of lecturers) at Colorado - Denver were from Harvard and Riverside. The assistant professors at UW-Milwaukee were from Northwestern, Connecticut, Madison, New Mexico, and Austin. It's obviously not impossible to get a tenure track job with a degree outside the top-25 (and it's not like a degree from a top 10 school guarantees you a sweet job). It does seem like people with prestigious degrees can be found teaching at a wide variety of schools. It does seem even that some spectacular people get top-25 positions without having a top 25 degree. Mostly, though, people from the top 25 get a lot of jobs (this probably has something to do with how big some of these cohorts are). I don't know if there's one clear take away.

"Mixed methods" is a somewhat hot thing in sociology. It's certainly a nice-buzzword at least, and one I use to describe my work. Check out Mario Small's Annual Review of Sociology piece on it--it's probably the best entry point. There's interesting work on religious minorities and immigration, in both Europe in the U.S. For the U.S., the best entry point is probably another Annual Review article: Wendy Cadge's "Immigration and religion" (her first book was about "the first generation of Theravada in America" and very qualitative). Fenggang Yang's work might be an entry point (though I like his work on religion in China more than his work on immigrant religion, which mainly means I think his work on China is some of the best stuff being done, period), perhaps "Transformations in new immigrant religions and their global implications". His book on Chinese American Christian might be another template. They've both written a lot on immigration and religion (particularly Buddhism and Asian Christianity, respectively). Obviously, there's also a rich, rich, mainly U.S. based sociological literature on immigration (you know, Portes and all those guys) which I assume you know about from your masters thesis. Europe is honestly more exciting to me, though that might just be because it's new. It's mostly about Islam and is much more quantitative. There's definitely a lot of quant-y stuff in America as I'm sure you know, there's just a clear lack of qualitative stuff in Europe--the closest I can think of is the little bit that Wacquant has written on the banlieue compared to the "ghetto" and the book Cosmopolitan Anxieties (Turks in Germany) and a few other studies that are more media/discourse/content analyses than anything else. The quant stuff I'm just learning about, but one entry point is the Ties Project, which is really sweet. All their reports are free online. The European Second Generation Compared: Does the Immigration Context Matter? is the only one I've read so far but it's both ground breaking and fascinating. The most important historical comparative person in this field would probably be Rogers Brubaker, though he does stuff on nationalism/citizenship rather than immigration per se, his Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany will definitely be important to any historical-comparative immigration you do. How you should position yourself should be based on what departments you're applying to: departments that are strong in immigration, say you want to study immigration, assimilation, and integration using mixed methods. Departments that are more historical comparative, say you want study citizenship and nationhood, especially in terms of minorities. Remember that this is not a contract that you're signing with the department you're applying to. This is an indication of your general interests and should be a signal that you can come up with an interesting, researchable question--everyone expects your topic to evolve and maybe even change completely before you finish your dissertation prospectus, even. The particular risk about studying yourself is: lets say I'm not from that minority and I have no interest in them specifically, why should I care about your study? What's sociologically interesting about this case? As my father always says, "If this is a case study, what is it a case of?" You'll obviously need to be able to answer those sorts of questions. Particularly with historical comparative methodology (at least I've found--ymmv), I think it's important to be able to point out specific things that the current literature is missing--not just "no one has studied this before", but "people think this (CITE 1999, CITE 2013), and it's clearly wrong when you examine this case and we also need to study that." Maybe you don't want to try to combine them, as I assume you would, and just go with one or the other (or indicate one is a "side project"--I don't know how that's looked on).

Yes, it does. Post-docs are less common in sociology, but where you get your PhD definitely matters. You may be interested in reading Val Burris's article "The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks" ASR 2004. Part of it is conceptual (how should we think of prestige?) but a lot of it empirical and will give you good data on exactly how much where you get PhD from matters. Of course, there's a confounding variable that the top programs generally get the most promising students, but Burris finds that prestige is not directly connected to the number of articles published. Here's a PDF of the article. Here's the abstract: The prestige of academic departments is commonly understood as rooted in the scholarly productivity of their faculty and graduates. I use the theories of Weber and Bourdieu to advance an alternative view of departmental prestige, which I show is an effect a department's position within networks of association and social exchange—that is, it is a form of social capital. The social network created by the exchange of PhDs among departments is the most important network of this kind. Using data on the exchange of PhDs among sociology departments, I apply network analysis to investigate this alternative conception of departmental prestige and to demonstrate its superiority over the conventional view. Within sociology, centrality within interdepartmental hiring networks explains 84 percent of the variance in departmental prestige. Similar findings are reported for history and political science. This alternative understanding of academic prestige helps clarify anomalies—e.g., the variance in prestige unconnected to scholarly productivity, the strong association between department size and prestige, and the long-term stability of prestige rankings—encountered in research that is based on the more conventional view. This is only looking at hiring at the very top schools, however; there's a lot less data about how these prestige effects work further down the prestige hierarchy.

Monica Prasad just won some big book award for her The Land of Too Much. The other person I was specifically thinking of apparently retired or otherwise moved on (I believe he had an Slavic name and said he was interested in taking a "conflict theory" approach, according to his website). Those were the two I'm pretty sure I mentioned in my SoP, and I probably shouldn't have focused on them--especially now that I look at their website and realize how many other great historical sociologists they have. I had picked Northwestern in part because I wanted to move back to Chicago and in part because there is a really cool lady who teaches at their Political Science department I wanted to work with; I didn't do a very much research on the people I listed and I didn't really understand historical comparative sociology, either, so my SoP didn't properly frame my project as historical comparative. Again, it's not that I don't think these professors aren't good, just I don't think the project I proposed would appeal, especially as written. Edit: Of the other professors doing historical comparative work there, I think Sheila Orloff is a leftist but I really can't remember precisely.

Probably about four things matter (in no particular order): overall quality/reputation: there are a couple of rankings threads around, I think there's a "rising programs" thread on the front page that might be worth reading. As much as we like to think only the quality of our work matters, we're sociologists, we know how this works. There's no reason to choose a program ranked #1 over a program ranked #5 (they're probably the same) but a department ranked #5 is probably noticeably less prestigious than one ranked #20. This is something to consider. support: in terms stipend, though most top schools are more or less comparable in terms of stipend. This is something that you probably won't consider until you see where you're in. Teaching/TAing is usually split with public schools doing a lot more teaching which leads to generally longer years to degree--most people still, probably rightly, choose places like Madison or Berkeley over a place like Penn or NYU, because even though the former take longer than the letter (and have slightly lower stipends, I think), the pay-off in terms of placement/jobs is likely to be greater (see above). There is also just overall support of the direction you want to go. Some schools give you great methods training (qualitative, quantitative, networks, historical, whatever), but tend to support very "normal science" work. Other schools tend to support very creative and a little bit weird work. You can kind of figure this out by looking at web pages and things like that, but it's not totally possible. My school supports people doing a lot of weird things all over the map, other schools (including schools higher ranked than us) tend to focus on the more traditional cores of sociology (inequality/urban/race and now networks). Lastly, some schools had a reputation of not being super supportive of graduate students (Madison had this reputation for a while, but they toally changed the way they funded students maybe five years ago and I heard it's changed)--this last thing is the hardest to figure out as a prospective student and can probably only possibly be figured out after you're in, on a visiting weekend, by actively quizzing people (I wouldn't tell people the downsides of my school unless someone specifically ask, and then I'd give them a pros and cons list). subfield quality: subfield ranking is generally less important than overall ranking for job placement (at least in direct terms), but definitely matters more for getting into a program. This is what people are talking about when they talk about "fit". Think about the project you want to propose, how does it fit into the ASA's sections? Methodology? I've written else where, but my cohorts projects have changed dramatically. But the person who cared about law and women still studies law and women (and added technology), the person who cared about race and education still cares about race and education, the person who did networks and economic sociology did a lot of things but ended up back with networks and economic sociology, the person who did China still does China (original project was very strat-y, but now does more science stuff), the person who did networks and education (but mainly networks) now does networks and historical/comparative, came in religion and politics and Turkey and I still do religion and politics and Turkey, etc. Since religion is a tiny subfield this didn't apply to me as directly (I just needed someone to sponsor me) as there are only a couple of departments (Princeton, Baylor, Notre Dame) that have any reputation as good places to study religion, but I did choose a place that was supportive my original methodology/subfield (historical-comparative), though I didn't really realize this at the time, this was half-luck. adviser match/quality: It seems unlikely you'll get in if there's no one who could help you. Here's where the "theory" stuff might matter. Do the people in your subfield work using the methods and outlooks you're interested in? Some specialists work with a wide variety of student in their subdiscipline. For example, at Chicago, I think William Julius Wilson and Robert Sampson are on most of the urban sociology dissertation committees, and that can give you very Marxist people like Loic Wacquant, more middle of the road conventional liberals like Sudhir Venkatesh, some very quanty neighborhood effects people, and some more policy oriented people (the closest I can come up with off the top of my head is Eric Klinenberg, but he's obviously not really policy-policy). My point is a wide variety of people work with those people. When I applied to schools, I applied to work with Cihan Tuğal at Berkeley. He's very interested in religion and politics in Turkey, but he's very Marxist. Knowing what I know now, I still would have applied to Berkeley, but I would recognize that my very un-Marxist approach might not jibe with him. Or alternatively, maybe I would have made my proposal a little more radical and thrown in slightly different language. Similarly, someone with a strong Marxist approach might have better luck at NYU or Berkeley than say Harvard or Columbia. Likewise, I applied to work with Phil Gorski at Yale, but he has a very archival, document based, very traditional historical approach that most of his students follow (though he does have some interview based or ethnographic students as well, I think). Again, I would have applied, but if I had realized that, I might have written my statement somewhat differently (though I did do right trying to connect these historical religious events to large debates within the field, as that's something Gorski is probably better at than anyone else). That said, I'm not sure it's always possible to know these sorts of things about individual schools before you apply unless you have particularly good advising. I had someone helping me out who knew all the exciting sociology of religion people, but I can't remember if she knew the details of Tuğal (who is more typically thought of as political sociology) or Gorski (who is more typically thought of as historical-comparative). There are some people who get great placements (one of the big names in my department has particularly good placements) and some that are notoriously hard to work with (one of the big names in my department has not graduated any notable students; another has graduate few students but these students have gotten good placements). All that said, people often switch around advisers once they're in, and part of it is based on personality. I came in to clearly work with one adviser, and no one else really works as closely on what my thing is, but I still probably could have found someone to work with once I got in. Adviser personality-type things matters more for small subfields (at the department level) than for big subfields, obviously, since you have more people to work with in big subfields. I can`t speak for other programs, but in my program one certainly doesn`t choose between macro- and micro- from the start. I went from taking a very macro-view, and now am taking a very micro-view (of a macro process), from how the state affects people to how people affect the state. How one engages with theory (especially, whether or not one is Marxist, or wants to engage with critical grand theory like Bourdieu and Foucault, less so if someone wants to engage with specific theories in the field) and how one engages with methods (especially, whether someone has or will take a lot of statistics classes) matter a bit more, but those categories are malleable. I have a friend who is, in certain ways, the most politically conservative, entirely quantitative, demographic person in my cohort and works (very well) with the most Marxist professor, one who never uses statistics but does a lot of big picture theorizing, in the department--the professor is one of those people who works with a variety of people though, and the student and the professor shares a strong substantive interest in a subfield. In some programs, I've heard that there's a more distinct quantitative/qualitative divide (departments are often quite good at both), but I don't know how things really work in departments other than my own. The difficult thing is most of these sort of things (about the dispositions of individual professors, resources available to students), I realize, you can`t really know until you`re already in the system, or at least probably until visiting weekend. Try to think about overall ``fit``. I think the best two threads that talk about these things are FertMigMort`s and the from the 2010 Applicants (there's also an but that got less play). Those give you an idea of what programs look for in you, which will get you some idea of what you should look for in a program. Also, the user "faculty" probably gives the best advice on the forum so keep an eye out for them. But overall, there's no silver bullet way to find the right school, especially if you're kind of in the cracks between multiple topics (I am between political sociology, sociology of religion, and historical comparative). Talk to as many smart, knowledgable people as possible. How I ended up at my department was that I found a scholar whose work I really like who didn't work at a PhD granting department and I just emailed him out of the blue, "Can I work with you? [i knew the answer was no], If I can't work with you, who should I work with?" He (incredibly generously) offered to talk on the phone for me, and he went through a variety of departments, some of which were on my list already, some of which weren't for me, but he recommended a political scientist at the school I ended up going to, and that made me research the sociology department and led me to my adviser. It was very random and incredibly lucky (when that professor came by to give a talk, I thanked him profusely). I also knew people who already researched Turkey or the Middle East, I looked at which schools taught Turkish language (a "method" I needed to continue to learn), and that narrowed my list some, too. Like I mentioned, I had a sociology of religion professor who helped me find sociology of religion programs, but there aren't a ton of those. I also just went through most of the top-25 and read the bios of all the professors and see who sounded like they were doing interesting work. This led me to find one or two potential matches, but also led me down some wrong paths (I applied to Northwestern to historical comparative stuff with very Marxist professors when my project I don't think would necessarily appeal to them--I hadn't realized that at the time, and honestly don't think I had a chance; knowing what I know now about their work, I'm not sure I would have applied there, though like I mentioned, there are other Marxist professors I would still apply to work with).

The qualitative-quant thing is important, sure, but we definitely have a few people who are doing qualitative work with advisers known for quantitative work (it rarely goes the other way, but it can). It's important to recognize also that there are multiple qualitative methodologies and multiple quantitative methodologies. I started out wanting to do historical-comparative work and my project will be largely ethnographic... but probably with at least two chapters that do some quantitative analysis (vanilla regressions). I didn't really know much about stats when I came into the program. You should use the method that best fits your question. As my question changed, the methods I wanted to use changed too. One of my colleagues came in wanting to do STS-style social theory, but caught up with networks bug and now is spending the two years doing methodology classes to catch up. Another one of my colleagues came in as a "networks guy", but then decided that the networks approach was too limited, and got caught up in historical/comparative and through that got interested in "professions" (a la Andy Abbott), and then ended up designing a qualitative thesis... this thesis had a small quantitative part (scraping data from the internet to make networks), but the early results on that were so promising it's become the main part of his thesis so he's back to being a "networks guy". Two years ago he told me never wanted to write a paper with regression, but I came to him with an interesting question and a dataset we could use to answer that question and now we're collaborating on a paper that mainly uses regressions (with a small historical element). I talked with the Andy Papachristos (who's now a professor at Yale) and when he talked about his career trajectory, he explained that he started as an ethnographer and that his ethnographic dissertation research kept pointing to coeffender networks so he just had to learn all the networks stuff and now he's known pretty much just for quant research (some regression based stuff but mainly networks). My point is, sociology is a wonderful discipline because it lets you use a variety of methods to answer important questions. Obviously, you'll have ones that you're more comfortable with and obviously you should pick an adviser who can actually give you advice and obviously some departments are stronger in certain methodologies, but topics change and I don't know if it's a good idea to be averse to any one method. If you do urban ethnography, or interview-based organization work, or historical comparative stuff looking state formation, those are all "qualitative" projects, with very different methodologies. And those urban ethnographers end up needing to understand stats because you need to at least be able to read about neighborhood effects, and the orgs interviewers probably need to understand networks and some ecological models, minimally and I've found historical-comparative kids end up friends with the networks kids because we're generally the weird ones who are interested in weird questions (I don't think this is just my program, I think this is a broader pattern I've noticed, but I'm not sure). /shpiel, that wasn't really directed at you by the end there, sorry...

Fun little update: in the comments to this post in Scatterplot (you guys should be checking Scatterplot and Org Theory from time to time) about dis-aggregating the 2013 and 2009 USNWR surveys [the magazine reported the 2013 score as an average of the results in the surveys of both years], Stephen Vaisy--a very smart dude from Duke--points out: Something that few people have talked about (that I’ve seen) is the change in the rating (rather than the ranking) over time. Consider these lists (limited to top 30ish)… Departments increasing: Irvine, Penn State, UT-Austin, Duke (obviously!), Penn, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton Departments decreasing: Berkeley, U. of Washington, Maryland (BTW, all of these departments moved .2 in either direction.) So there's that, but how much of that is random noise, how much of that is a real trend, and if there is a real trend, how much of it will continue, is of course hard to say. But just a fun little thing to see (though ultimately probably pretty meaningless!) Again, someone could try to compare 2005 survey's numbers and see, with a longer window, we do actually see any schools improving noticeably and consistently. It's an interesting observation that we tend to pay attention only to ranking here and not score.

You should really read "The Academic Caste System" by Val Burris. Ungated PDF. It shows you what goes into academic rankings (most important things: past rankings; department size) and, though it's necessarily the entire focus of the paper, how they matter in terms of job placement (hint: there's a lot of social closure at the top). He rethinks of "prestige" as social capital, and argues that it matters a lot in network terms. And his argument is based only on overall prestige, not more meritocratic subfield prestige. Worth reading and thinking about. If you want, Neal Caren wrote a blog post over in Scatterplot that looks at this issue again and it's a little shorter, but it's obviously not a replacement for the real article. The two links in the first line of Caren's post are also worth reading. But it's really true on top: I'm at a top-ten-ish department, and I think we've hired for 3 new positions in the past four years or something, and the like dozen or so candidates have only come from like six different schools, all ranked higher than us on all the charts. Again, though, this is only about placement at the top. If two people from a cohort got jobs at in the top ten, two got jobs at community college, and four couldn't find jobs, only the first two would show up in this data and the school would look excellent. That said, from my experience, it looks like schools that place better on top also place better for all their candidates down the line (the ones that go into the academic job market, at least--people who drop out or people who decide not to get university jobs, who knows). The only real caveat I can give is that, from looking unsystematically, some big state schools seem to place a lot of people in regional colleges and universities; I remember especially looking at the soc departments of smaller, unprestigious Midwestern schools seeing a surprising number of Wisconsin and Michigan grads. However, I assume this is more an effect of the preferences of individuals (and their partners) to stay in the area than anything to do with prestige and the job market more broadly. Like, I'd wager if you looked at all the colleges in CUNY, you'd find a disproportional number of NYU and Columbia PhDs with jobs there, and in the South, I'd guess you'd find more Duke, UNC, and maybe even UT grads--this could also be explained through networks, too, but I would guess has more to do with candidate preference, especially based on the fact I've heard professor at one smaller, top-50 or so program say, "Our people could get better placement than they do, but half of them don't want to leave [our metro area]!" Also look at the I wrote two comments about rankings on there, one with links to a going back to 1995 (the Burris article shows a variety of top ten rankings going back to 1925 and makes a point that the schools in the original ranking are all still more or less top ten departments).

In general, at least in the schools I'm familiar with, there's a standard, university-wide package for all humanities and most social science students (not economics). Some may offer some variations on that (at my school, there's not really that much wiggle room in packages, but I've heard some places are willing and able to offer a few minor perks), and maybe some specific projects and institutes will top up their students) and at some places there are a few high status, university-wide, merit-based package which are more generous ("Presidential Scholar" or something) but, in general, my experience is that packages for social science and humanities students are pretty consistent across the university.

I hope I didn't come off too harshly, I think I wrote too much and ended up losing my main point. Places like Irvine (at least for networks), Duke (for a couple of things), Notre Dame (for religion and probably other things), Yale (at least for culture and historical/comparative) are exciting places. I had the good fortune of presenting at a conference at a historical-comparative type conference at Yale and it was just one of those places where I got along with everyone, I thought everyone was doing great work, from the graduate students, to the post-docs, all the way up to the senior faculty (Julia Adams and Phil Gorski) who actually came to this dinky graduate student conference. I was totes jealous. For historical comparative, it was definitely just a great atmosphere and quite possibly the place in the country to do this sort of work (especially for the more empirically driven, heavily archival historical/comparative work). And while a lot of the work done there seemed more to be more exciting and creative than the "normal science" that some graduate students end up doing at other, more highly ranked schools, I'm think that sort of atmosphere in a subfield necessarily translates into improved rankings. And hell if I know how that translates onto the job market. But just because these schools are particularly exciting places to work (especially in particular subfields), we shouldn't necessarily expect their overall rankings to improve on these sorts of surveys. And it's always unclear how subfield ranking interacts with overall ranking (both in "true" and "perceived" terms) for individual students in search of jobs, but it's clear that overall rankings are pretty stable. In addition to Wendy Espeland's work that Dragon recommended (articles like "Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds" [2007] and "The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change" [2009], both about how law schools respond to rankings), people with multiple offers should definitely be aware of Val Burris's "The academic caste system: Prestige hierarchies in PhD exchange networks" (2004), which is specifically uses data from sociology. Here's the abstract: The prestige of academic departments is commonly understood as rooted in the scholarly productivity of their faculty and graduates. I use the theories of Weber and Bourdieu to advance an alternative view of departmental prestige, which I show is an effect a department's position within networks of association and social exchange—that is, it is a form of social capital. The social network created by the exchange of PhDs among departments is the most important network of this kind. Using data on the exchange of PhDs among sociology departments, I apply network analysis to investigate this alternative conception of departmental prestige and to demonstrate its superiority over the conventional view. Within sociology, centrality within interdepartmental hiring networks explains 84 percent of the variance in departmental prestige. Similar findings are reported for history and political science. This alternative understanding of academic prestige helps clarify anomalies—e.g., the variance in prestige unconnected to scholarly productivity, the strong association between department size and prestige, and the long-term stability of prestige rankings—encountered in research that is based on the more conventional view.

I disagree with a lot of this because all those universities can't rise in rankings without others falling. Who is going to fall in the top ten? Top twenty five? Maryland Washington Hopkins Minnesota Penn State Penn? I mean I guess those could fall--and a few seem to be on slightly declining trajectory--but none will probably fall that much (only a few are strong in my areas so I don't know the details). They probably won't all fall an average of two to four places each so that all those "hot" schools can move up significantly. Certainly none of "hot" schools will get higher than Harvard Berkeley UCLA Princeton Chicago Stanford Madison UNC bloc at the top and likely none will get higher than Northwestern Columbia Indiana Penn Columbia UT Duke or Cornell (maybe NYU will firmly join that group) rounding out the top ten+. For structural reasons, it's just hard to make "major moves" near the top (see also cumulative advantage). Conversations about "improving" and "becoming more interesting" are different from significantly numerically improving in a ranking. There's so much noise in these reputational rankings which are meant proxy for some platonic "true measure" of quality that even if there are changes in true quality it might not necessarily show up as large changes in the rankings or, because of the noise, really any change in the rankings. NYU was ranked 21 by NRC in 1995, 22 by USNWR in 2005, 16 in the Org Theory, 16 in USNWR 2013. They've definitely improved but will they rise further than that? Will they pass places like Northwestern, Indiana, and Columbia? Will they even cement themselves at roughly that level ("top ten", broadly defined)? I'm not sure. Yale has been trying to improve since they decided not to disband the department in the 1980's or whenever they almost got rid of the department (shortly after WashU in St. Louis and Rochester got rid of their departments). Yale Soc was 19 in 1995, 20 in 2005, 20 in 2013, in 17 in Org Theory--definitely all in the same range. They adopted a strategy for most of the 2000's of focusing on a few core areas (historical/comparative, urban, culture, inequality) and more or less ignoring most of the other areas. This didn't really improve their rankings, which is what I've heard this strategy was meant to do (the lack of movement in numbers is despite the fact that they are honestly about as good as you can get in historical-comparative and culture--I don't know about the other categories) and their recent hires (like Andy Papachristos, Rene Almeling, Fred Wherry, maybe some others) have moved a little bit away from that old concentrated workshop model. Again, they're trying to get at the Northwestern, Indiana, Columbia, Duke, UT, NYU, level, but will get there by the time you graduate? It depends on things we just can't know (who comes, who goes, how the new people pay off, who retires and when). The big state schools like Madison, Ohio, and UT might have a money crunch (I don't know the details of each) but the departments are just so much bigger than schools like Columbia or Northwestern or Yale so sheer quantity of researchers in some ways compensates for an inability to buy top researchers. As for the question about Washington, I think it was like Arizona in that it had some great faculty doing great things, and then some of those faculty left, some of those faculty retired, and some of the things they studied and the ways they studied them became not as "hot". That last one is probably the least important--it's mainly about big name faculty leaving and not being replaced. But that's why a lot of "hot" schools can only heat up so much--once professors get "hot", other schools try to scoop them. And usually the professor puts out feelers to other departments to show that they're interested in moving. My university has interviewed maybe half a dozen senior (roughly full professor level) or mid-career (roughly associate professor) in the past three or four years. Two were for a long standing search in a particular subfield to replace a particular professor who retired before I even got here. Another three or four were just people in one of the fields we are already strong on. I think there may have been one or two others but we're not always told what's just a department colloquium and what's a de facto job talk. I know for a fact that at least four of those people ended up moving (usually from a well-respected state school to an elite private school).

I'm in a relatively niche subfield (sociology of religion) which has only a limited number of people training students at top programs so I couldn't just apply to top programs that had a lot of sociology of religion people, I had to look for other things. I'm in my fourth year now and while there aren't many professors who explicitly work on religion or nationalism at my program, I have found people who are willing to support my work from related subfields (political sociology, historical/comparative, culture, globalization) plus some people from other departments (poli sci, religion) and some sociologists who just like cool, creative work and a few people who can help me methodologically. I definitely have enough for a committee and, in fact, I have people who I kinda wish I could have on my committee but don't have room for. I've definitely had to teach myself sociology of religion, but Arizona and a few other places have their comps reading lists online so it wasn't too bad. I've started a little networking at conferences, etc., though in the end I found myself falling in with a more historical-comparative crowd at conferences anyway, rather than a straight soc of religion crowd (who tend to like straight, single-sited ethnographies and vanilla regressions). My point is, I feel like there are a lot of resources and support available to me and the rest I could teach myself. That said, there aren't really other places I could transfer to (Wuthnow's at Princeton and Kurzman's at UNC but there aren't really a ton of others). I have a good relationship with my adviser, I have found two groups of peers to read my work (one a religion and politics interdepartment group, one a comparative sociology workshop that I got a little money for), and I feel like other faculty support my ideas and even if they aren't necessarily experts in them, they do know good sociology and interesting questions. As far as I have a relationship with a sociologist of religion in another department (and my university demands you have an outside person on your committee anyway--I bet yours does too), but I can sell myself a sociologist of religion because that's what I do. I know the literature. I know who is important. My CV lists conferences with "religion" in the title. I've emailed with (some) of the big names at other schools. Ultimately, though, I think what's important is that my work just is sociology of religion. I'll never take a comp on it, but I will publish papers in Sociology of Religion or Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Often, the job market sub-headings have a lot to do with whether or not you could teach the intro class in the subject. My sociology of religion class would likely be very different from the one taught at, say, Baylor or Notre Dame (which would almost certainly be entirely America focused and much more conventional), but it'd still be undeniably a sociology of religion class. I've met several people who already worked on or completed Ph.D.'s in Europe who basically started over in America. They could institutionally get one year off of classes, but no more. They obviously can move through quicker because of the ideas and experience (and in some cases data) they bring with them, but they don't get much institutional credit for it. People who transfer with their adviser, it seems, don't lose too much time, but these students are usually already dissertating anyway. Without knowing specifics of your situation, it's hard to say whether you should transfer or stay, but I do feel like you should talk with your adviser/DGS about your worries about finding enough support. Also, though, find the older odd ducks in your program--if you're in a top ten program, there are probably enough people in every cohort to have one or two other odd ducks--and see what they do to get by in the program, and also how they do on the market. My program has had both successful and unsuccessful odd ducks and I like to think I learned the necessary lessons from both.

Two years later and I say the list look pretty similar. Why? Because it takes a while for schools to rise, though schools can fall if a couple of big names move or retire and are not replaced, or funding more generally dries up. Compare some recent sets of rankings, like Org Theory's reputational rankings (link to the corrected version) or I think there might be a new US News and World Report grad school rankings. There was some controversy at the top with this one, as Wisconsin was surprisingly low, for example, but in general it "rang true" for people (one can read the comments on the two relevant posts to get a sense of what high profile sociology professors thought of them). With this from four years ago (!), you can compare it to USNWR 2009, USNWR 2005, NRC 1995 to get a sense of what, if any thing, has changed. The original thread had a spread sheet image showing side-by-side rnakings from all three years, but Grad Cafe changed something in their interface and now it's lost. It'd be pretty easy for someone who just finished applications and now has a lot of time on their hands to remake it. One note is that it gets noisy at the bottom. A lot of the smaller programs are highly specialized--I've heard Brandeis does well with medical sociology, Baylor with sociology of religion, Irvine with networks, etc--so if someone comes from a subfield not in one of those, they might simply not know how good work being done at those schools is (but it might show up on the job market in the external letters of rec and the quality of the writing sample and the publication record and the job talk). Just eyeballing it, Irvine's rise has been quite noticeable and it seems like (at least in the very networks and orgs friendly crowd at Org Theory) it is firmly a top 25 institution, though breaking into the "top 10" (which probably includes about 15 schools, just like the top 5 probably includes about 8 schools) would probably be difficult.

I think my statement of purpose would have been like, "Man, aren't these so-called 'secular' states weird? They're always messing with religion! Why don't they just love freedom, like America? Guys, I'm definitely studying Turkey, probably France even though I don't want to read a ton of French, and I feel like I have to make up a third country so let's just say India on this form and I'll figure out if that's actually a good case later on." It would have been a sweet project, but someone already wrote a book on it (their third case was 'Murica) so I had to abandon it in my first year.

Three things, in declining order of importance. 1) Don't plan on writing a huge book like Wallerstein or Mann or even Tilly as your dissertation. Tilly's dissertation was The Vendee which is a much smaller, more archive based, more traditional book than the later books we know and love. Don't plan on having multi-volumes, etc. The fact you have a limited number of cases shows me you're find on this account. 2) (for historical comparative people only, really) Don't plan on learning more than one language. More generally, plan on getting some new skills, but don't make your ideas revolve entirely on gaining an unreasonably large amount of skills (I've seen people do this, come in with know quant skills, for instance, and develop them to do purely quant dissertation, and one of my colleagues is learning two more languages in addition to the two or three he already has, but generally just keep things reasonable) 3) Fitting into this, the other thing is just make sure to sell the skills and background that you already have that are applicable for the project. Some people are overly modest, and the SOP is not the place for it. Some people tell you should present a "hero narrative", where you basically say "I have the perfect skills for this project, me alone". See this post from the blog "The Professor is In". That's not a bad way to think about it, but it might be easier to argue "What about me makes me uniquely qualified to do this project? What am I going to do (at school X) to make myself more qualified?" I bet you already have that stuff in mind. Anyway, almost every presents a doable project, I think. Türk müsünüz? Türkiye vakalarından biriyse Ahmet Kuru, Sener Akturk, ve Ateş Altınordu'yu oku. Nerelisin? Istanbul'da üç yıldır kaldım ama (inşallah) Kayseri ve çevresinde araştırmamı yapacağım. But anyway, I'm trying to keep track of all the people who study Turkey (or the Middle East) in sociology departments so if you're in that bucket, definitely stay in touch and I'll help out when I can on this side of the Atlantic.

Don't panic. I wrote my SOP for historical comparative as well, and my cases were "definitely Turkey", "also probably France", and a "I don't know, maybe India" (in more elegant language, obviously). Everyone knows that part of your topic is going to change and part will stay the same. I am doing religion and the state in Turkey, but instead of historical-comparative, it's become much more ethnographic (with an adviser who works a lot on the state, and some on religion). One of my colleagues wrote in her SOP about doing networks in education, she's now doing historical-comparative networks (with an adviser who works on networks, and some on historical-comparative). You don't need to fake a large amount of detail on a project you'll never actually end up doing, just make sure your comparisons have a clear reason, and the potential to be bother doable and interesting. It's much more to show that you can identify i) an interesting project, ii) that can be done at the school you're applying to, and iii) completed in a reasonable amount of time, with iv) the skills you already have or will learn in the first few years of graduate school. Even at the level of prospectus stage, one of the professors in my program basically said, "For a qualitative project like yours, we want to see the general outline of the questions you're asking and enough details to know that you'll recognize interesting data when you see it." Sounds like your SOP is going just fine.

Live it up! You've been in an application bubble for the last X months, and you're going to be in a grad school bubble for the next Y years so now, in the last two months where graduate school does not exert some control over your life, live it up!

This late in the game, it doesn't really matter. Don't worry about it! The one school I got in to was also one of the only ones I didn't correspond with any of the faculty (because I already knew they were good matches). Just confidently state you'll be a good match with people in the "fit" part of your statement, and definitely demonstrate that you're good fits with them in the rest of the application, and you'll be fine.

I think you want to express, more or less, three things: 1) the general topic area you're interested in. This is the area you intend to work in no matter what. For me, it was religion and politics (with an implication that I wanted to do some work on Turkey). For you it seems like it's crime and inequality/economic resources. 2) a more specific topic that could be a thesis or dissertation topic. This topic is liable to change and everyone knows it. For me, it was a comparative study of secularism in Turkey, France, and probably India. I ended up not doing this, in large part because Ahmet Kuru had just written Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey the year before I applied to grad school. My adviser knew about his book before it even came out but still accepted me because she knew my interests (within the broader scope of religion and politics) would change, and that I was asking interesting questions, even if this specific question wouldn't pan. This part, I think, is a lot about showing that you know how to ask interesting (but feasible) questions. Literally none of my cohort is doing their specific from their SOP, but everyone is working in some variation of their general topic. 3) you want to make it clear what methods you'd use. These too can change. I obviously was suggesting a comparative/historical project, and while I'm still interested in comparison, I'm doing a much more ethnographic project. No one is going to be mad that you're learning too much statistics (if you use them to do sociology/criminology). People want to hear that you'll continue to develop your skills, whatever they are. That's part of the reason you're going to grad school. They don't necessarily where you get them, as long as you get them. They're much more interested in how you're going to use them. You can kind of do this with something like "I want to look at ______, specifically I'm interested right now in the intersection of _____ and ____. I'd like to explore ____ theory using ____ (and more details about what you could be interested in). My ____ skills let me do ____ research, etc." tl;dr Put it all it. Don't worry.

When I was applying to PhD programs and considering both religious studies departments and sociology departments, the advice I got was a "even if you wrote the exact same thesis, a sociology department will only hire someone from a sociology, but a religion department will hire someone from a religion department or a disciplinary department." I don't think this is as strongly true in your case, but at my undergraduate school I saw that the students in the anthropology of religion program through the divinity school had worse academic job outcomes than the people in the department's anthropology department. Likewise, my current university's sociology department has very little connection with our sociology of ed program which is housed in a different school. However, his isn't the case across the board, as we're quite close with the sociology of medicine people who are affiliated with the medical school. If you make connections with faculty in both places, it probably doesn't matter that much, but I would assume that the sociology department, in general, if there is a significant difference, has better resources for PhD students and is more prestigious for academic jobs (but may possibly have fewer connections with non-academic jobs). I rarely advocate this, but you might want to go on Stanford's website, find their graduate students who study education, and email them to ask them what the deal is (in a short, polite email).