jacib

Long story short: no. For a pretty good listing of programs with sociology of religion focus, check particularly the original post, and going crazy's pretty decent list of schools. Those are most PhD only programs, though, I think. I also work with religion and politics, and around similar issues (secularism), but the vast majority of people working on "sociology of religion" just weren't suitable for advising me. It really depends on your specific interests. I thought Omar McRoberts was one of the most exciting sociologists I'd ever read, but I knew that our fits just weren't close enough for me to work with him because I wasn't interested in Urban Sociology. Sociology of religion is a small subfield, and most people who do it (except for maybe those who study under Wuthnow) do it as sociology of religion and sociology of something more popular. One of my friends just got his PhD looking at how religious upbringing affected educational achievement, but no one in his department worked specifically on religion--he worked with someone working on education. My own adviser hasn't explicitly published anything on religion either, but we have other interests in common. You might want to sell yourself at some schools as a "social movements" guy with a religion sub-interest. I definitely sold myself as someone who wants to do sociology of religion at some schools, political sociology at other schools. As for other things, you might want to consider looking at anyone who publishes in the Immanent Frame, which if you're interested in religion, politics, secularism/secularization, is really the first place to look. They have a pretty useful "sociology of religion" and "sociology" tags and a less useful one for "social science", though they're somewhat inconsistently used. Other places to look might be anyone who's editing (or publishing in) the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion or Sociology of Religion or people who are officers in the professional organizations that publish those journals (the SSSR and ASR, respecitively). You might also want to consider selling yourself as, rather than agnosticism/atheism, talking a little more about "beliving without belonging", because that's kinda hot right now. Generally what I had to do was just look at every school with a good program, go through all the people, and figure it out like that. Since I have very specific interests, there were really only 5 or 6 programs in the whole country I felt like I was a good fit for. A sociologist (a colleague of my father's) also helped me find more schools. Perhaps ask a sociology at your current program for advice. I also did something a little weird when I was applying to PhD programs in Religion, and that was I emailed, out of the blue, professors whose works I respected and who worked at schools that didn't have graduate programs--I told them what work I was doing and if they could recommend any places off the top of their heads that might be good for that. I also looked at where people whose work I liked got their degrees, Things like that. It's a long, painstaking process.

I wouldn't mention financial aid in your SOP. Like Joops said, that's really not what it's for. Financial aid policies vary by school. Find out what the school's policies are by emailing the DGS or the graduate assistant (depending on who fields application questions at the school). Sometimes fellowships are competitive, sometimes they're guaranteed. For many MA programs there is no financial aid. At many schools GRE is a major factor in competitive aid. Email around, see what proportion of people get aid, see if aid is decided at the department or the university level, see how they decide who gets aid. If it's at the university level, GRE will probably be important because that's one of the few measures that can be compared across departments (this way of deciding funding is more common for PhD funding than MA funding, I think). To the best of my knowledge, aid will be merit rather than need based, and "merit" is frequently based on GRE scores, etc. rather than ideas. But I could be wrong; email and ask. I had to ask about funding for one school and they were able to give me very clear information. Long story short, I don't think anyone will be able to give you general information if you're competitive . At some schools, no MA students get funded. At some schools, they all do (so I've heard?--I don't actually know). At other schools, I'd guess the deciding factors vary.

My background is also in Religious Studies (from a secular university) and I'm now in a sociology PhD program. I can't say how they'll read the grades and qualifications from Baptist colleges and universities, but I know that being religious will not by itself mark you as "unserious". If you frame your interests as substantive, sociological interests, I'm positive you will come off as a "serious" student. After all, Andrew Greeley, one of the better known Sociologists today, is not only religious but is actually a Roman Catholic priest. It seems a more natural fit with sociology than say the occasional physicist or engineer who goes into sociology. If you're worried about it, you might make it clear in your statement of purpose that whatever you research, you're willing to find "negative" results about religions. Or that your background might be useful in getting you access to places that other sociologists might not be able to access. I'd definitely make sure to relate your interest in sociology directly to your experience in churches, etc. in your opening paragraph (there's often a format to SOPs--the first paragraph for many is the biography/hook/how I got interested paragraph). I don't think your scores will keep you out of any of the schools you applied to, but they won't help you stand out, I don't think. No set of scores get you in. You really have to demonstrate your interesting ideas in your statement of purpose, and writing/research/analytic skills in your writing sample. You might want to choose a wider range of schools, unless for family/romantic reasons you need to stay in the Northeast/Chicago. You have a few schools in the top 30, but not many. Look at UT-Austin, for example, where I know some people work on religion, but just also look at some of the bigger state school programs. For sociology of religion, you might want to consider applying to Princeton. It's where a lot of the top sociologists of religion are trained. It's not that much harder to get into than NYU, I don't think. Yes, it'll be a long shot, and you might want to consider retaking the GRE if you want to pursue it more seriously. A higher GRE score might help make your application stand out from other candidates at any schools, but could particularly improve your chances at the couple of higher ranked, larger programs you're applying to, but it's not technically necessary for most (any) of them. For more on GRE stuff see I'm just saying this because there is still so much time until application season that it couldn't hurt to study for a few months and retake it, unless you're absolutely positive you will not improve significantly/have absolutely no time.

First of all, I'd argue that Chicago is ranked *much* higher than Yale. Check out an old post on The Yale department was very troubled in the past (like thirty, forty years ago). Yale's department apparently nearly shut down when WUSTL and Rochester shut theirs down (the only two sociology departments that shut down, I think). It has a good reputation, but it concentrates heavily in a few areas. I forget what they are, but let's say it's something like culture, historical/comparative, and urban/poverty/strat-y stuff. Maybe race was in there too. Anyway, a former Yale faculty member once told me that their strategy was focusing on getting strong in three areas. I do historical/comparative and know that they're very good at that. But still, it has a reputation of a somewhat "rebuilding" program. Because it's relatively lowly ranked for a Yale program, I've heard rumors that the school is aggressively trying to improve it---with mixed success so far. I haven't heard anyone argue that it's getting worse. The former faculty member I talked to was somewhat skeptical of the focusing on a few core areas strategy, it seemed. I don't think the bouncing around on the rankings above represents anything more than random noise. So yeah, I'd say Chicago vs. Yale is more like a top-5 program vs a top-25 program than a top-5 vs. a top-12 program. Of course, for reasons that others have mentioned, Yale is not your typical top-25 program, and especially if you do work in one of their core areas, I wouldn't be surprised if they placed people in jobs better than that of a typical "top 25" program. Against the last poster, for graduate programs across the board, I'd say there isn't much prestige difference between Chicago and Yale. I'd assume in Chicago, kids are getting noticeably better jobs, though in certain subfields with certain advisers, they may be more evenly matched. Still, in sociology, Chicago will always be Chicago... which in part means it will always have one of the best reputations period...and will do things (especially its ethnographic stuff) the "Chicago way". You may like that way, you may not like that way. I mean, a lot of huge ethnographic bad-asses have come out of Chicago program (Mitch Dunier, Sudhir Venkatesh, Loic Wacquant off the top of my head) but I've also heard a lot of people talk about work coming out of Chicago, somewhat disparagingly, referred to just as "very Chicago". If you talk to graduate students in your subfield, see if they feel restricted or anything by "the Chicago school". If you're doing something not ethnographic, or even maybe not doing something urban-ethnographic, it's a little bit different, I gather, though I can't be sure. I'd also imagine Chicago has more events and lectures, more people coming through, etc. Personally, I'd also prefer to be in a city, and while Hyde Park isn't a city, you can at least live near buses that will take you into the city (and you can easily move into Chicago proper after you finished your course work). Talk to students with the same adviser that you will have. Try to see the placements for people with the adviser that you will have (if you know). The Chicago money thing--sucks, and I generally don't think it's fair to offer two tiers of funding in one program (it creates a fucked up class system of students; there's no way for that not to breed some resentment, seriously), but it's basically "You pay for the masters, we cover the rest", which isn't so bad. I have many friends who are getting completely unfunded, no tuition remission stand-alone sociology masters degrees right now in order to look better for PhD apps. Ultimately, it comes down to which will make you happier over the next five, ten, twenty years. My dad teaches at a smaller program that only admits a couple of graduate students a year, and generally the graduate students go on to teach at small places. It's so small it doesn't even make sense to talk about it as being ranked. Still, he's had some students turn down top-10 schools to go there because they know they'd be happier, they want to avoid the crazy environment entirely. For me and my own priorities, career-wise and not, all else being equal, I'd lean towards Chicago (assuming you've visited, which you probably haven't if they just let you in), but if Yale just "felt" better when I visited, I'd go to Yale. Also, one of my close friends is starting at the Yale PhD program next year and she's awesome. So you'd have that to look forward to at Yale. Also try to renegotiate your funding package! Say to Chicago, "Look, I really want to go to Chicago, but it feels silly when Yale is offering me a full ride. Is there anything you can do to improve this? I think I could swing one year unfunded, but two might be hard..." something like that. Try to make it as much about money as possible, because they hate seem to hate people choosing based on money. When I was thinking about flying to visiting day to my school after I was admitted, I was coming from Turkey. That's like $800-$1000 for the ticket, something like that. They initially offered me only the $300 reimbursement that American students get, and then they upped that to the $500 international students get (because though I am America, I was living internationally--make sense). Then without trying to bargain, when the DGS was like, "So we'll see you at graduate visit day, right?" and I was like "Well, I don't know, I don't even know if I can get the time off work and the flights are more than $500 dollars, and I don't know if I want to spend the money" and then he very quickly said, "Well, I'd hate to see you miss out on this just because of money" and arranged so that my entire flight would be reimbursed. I saw the Chair do a similar thing with another student at visit day. He asked her, "What can we do to get you to come here?" and she said, "Well, [another school] offered me a computer..." and the Chair just said, "I'll see what I can do" (I never asked if she actually got the computer). Obviously, a couple of thousand dollars stipend is different from a couple of hundred dollars for sundry expenses, but see if you can leverage your Yale offer into a better offer from Chicago.

Also at least at my school, the vast majority of graduate students came in with sociological interests, but no sociological background. Sociology is a big random field, from historical sociologists who could be easily in a history department to strongly quant people who could be in the math/statistics department. It's cool, you're just expected to start figuring out where you fit into all of this during the first little bit.

-Get to know as many faculty as possible your first year. Just at least know what every one in the department works on. -Develop a good study schedule. This is worklife 1.5, not undergrad 2.0 (this honestly shocked me a lot, and was the biggest adjustment. I was expecting to sit back and drink much more than I am able to). -Know that your grades don't matter. Like, at all. Extensions are also easy to get. Stress about doing good work, don't stress about doing work on time. Learn to prioritize which work is important. -Explore your first year. You may never have the chance to again. If you're a quant person, look at qual things, and vice verse. At the very least be sufficiently comfortable with other methodologies to evaluate "this is good" and "this is crap" so that you may cite appropriately. -Go to TONS of talks. Again, this is a first year luxury. You're not really expect to produce work. Find out what good work looks like. -If there is someone you want to work with, meet with them, talk with them, don't annoy them, get their advice. Start trying to establish a relationship, and figure out how your relationship works. My relationship with my adviser works best when I have something to present her, which is different from my undergrad adviser who I used to abstractly discuss ideas with. The sooner you figure out what relationship works for you, the sooner you can start reaping the benefits. -Know your cohort, do social things together. You will be together for years to come. Be friends with your colleagues, hopefully. Be polite them in all situations, at the very least. -Make sure you have enough time not working in school to stay sane. -Older students are the best place to learn about everything. No, seriously, everything. From the department gossip, to department drama, to what you should be doing, to what classes are legit, they know a lot. Be friends with them as soon as possible. I seriously benefited from being a smoker (gasp!) and being able to be friends with the other three (older) smokers in the department. They clued me in on a lot of things. -Yes, maybe for the first time in your life, everyone in around is genuinely smart. Including you. Never forget that you were chosen among many, many qualified candidates. You are there for reason. You deserve to be there.

No one asked me about other schools until I was admitted (my primary interests are fairly specific, though). This is still excellent advice. Keep an excel sheet of EVERYTHING. Schools. Dates. Scores (if you can find them). Requirements. Professors. Whether you've emailed them. If they've responded.

There may not be any harm in trying, but I feel like many DGS will just simply not reply. I know my DGS asked me last year, "Why are so many kids we didn't accept emailing me this year?" and I explained to him about this website. I do not think he responded in detail to those emails. Don't think that's rude, or take it as a reflection on your application. No DGS has the time to write dozens of individual responses, and if one responds to you in detail, it likely means you were memorable or they are in a particularly good mood or both. Thank them profusely for their time if they do.

So last year we made a big long topic called I think there is a lot of good advice in there, and I thought it would might be useful for some of you to add to, emphasize, or critique that advice. Basically, what do you know now that you wish you knew months ago? What do you guys think were the key elements of your success? What do you wish you had done differently? Which old threads had particularly useful advice? What did you find out the hard way? What did you learn about Sociology applications specifically and graduate school in general? [This one might get fewer replies because we started the other one way earlier, before people had made their decisions and stopped using the board]

About GRE scores: My dad is a sociology professor, and while I was applying to programs, he emailed a bunch of his buddies to get a sense of what they expected in terms of GRE scores and other things. but really that whole "Advice for 2011 Sociology Applicants" thread might be useful to read as you think about applying. I would guess your scores will not keep you out of anywhere; they seem about average for accepted students at top programs. Your GPA is of course stellar (unless your school has extrabad grade inflation). Your ideas are what really matters now (in addition to your writing sample). But seriously, your numbers and credentials will only get them to read your ideas carefully. Contact all the professors you're interested in working with. All of them. Even the ones you know you're a good fit with. I usually couched my "Hey... I love you" emails in terms of "I am interested in working with you. Are you currently accepting students? These are my interests, do you think I would be a good fit for this program?" You can also ask about "current research", because people are always working on things that are unpublished. I personally never sent my CV out, because I think my well-stated interests are what made me sound professional--my CV would have made me seem less professional. If you choose to contact them now, contact them again in the fall asking if there have been any "developments in the program" or to "follow up" on something or some such bullcrap to remind them who you are. Also, this is just me, and you may be a very different person, but I found it useful to take a few years off between college and graduate school. I feel like most of my friends felt the same way. That said, the people in my program who did come straight out of college or masters programs are just as happy as those who took years off. I just know it was personally useful for me, and I know several people who used the time off to gain skills that would look good while applying for schools. Just something to consider.

I went to the University of Chicago as an undergrad. I can't tell you how it is now, but I know that one of my favorite TA's worked in a completely unrelated field for three years while he was ABD. I didn't pry as to why, but I know he's looking for a teaching job. Another one of my favorite TA's, who had a slightly niche topic in the History of Christianity, was only able to find a tenure-track job at a community college. I know the details of his job search a little better. I think he applied to both history departments and religion departments, and I'm not sure an official history (or American studies) degree gives you much more of an edge if you can already sell yourself as a legitimate (religious) historian. I know many of the graduates who are in the History of Religion track (that's where I primarily took classes) at the U of C Div School go on to work in History or South/East Asian Studies departments. So anyway, granted this TA had to go on the market in like 2008 or 2009 , when the market was at its absolute low point, but it's clear that things will probably never be as good as they were in the (semi-mythical) past. He also had a young child, so I think there might have been geographical restrictions on his job search (my father is a sociology professor at a small school and said that people wanting/needing to stay in the same region has really affected the job placement of his graduate students considerably.). Still, I want to emphasize that even if you get a degree from Chicago (which admittedly has somewhat of reputation for overproducing PhDs in Religion), there's no guarantee of getting a good job at a college that your parents or friends may have heard of, especially if you can't do a national job search. Don't get me wrong, I think this guy likes his job, and is satisfied teaching there, but both TA's made sure I was aware of the reality of the job market before I was applying to schools, and their honest advice was one of several reasons I switched to sociology even though I had studied religious studies as an undergraduate (I applied to both sociology and religion programs with the same thesis topic and made my decision about which way to go only after getting acceptances and rejections).

Have you talked with the department/chair at UNC about it? Who they think you'd work with? Did you list anyone specific to work with in your application? Clearly they think you have some potential in the department. Talk with that person, tell them your interests, and ask them if they honestly think this would be a good match for you. As just one last note, if you are seriously going to consider Irvine, have an honest talk with all the faculty you want to work with and ask them "Look, are you going to be here for a while?" I guess it's an appropriate talk to have with people at any of the institutions, but especially at Irvine considering California's budget issues. My dad's a sociologist too, and I know that when he chaired his department's last faculty search (maybe two years ago), the very first thing he did was look at the UC's to see if there was anyone interesting (it was for a search for someone in a specific sub-discipline). There wasn't, but it says something that he thought the first place to look was the websites of the UCs, you know? I think it might have leveled off a bit since then, but at least when he was telling me this, there was a very real sense that many faculty members would be happy to leave the UC's (especially those not at Berkeley, or if I remember correctly, UCLA, apparently. Those were seen as a little more cushioned from the budget shocks).

As a counterpoint to the "feeling the pinch", or perhaps just a different way to look at it, I know at least one state school (Wisconsin) that was notoriously bad for funding (apparently few people got it their first year, and had to compete after) has switched to full funding. State schools may let in fewer students, and may be offering less money in total, but on an individual level, from the little that I've heard, it seems like the trend is more money (that is, they are more than keeping up with inflation).

I wouldn't worry too much about the quant stuff. Most Ph.D. programs require one year of statistics... but a lot of that is just aimed for you actually being able to evaluate the statistics articles in the literature. Of all the students who took the required statistics class (that is, all those who didn't pass out of it because of previous stats experience), no one had any problems with it, even people who "hate math" and hadn't take a math course since high school (ten+ years for some people). Trust me, departments know that a lot of good sociologists just don't think like that; that's why these courses are usually taught in department, rather than say through the stats department Few of us plan to use stats in our research, but it is still absolutely necessary knowing it. There's a heavy emphasis on understanding what the numbers in articles mean, how to punch things into a computer, and how to interpret outputs. The actual emphasis on "math" was pretty minor, at least in my course (I actually ended up taking a Poli Sci stats class my second semester because the Sociology department's course wasn't "mathy" enough for me). STATA isn't that much harder than Excel.

At top private schools, PhD funding in the humanities and social sciences across the board have been rising (At private schools social science and humanities Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences get the same level of funding university-wide (except for Econ PhD candidates who get more). My school recently threw us an extra 3,000 for guaranteed summer funding because Yale offered something similar a few years ago and started calculating their yearly stipend including summer funding, making their numbers look higher. I talked with a professor who got her PhD from Harvard in the 80s, and she told me that no one did fancy research over the summer... people just got jobs (she worked as a typist). And debt was something that was much more common. I'd say, in general, stipends have been going up. At top private schools, one is generally expected to earn a Ph.D. without needing to take on any (substantial) debt. State schools are generally the same, but the stipends are generally lower (cost of living is also generally lower). State schools are much more affected, obviously, by budget cuts and economic cycles but I don't know exactly how exactly all of this translates down to department level effects on graduate students.

Your profile looks generally like mine (my overall GPA was 3.26 I think) your strong quant skill should help you a bit though. My recommendation though is the more I think about it, the more important your actual ideas are. Especially at top schools like the ones you're applying to. Some schools will really care about it, some schools will think "Well, they'll change their idea anyway once they get here", but your statement of purpose really is key. All the stats in the world can only get your foot in the door. Well, okay maybe they can get you half way through the door, but really it's your ideas that will carry you the rest of the way. For masters, I know Chicago has the MAPSS program, Columbia has a Soc masters program and also QMSS. Those are all one year programs so you really need to know what you want to get out of them before you go into them. MAPSS is usually given as a consolation prize to strong people who apply to Chicago Soc Sci PhD programs and don't get in.

I would just say that I started thinking about grad school heavily by my sophomore year of college, and I think it left me well placed to apply later on. I already knew the scene decently well. That said... I had originally planned to apply in Religion and only two, three years out of college did I end up considering Sociology. But that said, graduate school was always in my mind and I familiarized myself with the processes of graduate school, the norms of the fields, and attended those conferences and lectures that I could. But seriously, just by knowing what gets published in ASJ/ASR you'll have an advantage over many of your fellow graduate students because you can couch whatever you want to say in that vocabulary. I'd say to best prepare for graduate schools, read journal articles for fun (I used to read "fun" journal drunk pretty often, because I actually enjoyed them. They're what I wanted to do after a party). Realize what skills are expected of you. In Religion, this was primarily languages, so I am able conduct research in three languages in addition to English. This is definitely not that important now that I'm doing Sociology (in top Religion journals, articles will frequently have untranslated phrases and sentences in French and German because, hey, everyone speaks those languages, right?). If I were to do things differently in college, I would definitely have learned more statistics (as one of the posters above recommended). Extensive statistical knowledge is not required, but it is recommended. Basic statistics literacy is required, of course, even if you're studying something touchy-feely like Sociology of Religion and even if you want to I think people on this board generally overemphasize undergraduate "research experience". If you write a senior thesis using generally the methods you plan to use in your PhD, that should be more than adequate. Most of my colleagues in graduate school do not have extensive research experience. I don't think anyone has publications in a sociological journal. Most people weren't even sociology majors. Research is great, do it if you can, it will make you look good probably, but it's not required at all. I think what's underemphasized here is that the creativity and brilliance of your ideas are actually important to a lot of schools (especially if you're doing qualitative work, but even if you're doing quantitative work--low hanging fruit has been picked off, how can you tease our what you want from existing data?). A creative idea "bridging" two fields will always get you bonus points (for example, if you research was about the health of prison inmate you'd be bridging criminology and medical sociology). My own work definitely is squarely between religion and the state. My own personal advice is unless you want to be a doctor or a school teacher, never go to graduate directly after undergraduate in any discipline. Seriously, even though I've known for about seven years I wanted to go into academia, my first year here in graduate school would have been very difficult if I didn't know what my other options were. Get a job that might look decent/justifiable for graduate school (think tank, community center, policy advocacy group, teaching abroad, whatever), but I would seriously recommend taking time off between undergraduate and graduate school. Take at least a year off. Maybe three.

Someone posted this article a month or two ago, and its obviously very interesting: http://pages.uoregon.edu/vburris/ptr09/asr_2004.pdf (don't worry about the difficult math, you can get a pretty clear impression of the arguments from just looking at all of the tables). I haven't read the whole article careful (yo, I gots real work to do) but basically, it argues social capital (which by their standard has something like .92 correlation with department prestige) is the best predictor of job placement. It is worth noting of course that different professors within the same institution will place people differently.... I would guess that quant people (especially if they have published using non-standard modeling methods) generally have better placement, but that's a gut feeling not a fact.

9 might well be a misleading number, because this is probably the cohort size they want. I know Columbia accepts about 16 students for an intended cohort of 9-ish students.

I haven't posted here in a while and I had to comment on it, Yeah this is not true. I go to Columbia which offers a similar stipend. Historically, the Village provided a cheap place for NYU grad students to live, but now they've mostly moved to Brooklyn. A 1-bdrm might cost that much in Manhattan, but NYU students don't live there (Columbia students more often live in university-subsidized housing, especially the first two years, because Brooklyn isn't convenient; some choose to move to Harlem or Inwood for an even cheaper option). Yes, you need to find a way to fund yourself over the summer, be it applying for grants, working as an RA or teaching summer school, or something else, but that's probably true for most programs (the big-if dependent thing is how easy it is to get RA-ships/grants). But yeah, seriously, all of my friends in other NYU PhD programs in social science/humanities take on no loans, get grants for summer research/funding, and live in Brooklyn. I can tell you, it's surprisingly easy to live on $11,500 a semester as a graduate student because you honestly work too much to spend much money. Sad but true. Though there may well be such people, I don't know anyone at NYU or Columbia who has trouble living on the money they get from the school + summer funding, hard as it is to believe that you can actually make it in New York on that little money (also just a note: starting next summer, Columbia is offering guaranteed summer funding to all GSAS students who have normal fellowships, much like Yale does--this will probably be a slow spreading trend).

Grad school, it turns out, is not College 2.0. It's a little more like "Working Life 1.5". That's fine though, I just was expecting to drink more not less now that I'm a scholastic environment again. Sacrifices to be made, I guess. People aren't interested in throwing back a thirty rack with me (which is what I did while I was an undergrad with my friend who was finishing up his Plant Biology PhD ). But I'm being challenged, which is fun, and am surrounded by ridiculously intelligent people, all of whom I respect (I'm kinda a hater so that honestly surprised me) and am doing regression for the first time since my first year of undergrad. I took that as part of a"Social Science sequence" at my college. I know about 1/4-1/2 of kids at my Sociology undergrad school did quant stuff for their Bachelor's thesis. Most people did participant-observer ethnographies or a series of interviews, but not all of them. I think my dissertation will be mixed-method at best, but probably lean heavily on the historical/comparative. Also, I decided since I'm still posting this thing, I'm not going to announce where I am right now, but I'll privately tell anyone who's curious. I'll hit you up in a private message, man. I was just working on some quant religious stuff that might interest you.

I don't think Sociology has a smaller pool than say, Anthropology or Religion or Art History. Also, I don't know how much quantitative experience most undergraduate students get in Sociology (I wasn't a Soc major), but they would be expected to at least understand regression tables and stuff, right? Maybe see one or two papers with mathematical modeling in them, too? That's something that the students in the three departments above mentioned wouldn't be expected to know at all. English students got higher quant scores and economics students got higher verbal scores, c'mon! (a la Gob Bluth). In the top Religion PhD programs, a decent (let's say 500, 550+) score is expected in quant, even though most students will literally never be expected or encouraged to use those skills. I think this is something unique to Religion departments and not something indicative of a wider trend in the humanities (in.English and Comp Lit, I know it's widely stated that programs don't even look at the quant score) Also, people in English and Religion are I think more likely than us to reapply multiple years and therefore a competitive set of students may be retaking the exam with eyes on improving their scores and biasing the sample. I think you're point, Astronautika, about first generation college students and students of color is a good one, and would probably explain a good portion of the variance. I don't know if I agree with you about a higher score for admitted applicants, and I certainly don't think that sociology has high scores "needed"-- I think even the top Sociology programs have more flexible GRE requirements than, say, the top Political Science or Economics departments. I think I read on the boards last year that in Poli Sci, to get into Stanford or something, double 700s, or at least one 700+ and one in the high 600s, are seen as kind of a minimum--in fact they even kinda hint that on their website. I can't imagine Michigan, Harvard, Chicago or any of the other top Sociology departments writing something like that because I think research compelling research interests and an excellent writing samples can make a student with slightly below average test scores look exceptional in our discipline in ways that is not possible in other disciplines simply because the field of Sociology is great that creativity is easier to see. One thing last thing I was thinking of is that Sociology is taught more in community colleges than, say, Anthropology or Religion, and so there might be a greater demand for less prestigious PhDs here. Or that maybe a bunch of people who want to do Social Work checked Sociology instead, I dunno.

It really depends on what you're interested in. Do you want to do Medical Sociology as your Unicef work seems to indicate? Or are you interested in Economic Sociology or studying Organization? For PhD programs, many deadlines for Fall 2011 have already passed, and most of the rest are coming up in the next month. As for low GRE scores, people have various takes on how important they are: I know Roll Right will argue that for qualitative departments they are relatively unimportant, I have a feeling that they are an important disqualifer, but can be compensated for (especially for foreign students ) to a degree with excellent writing samples and the like. If you have extensive experience with statistical analysis and have similar research interests to specific professors, there are probably places that will want you regardless of scores.

This is just some random information I found that I thought might interest some of you (I was linked to it from Chris Blattman's excellent blog) : Verbal vs. Mathematical aptitude in academics (from a discovery magazine blog) It's actually using this (easy to read) data: GRE Scores by Intended Graduate Major Average Sociology Scores are: V: 487 (approx: 59%) Q: 545 (approx. 36%) W: 4.6 (approx. 65%) A few things to notice: compared to the other Social Sciences we score: lower than Anthropology in every category lower than Political science in every category lower than Economics in every category but writing (which is probably explained partially by the number of non-native English speakers in Econ departments) higher than Psychology in every category In the Humanities we score: lower than History in every category lower than English in every category lower than Religion in every category lower than Arts - History, Theory in every category lower than Education - Higher in every category lower than Foreign Lang & Lit in every category lower than Humanities & Arts - Other in every category higher than Communications in every category. I'll be honest: I'm particularly surprised by the relatively low placement in the quant section. And that Anthropology is higher than us in everything. (Also, the data is six years old, but I don't know see why this would have changed all that much in six years). edit: the subject should be GRE Scores Across Disciplines. It's really early in the morning.

1. For general sociology applicationadvice, try 2. As for your statement, I'd lean towards making it much more specific than not. One thing that programs are looking for is "serious" sociology students (for that same reason, I was encouraged to hide the fact I was applying to other types of departmetns), and they want to see that you can design research and have a deep interest in a specific topic. After all, you're going to be working at that one topic for several years. While changing your topic, and even scrapping your topic entirely, is fine once you get there, you do need to propose a fairly specific to start with. I didn't say what methods I would be using (some people are clear about this in their proposal), but I was very clear what was the main thing I wanted to look at, as well as half a sentence "and possibly with x and y in comparative perspective." If you say, "I'm interested in the sociology of religion, particularly the role that religion plays in social movements" I think they'd also want you to say a specific social movement or two working on specific issue or two. such as "examining how Family Research Council and the Catholic League have conceptualized 'the war on Christmas'"or "how Christian base communities have affected the debate on housing in Central America" or "how the Muslim Brotherhood has become the most effective, though fickle, advocate for democracy in Egypt". My proposal was that level of specific, but you could phrase it a little more conditionally, if that made you feel more comfortable. "I'd like to look at how left wing religious groups have tried to enter the discourse on same-sex marriage in America, perhaps comparing the efforts of the Unitarian-Universalist church and United Church of Christ. While the the UU have done X, the UCC have instead decided to do Y. Why did blah blah blah. I'd like to understand how these groups have failed to create an alternative liberal model of religiousity." You don't have to say whether it would be historical or ethnographic or quantitative, but I do think you have to name names and give some details even if it is after a "perhaps".