jacib

East Asian studies, like all area studies, has been moved from the Humanities to Interdisciplinary. Check there, good luck!

For anyone who didn't get the memo, the gender/wage part of this particularly discussion has

Anyone with an Emory interview simply must (discreetly) try to find out more... like if it's working...

My tip: email professors. I was saved applying to several programs because of this. I should have emailed them all. Just email them your general interests and ask "in your opinion would I be a good fit for your program" (if you're worried about your scores or grades, you might also ask would these put me at a disadvantage for your program). One program said that despite what was written online, they had no professors interested in my topic. My dream professor, who everyone and their mother recommended I work with, turns out to be retiring in three years... and he told me to work with his friend, who it turns out isn't taking any new students. That said, the school which replied "Even though I am not head of that program, you are exactly the kind of student that program is trying to attract," was a strong encouragement. I also emailed one of the stars in my subsubfield for advice (he doesn't train PhDs) and we ended up having a 30 minute phone conversation where he went through every program I should apply to... in Sociology, Anthropology, Religion and Political Science... It was really useful to get a sense of a) the jobs the research prospects and c) how interdisciplinary my subsubfield. Second tip ask for recs early. I emailed with a month and a half before my first application and it wasn't enough time, mostly because two of my professors didn't respond to emails... one was on leave and I had to repeatedly call, and one I had the wrong email for (he no longer checked his official school email). Don't apply to school's based on name or undergraduate reputation.... apply to school's whose graduate department has a good reputation. What's a fast and dirty way to check this? Figure out where you want to be in ten years, and then look at where professors at those schools got their degrees. Find the stars in your subfield, where did they study?... and where do they teach? Study for the GRE. A lot. Take practice tests. Look at the old questions. Review your math. I have heard mixed things about courses, but I have not heard anyone regret studying. If you're going for 700+ verbal, use the Barron's book. And in general, if you're buying a second book, get the Official ETS book filled with old questions. That's the best way to know what real GRE questions are like. I studied intensely for a month and got an 800v/780q. That's about a hundred points higher than where I started. Make vocabulary cards, but most importantly, class words into groups... know that belittle, calumniate (noun form: calumny), libel, scourge all mean roughly the same thing and that their opposite is laud, extol, panegyrize. Don't bother with the actual meanings. Figure out why you missed out on every single math problem, and relearn all the geometry formulas.

My $.02 would be the value of your MA depends a lot on what subject you study. If you wanted to study England in the Middle Ages, a Masters in England would strengthen your application considerably, especially if you had the opportunity to gain experience with archives. If you wanted to study America at any non-Colonial point in time, a Masters in the UK would probably be relatively useless. Other fields fall somewhere between the two.

I'd guess Wisco. They sent stuff out in several departments. Am I the only one who doesn't check obsessively? Who is happy being done and doesn't want to start a new round of things to do/decisions to make? Who is trying to catch up on social things? I don't mind waiting... I just try not to think about it.

(double posted, see below)

Perhaps someone will find the link to the original thread where we started this, but there was something interesting in the Times today: Women Say Their Marriage is Richer For It. (I should point out growing up my mother always made more money than my professor father). It reminded me of something Roll Right was talking about in another thread.

Yes, but luckily German has a lot of fun words to keep us on our toes... imagine trying to derive "conscience" from "Gewissen" (it helps if you think in Latin... con + sciencia or whatever knowledge is in Latin). Then you have fun words like gehoeren, which has nothing to do with hearing...

It's also a permeable divide. My father is in Sociology of Health and Illness, and I think most of his work has been on the qualitative side of the coin. He definitely started doing straight ethnography (in Deviance) and though I don't think he has done an ethnography for a years, most of his work is still qualitative. That said, he has done some work that is strongly quantitative, and even his qualitative work still has some quantitative elements. I doubt people see one set of his articles as more serious than another set. That said, it sounds like you, Captiv8d, were talking more about subfields than methodologies. Graddamn is an interesting case because he is using a "hard" methodology in a "soft" field. Where does Health & Illness fit on the hard/soft continuum? Deviance/Criminology? Where does Historical fit (probably soft)? Comparative? By Marxian, do you mean like ideologically Marxist, or people who see Sociology as Marx would, like big picture, not small ethnography things? Actually, though I'm saying there's a lot of back and forth, I guess actually generally there's not. My father was telling me that he was chair for ten years instead of five because of internal disputes... I forget what the dividing lines were exactly but my old man as chair was definitely some kind of pragmatic compromise. I should ask him about this. As corollary, professors' salaries are often determined by supply and demand... that is, if there are tons of people in a field, it pays lower (think English), whereas if there is extra demand for a set of skills, and especially if that demand comes from the private sector, pay is higher (think Economics). Therefore, it is natural to assume that if political and economic sociologists (as well as demographers) have an easier time getting work in the private sector, then they probably have at least slightly higher pay in the Academy. This is based on deduction and not any empirical evidence within Sociology itself. If true, the next logical step would be to ask: higher pay-->more serious? Also, just to be clear, qualitative is not just ethnography.

If you do address it, I'd give it like half a clause. "Although my senior year I _______, I entered a Masters program with an outlook tempered by a few more years of mature and surety." Just the general "While this was bad, it taught me x and now I'm like y." or "While I did z in undergrad, I did awesome x and y in masters which shows how awesome I am and how committed I am to studying History". There's really not much of a need to do more than that if you do well at your masters program. There might not even be much of a need to mention it at all if it doesn't come up. I don't think the two really disagree that much. If you feel, upon consultation with your professors in a masters program, that you ought to mention it, do and be brief. If you don't, don't. But its no deal breaker and probably more glarıng to you than the adcomm. How is it shown, as a W on your report? What I would do more than mentıon ıt in your SoP ıs have your master's thesis (or part of your master's thesıs) ready as your wrıtıng sample... whıch unfortunately means havıng a sıgnıfıcant chunk polıshed by Dec 15, probably a good few months earlıer than you expected. That way you can SHOW them you are capable of workıng on large research projects, rather than just TELLING them.

Will you PM the numbers for this? If you have them handy. You have proven yourself quite reliable with your evidence, so I'm going to trust you on this one but I'm curious. Last I remember reading there was still a gap, but it had to do more with childcare/childbirth etc. than any real starting salary discrimination (it also had to with things like women being less willing to ask for a raise/promotion). And SEADUB, it's more how you say it than what you say. You're not "speaking truth to power", you're just being a bit unpleasant to talk with. If you had said, "Competition in graduate school is higher than ever, and more and more people are applying for the same positions at top schools. When these schools want to narrow down their search criteria, the first thing they are going to use is some combination of GRE and GPA. While no one likes to talk about it, it is still a numbers game. While your 4.0 in a masters degree is obviously good and the rest of your app might be equally strong, unfortunately I simply don't think it is enough to get over your low GRE scores. Since the whole application process is so much based on perception, GRE scores are very important at elite schools. This process is inherently unfair, as are many other things: witness the glass ceiling, legacy admits at elite schools, etc. While you can of course apply to the top schools, I would guess you have a slight chance of admittance. I would make sure to apply to a range of schools. If going to a top school is your dream, I'd recommend studying hard and retaking the exam. No matter how holistically a school claims to look at an application, GRE scores still matter. The fact of it is, GRE scores act as an equalizer. In this day and age of grade inflation, no one knows what a 4.0 means. Universities use the GRE to see how a student does on a universal, objective standard. In a way, it is a good measure of grad performance because if you're motivated to study hard for the test it indicates you'll be motivated to study hard during grad school. The mathematics section is middle school [sic] math, so any candidate who does poorly on that section would raise a serious red flag for me if I were on a grad committee. Assuming you're a native English speaker, you should do well on the verbal section too, as many of those types of words show up in the readings you will be expected to do as well. I know a lot of people are going to tell you that scores don't matter, but I absolutely believe those GRE scores are going to look out of place on an application at a top school and my impression is that they may well cause your app to be discarded before it is even read." Did I miss any points you wanted to make? If I missed any of your points, please excuse me. I think I said pretty much everything you said in your three posts on this board, but I just said it in a much more collegial way. To make it clear, I don't necessarily agree with what was written above. But seriously SEADUB, no one is upset by what you say, it's how you say it. Was any one bothered by what i wrote above? I hope not. However, many people were bothered by HOW you wrote what you wrote. The medium is the message.

Secularism, civil religion, secularization. How political groups can adopt quasi-religious beliefs. My undergraduate thesis was in the vein of J. Z. Smith's Drudgery Divine and Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religion in that it focused on an almost universal Protestant bias in the study of religions.

This is, again, not necessarily true. Many English programs apparently claim they do not even look at the Quant section. Every field is capricious in its own way, often inconsistently at that. Religion (a field in which one is no more likely to use math than in English) demands a very high standard in both sections. However, I have never heard similar things about English. Email programs. Honestly, from the little that I've read on the English forums here, it seems like your verbal score will be more problematic than your quant score. That said, I don't know how English programs weigh scores beyond that some don't even look at quant.

Unless they're somehow connected, I doubt you'd get the notifications at the same time. Around the same time probably, but departments make their choices independently (and then the University rubber stamps the department's choices).

I'd repost this in the religion sub-forum.

Toronto is one of the top religion departments in the world, at least for things outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. I have noticed a few American schools that will have professors with PhDs from Chicago, Harvard, Oxford, Toronto and then a few degrees from Columbia or Duke or Cambridge. I haven't heard anything about McGill's religion program, but Toronto's is tops. They accept very few non-Canadians a year (I emailed).

I mean it will be tough getting into those schools... there are no safety schools really at the graduate level. That said, it doesn't mean impossible. A lot of it depends on a ) what discipline you're in b ) how low your scores are c ) if you have anything to really differentiate you from your peers d ) masters or PhD. But that said, there I don't think many candidates should be out and out discouraged from applying anywhere in the top 50. I'd guess schools out of, say, the top 25 likely view applications more holistically, and while a low GRE could continue to be a black mark on your application, some programs, especially the smaller ones, prize fit above all else. If she has been telling that to literally everyone, well she's probably just a jackass. It's hard for me to imagine a professor urging students to apply only out of the top 75 (where getting a professorship might be especially difficult, perhaps even at a 2 year school). That just doesn't strike me as reasonable advice.

Does this actually happen frequently? I can not recall a single case of this happening in my undergrad (I can't say that it never did... I mean I'm sure so one must have done a random, brief anti-Bush shout out or two). The closest to getting political was when one polisci professor was like, "And this is why I wrote a paper advising Clinton to just sell tanks to the Bosniaks... the war would have been much better if he did and we wouldn't have had to get so involved" something like that. But it was pertinent.

3.5 again is probably a general thing. If you went to a school that's known for tough grading, if you tried to be a physicist your first year and it was an epic fail, etc. they probably will tend to look at your a) major GPA the grades from your last (two) year(s). I for one have a GPA lower than 3.5, with GRE scores well above average (without my language courses, my GPA is much higher). I am guessing/hoping my GRE scores will balance out my overall GPA (my major GPA and my last two years GPA are both between 3.55 and 3.60).

I have had a few opposite experiences: first of all, when I said at one point that I was considering becoming a Rabbi, my father spent the next 30 minutes explaining why I should be a social worker... My father is a sociologist, and I refused to even learn what a sociologist does until college. I just told people he was a teacher or a professor. When they asked, I'd say sociologist. And if they asked what that was, I'd just shrug. Basically I'm warning you all: your children might be as ignorant of what you do as strangers are.

+1 This one had me stifling my laughs at work. You cannot fault him (and I am almost certain it was a "him") for inaccuracy. I am just trying to imagine a life where that's the main contact one has with linguistics...

It depends on the school. For funding based on grants for a specific project, they probably don't matter (though this doesn't apply to the Humanities/Social Sciences as much). Many of my schools guaranteed full funding for all PhD programs. Often times, funding is tied to certain specific fellowships, each of which has a different standard. I know some of the standards are strongly topic based (for example, someone gives money to fund students studying the "African-American experience"). I have heard certain schools determine funding largely if not entirely based on GREs. State schools have all sorts of weird fellowships (for each UC I applied to I had to choose all that applied to me for a page worth of categories), but I don't know if within those GREs matter. In short, I believe some schools do, some schools don't consider GRE's. What percentage probably varies by specific field. I think the fact of the matter is each school treats this matter differently.

1) Though well left of center politically, I do support many typical conservative "pet causes" such as Great Books programs. Furthermore, I often find myself opposed to separate "Ethnic studies" and "Global studies" programs, as well as to what I perceive as an over emphasis on sex/gender/race/whatever in theorizing. At the same time, I argue that much of the stuff that is read in sociology is too Ameri-Eurocentric and needs to take on a moral global perspective so... 2) Check out this sweet academic article on why so many (Islamic) terrorists are engineers (for the wimpy/those pressed for time, here's a non-academic summary from Slate.com). 3) I think while education has some liberalizing effect, I doubt it accounts for everything. Look how many neo-Cons have graduate degrees from Chicago. Clearly, some professions draw different types. Law and economics, for example, attract people who are will to work long hours for large pay (something which I am not willing to do). Apparently, engineering tends to draw people who like black/white distinctions. It is no surprise that the Academy in general favors shades of gray and are open to new ideas, traits highly corrolated with the left-wing politics. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if some historical areas (I am thinking of History and Classics in particular) might lean more towards the right than an "presentist" field like Sociology would (I really had a grad-student complain to me about the "America-centric and presentist biases in Sociology"... that dude was awesome). After all, I think Burke has a quotation that says something along the lines of "Conservatism is the democracy of the dead."

So let's summarize what we know: though difficult to prove, we all know that high scores (let's say 1300, 1400+ being high scores) are necessary except when they're not (a la what Classicsgirl said). And there are no firm caps except where there are. Since most of the admissions process is done by the subfield rather than program as a whole, some subcommitees (like apparently some subfields/the whole program at Vandy) may have hard caps, or perhaps hard caps for certain students (perhaps to compensate for a lower GPA or an unknown undergrad institution--I have heard in other places that GRE's matter more if they don't know the rigor of your undergrad). Moral of the story: adcomms are incredibly capricious and opaque as hell. I think we can all agree: when in doubt, email someone you want to work with plenty in advance, preferably someone on the adcomm, and ask if they would recommend retaking the exam because they will hopefully give an honest assessment. Ask if they would "recommend it" not if they "require it". I have a feeling that'll make them more honest. GRE's will not get you in, but they just might keep you out. But we really can't know when they'll keep you out at any particular school or subfield without asking because these vary too much. Have we reached a consensus? Final note: I think this convo was useful, though really fucking long, so I feel sorry for all those people who have to start reading at the beginning.