jacib

Neither of those examples are passive voice, unless you meant in the first example "I was introduced" (that's passive voice. As a handy guide, it's passive voice if you can ask "by whom?" or "by what?" were you [x]ed?). However, they are still bad form. You unnecessarily made what ought to have been your main clause into a supporting clause using an anticipatory "it" in order to emphasize an adverbial element. They ought to be changed (that, my friend, is passive voice, but I believe used judiciously). I personally like an evocative phrase like "take up the cross" so long as you put scare quotes around it. If you're tied to the image, on alien soil works better than under an alien sun, because, after all, it's still the same sun that they died under. I like fuzzy's approach. We talked about the value of personal anecdotes in a (start under post #12), and the conclusion which I took from that discussion was that it's basically a wash whether or not to include an anecdote. If none come to mind, go with Fuzzy's direct approach. Italicize book titles. I agree with expressionista's pronoun comments. Be careful if you decide to use multiple subclauses beginning with "that" or "what" in a single sentence. Even fuzzy's corrected sentence I think would read better if "use the framework that this interdisciplinary approach provided me with" if it were replaced [passive voice again, on purpose] with simply "explore (a variation of) this interdisciplinary framework"

Sigh, yes. Law school this is not. This is why we're judged on stupid things like our writing quality, research experience, language skills, and most of all research interests. Oh, and what professors whisper about us behind our backs. The concrete things like numbers only tell let us know that we're competitive, not that we'll get it. I think my GRE scores will get my app looked at very carefully.... but its obviously the other things that will get me in or not. Hence stories like inextrovert's above. Which is why the process is so nerve-racking. There is really no way we can compare ourselves to other candidates, especially us folks in the humanities/social sciences. Everyone has positive SoP's.... no one knows how glowing all of theirs are.

Ah, I assumed it was "convention" not "conference" on google. (I suspected the southern and sociological... but then I became convinced it had something to do with social work for some reason). And then I was trying to figure out what C could be.... because there's SSSR which is the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Anyway, mystery solved, I appreciate it.

My father, a professor, just joined facebook for some project or something, I don't know. Anyway, he searched for me, and I already made my profile private because I'm teaching. However, my father could see that a. I was in some weird Ron Paul something b. my gender was listed incorrectly. Ron Paul I was fine deleting entirely (he's so 08), but we got in a screaming match over whether i) a professor on the adcomm would check facebook ii) if they'd noticed my gender on facebook was not different from the gender on my application iii) if they'd assume this was serious or if they'd assume it was a joke iv) if they'd care if i were transgender. I argued that anyone who would be bothered by it would assume it was a joke because transgender isn't even really on their radar screen. I gave up fighting him eventual. Interestingly, I don't think he'd have a problem with this forum.

It's a department that accepts only like four students a year, so they don't get tons of applicants. Let's say 100... so 50 contact... spread that over 6 or faculty that take grad students... . that's 8.3 per professor.... over a space of let's say the four weeks before applications are due? Even let's look at Columbia's sociology department. They get more applications than most per admitted student because they're in New York and have a good undergraduate reputation basically. 24 professors, let's say no one who got a PhD after 2005 can take grad students, and no one who got a PhD before 1980 can either. That leaves 14. They get 280 apps a year, ish. If half write, that's 140. That's still only 10 per prof! I mean obviously it's not equally distributed. But it's not a huge drain on time... unlike this board, on which I have recently wasted an hour coming up with imaginary math equations. Hmmm, this metric also ignores the many people who write and are told "Sorry you're not right for our program. Best of luck elsewhere!" But those emails generally don't take very long to write...

I like Lauren's system better, because I think GPA does mean a lot. However, you guys are all assuming addition. It makes more sense a multiplier... your high GRE scores attest to the rigor of your undergraduate program (I know schools weight GRE scores more heavily when they aren't familiar with your undergraduate university). So here's my suggestion: GRE/1600*GPA/4= x% I got 81%, or a B-. (Think about grades pre-grade inflation). On Lauren's scale, I got 288. I wish I were applying to law school, so I could play little numbers games like this. And anyway, I think the GRE is probably on some scale where it affects your GPA 1+like the square of the number of standard deviations it is from the mean applicant (or more likely mean matriculant), so that really high and low scores matter more than average scores. And the GPA would of course be fudged in some way or another, probably less scientific, "Oh I met a really smart girl from there once who had really pretty eyes... she seemed to have a rigorous education/work out routine.... so I'm adding the mental equivalent of .2 to all applicants from that school."

At least you didn't say you were interested in Texas T&A. That could have been worse. My best is I had a sentence in one of my apps was something like: "Another reason why this program is especially good for me is." Then a new unrelated subject.

I googled it, what the hell is the SSSC?

Duke, obviously one of the most competitive programs in Religion in general (I know nothing about NT or things like that, but I get the sense it's very well respected), posts all their admissions info, year by year, here. Your quant is considerably above average for every year, your verbal below average for every year of the last ten years except 2005-6. But that said, it's not very far below average. Your GRE's won't make or break you. Your statement and your writing sample and then your recs will. If you are absolutely confident that you could do considerably better, you could retake, and it would improve your application, but it wouldn't be worlds of difference i don't think unless you improved by 40, 50 or so points. And even then, your statement and your writing samples and your recs are still what will matter most. Others may have different opinions than I do. But the advice I got was, "Your GRE's only matter if they're really above average, or really below average."

Schedule a meeting with all of them face to face, and put it as an "improving my thesis topic" thing. A lot of times its not the whole topic thats a problem, but rather, they think you should focus on something slightly different. Ask how exactly you can improve your topic. Treat them like the experts they think they are. For my undergraduate thesis, I had to have a long talk with my department head and I found probably 50% of her comments and suggestions totally wrong and useless, and leading towards work that I had no interest in. The other 50% were quite good. I ended up with an advisor I saw a handful of times (my school encourages students to take an advisor they know from class... and most of my classes were out of my interdisciplinary department), who nonetheless gave me a few key insights. That said, know if you're advisor isn't super keen on it, you have to be selfmotivated and get it done on your own in a timely manner (my advisor was not there holding my hand... oh God I wish he were. I think he only saw 20 pages [less than half] of it ever before I handed it in). Are there other local universities that have people working on your field? I'd really talk to the people and play to their expertise, "How can I change my topic to make it better". Often their advice is surprising reasonable about what one can be expected to accomplish. But do it face to face, and have a lot of stuff prepared, at least mentally, about exactly what, how and why you want to do what you want to do. Defend yourself without seeming "agressive". I found it really hard not to fight back and say, "Your suggestion here is straight up stupid. Why would I want to do such a boring impotent project?" But I held my tongue, cause I knew it would create more problems. I ended up with largely the project I wanted, just with very little support, which definitely made the project worse.

While not that practical of an update, I read the whole saga and my heart goes out to you. I'm in the social sciences, but I want to study a pretty specific thing for my thesis (a mix of subfields with a regional emphasis) and I was trying to figure out what would happen if, God forbid, one of the folks I wanted to work with left! This was especially relevent becasue I applied to two UC's, and apparently many of the good folks there are being snatched up by institutions that still have money. You situation seems much worse, however, than anything I had imagined. I guess I'm in the minority because I don't think you have much legal standing (could one sue the school if one's advisor died? moved to a better position?), but I would by all means make sure of that through free legal advice. The question that's killing me though is: what did your former advisor DO? Academic dishonesty? Shoddy workmanship? Nailing an undergrad? Just being a horrible guy to be around? What! I understand you not wanting to go into details, or feel comfortable sharing at all. But I feel obliged to all ask for the goss. Private message? It's pretty shysty that he knew he was on his way out... but still tried to take a grad student... but it's way worse that the department knew that he might be fired and still gave him a grad student! Lastly, I would definitely try to arrange for an MS/MA whatever. Even if you have to do research you don't like for six months. Just tell the department head, "it's clear I have no home here... please just let me leave with dignity." If they don't want you there, see how sweet a deal you can get for leaving. "Okay, dude, I expect the sweetest ever rec explaining that I'm a brilliant student and have been an asset to the department that you're sad to see go." I think it will make everything, from getting a new grad school, to opting out of another stupid round of prereqs, to getting a job working for a museum or something, much easier. If you can at all afford it and any are still open, consider applying to the schools where you don't know the research (surely they must have some sort of websites where you can find out basically "paleontology? dinosaurs? good enough!"), and the schools where your former advisor had contacts? There is no guarantee that he'll badmouth you, and his friends might sympathize with you rather than shun you. If what he did was not so heinous as to estrange him from all of his former colleagues, perhaps you can write him a make nice concillitory email, "It seems they are forcing me out too... I never had anything to do with your plight... can you think of other programs that fit my interests? Oh those really? Yeah you know people there? Can you see if they'll let me apply late?" I obviously don't know how bad the situation is but it seems possible that your advisor's contacts have just as much potential to be a boon as a burden.

Haha, that the quoted post has a -3 reputation. Also, how do you creepily see what topics others are following? I only discovered the "find topics" and "find posts" thing in our profiles recently. Do I have to be "friends" with people to see what topics people are following? By the way, the latest visitors thing is SUPER creepy. I just totally added it to my profile. Yes, I know this is off topic... but the topic is out of date so I refuse to feel guilty.

I just got an email from a program with a Dec 15 deadline two days ago telling me a letter was missing. Which got me off my ass and checking all the webpages finally... Two were missing an optional letter, one (with a Jan 1 due date) was missing an obligatory one. I hadn't gotten emails from any of them. I too had expect them to send me an email if I was missing something.

I think there is a big difference between the singular life changing experience that gives you an interest in a subject, and a generic understanding of one. Plus, most SOP books appear to be geared towards the Med School/Law School/B School crowd. They gave very little insight into how to write something about research interests. It was mostly, I was born a poor immigrant so I want to be a lawyer/doctor so I can help other poor immigrants, or At my exclusive summer yachting camp in Long Island Sound, some kid fell in the lake, a doctor totally saved him and from that day on, I wanted to either be a doctor after my father told me that I could never own a yacht on a fireman's salary. I found them totally useless. It's harder to move from a specific anecdote to a research statement and that's why I think people often give a more general "Since I was a child" thing. Its easier to talk about your development and your narrowing of interests from a general thing than a specific one. I was lucky enough to be able to get two actually successful SoP's from a professor who asked two of his current graduate students for permission. It was nice to see what percentage research interest, how much name dropping, was expected. I don't think either of those successful statements had a fit paragraph (though they were sent to me by the students, rather than by the professor, so they may have just sent me a fit paragraphless generic template). I think one included an extensive anecdote that connected vaguely to the candidate's actual research interests (the transition was something clunky like, if I'm already an entrepreneur, why do I want to study nurses?) and the other had a two sentence micro-anecdote "As I sat in the car writing up my research fieldnotes..." that tied directly to the topic, but was just an elegant way of descriping her research experience. In neither case was the anecdote the most interesting part, and on rereading it several times, seemed more and more unnecessary. As I reread these magical successful apps over and over again, scouring them in search of some missed detail or secret code that would assure my addmission, I found the transition between anecdote and research to be quite awkward. Still, I included an anecdote... in fact, the biggest difference between my religion apps and my sociology ones is my anecdote. I feel like it's main benefit is that it can help mentally separate people, especially for more popular topics.

I'd personally prefer to think of this as the preseason still... please? I mean it's in the South, let's call it early Spring Training? I'm not ready for the season to actually begin. I'm quite comfortable being in a similar situation to Schrodinger's cat; I'm not ready to open the box quite yet. I bet at least two of the fourteen rub the staff the wrong way. At a place with interviews, I'd imagine they have slightly different criteria and have a few people in the "I like them... if they're not creepy psychos" box.

Thank you for sharing that all TMP. I for one appreciate reassurances. I have a secret fear that someone even more brilliant than myself will "scoop" me at all my schools. They'll get across the board acceptances and I'll get across the board rejections that in another year wouldn't have broken that way. Does anyone else secretly fear this? Its of course illogical because, even within the subfield, departments have different strengths, and some of them I fit in quite well with, so they'd not only have to have the same subfield but essentially the same topic. Anyway, still a fear, though less than it was a month ago.

Jesus Christ. Well in that case be aware of time. If you have more time at the end, do it slower, obviously, but timing does make a difference. If a problem is taking you a long time, reread it and make sure you're doing it right. The problem that took me the longest on my real GRE was a problem where I was trying to find Z and they wanted X (they gave you y+z, I thought they gave you x+y). I spent literally four or more minutes on this problem, reread it, finished it in less than 30 seconds. Know what kind of mistakes you make.

No, you don't. The notes on your college transcript are more than sufficient. Anyway, you would have earned credit not from you HS grade, but from the actual AP score... so what you should really do is get ETS to mail your AP results to your schools. It's easy if you still have even one of the original AP score reports.

I always talked about what I wanted to research, but I didn't necessarily say "I want to work with this and this person in the department." I think in something like math, where you actually need qualifications and training already, these things matter less. Literally, I don't have to have taken any sociological theory or any stats prior to entry to my program. I literally could have majored in basket weaving as an undergrad. That's why it's much more important for us Social Science/Humanities kids to say what we're going to do. Point 2: I definitely tried to be a "____ kid" in my statement, as in "the coconut kid". Not as cool as coconuts, but still.

1) What programs are you testing yourself on? I found that the CDs with books were really poorly predictive of my quant score, because they used an entirely different algorithm (that is, the counted my mistakes much). I got somewhere in the 500s or 600s, I think, on the CDs tests I took, and was worried, but PowerPrep said I got 790 and 800... I got 780. Trust PowerPrep. Also look at the questions you got wrong, and why you got them wrong... are they all the same? Are you missing something? Is it reading poorly? Is it those stupid charts? Is it forgetting some weird triangle rule? 2) Yeah you totally don't need a score that high a quant score for anything in the humanities, I'd imagine. In the Social Sciences, they want high scores in both, or at least a high score in one and a decent score in the other. Additionally, there is not any real difference between a 6.0 and a 5.5, even on the ETS website they are considered at the same level; no one gives much credence to the writing score anyway... so whoever told you that I believe is misinformed. The GRE is generally considered the least important part of the application. 3) Above a 750 verbal is good. By any standard. For any program. Seriously, I don't know exactly what programs you're applying to but check out Berkeley's AVERAGE scores in Sociology (where one is generally expected to have high scores in both): What are average GRE scores? 680 verbal 730 quantitative 5.3 writing Berkeley is consistently considered the Sociology program. Keep in mind you have to use math in that program, and there are a number of foreign students in that program, and foreign students are generally expected to have higher quant to make up for lower verbal. Those are also averages. People got above those scores, and below. The very top Political Science programs (maybe the top five) are the only programs where I can think of that one might be expected to have over 700 in each section. Stanford (in a three way tie for first) says "Although we have no official score requirement, admitted students typically have GRE scores of 700+ on both the Verbal and Quantitative sections, and a score of 5.5 in the Analytical section". Chicago (a competitive #11 with a lot of the big realists, and tops in some subfields, hurting mainly because they only do theory and international stuff, but nothing else), says "The average GRE scores for those admitted last year were 638 Verbal, 698 Quantitative, and 4.85 Analytic." Sociology and Political Science are the two programs that I could think of that require advanced competency in both quant and verbal. Even there, the kinds of scores you're talking about aren't required. Some programs that have far too many applications for far too few positions might look at both scores. Duke's Religion PhD program, probably top 3, at least top 5, has these scores: "There is no minimum score. For the 2007-2008 admissions cycle, Ph.D. students admitted to the Graduate Program in Religion presented a mean GRE verbal score of 760 and a mean GRE quantitative score of 720." Again those are mean scores. Duke had 226 applications with 9 acceptances that year. That data also shows that that was the high water mark in terms of GPA. The average of both scores is closer to 700 usually. The only other programs I've seen with 4% admissions rates are the top English programs, which are well known for completely ignoring the quant score. I don't know any of the things for interdisciplinary programs, but as you can see, even at these most selective programs, their averages are rarely that. If you can pull your quant back to a high 600s (where you had it before), especially if you really nail the verbal, your GREs will literally only keep you out of no programs in the Social Sciences, never mind the Humanities. Whoever told you those numbers I am certain was exaggerating, and as we've seen from the Political Science examples, the top school and the top ten schools have different GRE standards. The writing sample and your statement are probably way more important.

Cub journalists get paid worse than we will. And have to work in more obscure places. The whole system works like the farm leagues, where you start out at places like the Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star and which ever city has the Sling-Blade, and work your way into the major media markets. Believe it or not, these no good yellow journalists have earned their stripes. Yes, I do agree that it would be better if a degree was valued more in the private sector. Look at the fields where professors can switch back and forth and you will see that, because of competition, the wages go up (all of the hard sciences, but also economics and political science). That said, what can you do with an English PhD that you couldn't do with an English BA or English MA besides teach? That's not a purely rhetorical question; I remember clearly once being really drunk and watch one friend try to console another, "Don't worry Luke, like there are plenty of things an English major can do. Like... like... every time they start a new country they're going to need a really good writer like you to make the constitution."

And also a class teaching students about "them", that is the people who are not "us". They seem to suffer so much/make so many bad decisions over there.

Did you mean undergraduate or graduate? I'm not sure they're two different issues, but the two posters interpreted them differently. I assumed you meant undergraduate. In any case, from what I've seen of "business" programs, I'd prefer to hire a good history/social science student over a business student. Obviously I'm biased, but seriously, what is an 18 year old kid doing in a management class? I helped a kid write an essay about different motivation techniques and she absolutely did not under the basic psychology at work. Nor did she get the economics (I don't mean numbers, I mean like supply and demand). And even if she had, she would still have to remember it 4 years later when she graduated. Seriously, all kids in business programs should have to start with the tools like psychology, stats, and basic economics before they can move on to taking business classes. It should be treated like an interdisciplinary program. I also think Pre-Law Programs should be give different names, like "Law and Society" or something. While I don't think college should be turned in a vocational school, I do think that people should be prepared a little more for dealing with real problems in college; for example, I think everyone should have to take some basic stats. Perhaps some sort of philosophy class which teaches people certain logical fallacies (if only to have an educated voting population. Ad hominem attacks should be unconvincing...). Someone somewhere on this board said they took a "Latin for Scientists" course and I think that's exactly the kind of course that should be encouraged. The art of the persuasive essay. Sociology of this particular place where we all go to school. What is global warming anyway? Web page making. America's place in the 20th century. Foreign language. I am a strong believer in the core education, which sounds a lot better than "distribution requirements". I think that educated people should have a certain shared knowledge, and that includes things like Rousseau and Bentham and Thucydides and Weber. College should challenge you. I think it cuts the other way too, and that all the English kids should have to take science, math and computer science classes. If I had my way, everyone would have to take at least one Art History survey class too.

While adjunct brick-laying, or brick-laying at a community college, will Gypsum be able to develop new kinds of bricks?? Or will he have to watch others make all the bricks he'd like to make? And secretly curse under his breath "I'd make such better bricks... if only I had the time! I could be a master craftsman instead of a workman", all the while growing more and more embittered toward the brick industry in general?

dzk. you have inside information. i can smell it on you. share. please? No but seriously, I am curious: do you know, when GRE scores are used late in the process, what they are used for? A tie-breaker? Funding?