jacib
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Posts posted by jacib
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Whenever it's someone who is the only of their kind in a program (like Willer is), it's more of a risk listing them. Even if he isn't leaving (and he certainly could be), he could already have an overwhelming number of students and/or the faculty on the committee could wonder who else you would connect to. If it seems like he is all you have in sociology, it might be a problem.
I've recommended in the forum before that the best thing to do is to apply to a department that has an enduring strength that you're interested in, not an individual that you're interested in working with. And certainly don't apply to a school - rather than a program - that has people that you like in it. If a faculty member isn't affiliated with a department (and even joint appointments whose tenure or teaching homes are in other places at the university), chances are that they won't be able to be that involved in your academic training or professional development. Even taking class in other departments is generally frowned upon in top programs. If you're not sure what you're interested in studying - which isn't the case for econosocio, but others in this forum - then choose programs that will give you the best broad training (e.g., methods, theory, major areas) and has a record of strong professional development and placement in schools/positions where you would eventually like to end up.
I agree with this in principle, but I would just add amendment saying if you are in a smaller subfield (i.e. you're not doing race, inequality/strat, urban, econ soc, orgs, demography, networks, etc.), you may have a harder time following that advice. My initially project was about state regulation of religion in the Middle East and how it affected minorities, so I was looking for people who did:
a ) sociology of religion, or
b ) work on the Middle East, or
c ) any one doing something that connects states and culture
I probably should have widened my search a little (I didn't know any better), and applied to at least two other schools, but there were really just a handful of people in the country who fit my bill in any of those categories at top 25ish places. Granted, in retrospect, I should have applied to work with d) more historical sociologists and e) people who work on ethnicity-outside-the-U.S. (like Rogers Brubaker) but regardless: there was a very limited pool of people who would have been interested in advising my project. And they mostly didn't work at the same schools. That doesn't mean I'm working in a hopeless obscure subfield, it just means I'm working in a small one. I'm sure other applicants who work on more obscure subfields (like social psych, religion, historical sociology, STS, environment) will run into the same problem. Where you can, list list list people in the department. Where you can't, try to find places with faculty you don't think are going anywhere and are excited about your project. If you can, list people from related departments so it doesn't look like you're too narrow mindedt.
A partial solution to this is of course bridging: say my project is "(obscure subfield) and health", or "and urban", or "and inequality", or "and social movements" or something like that. If you work on a religious organizations, make sure to list both Robert Wuthnow and Paul DiMaggio when apply to Princeton, even if you really just want to work with Wuthnow. For Minnesota, on the other hand, you might say your project is religion and historical sociology. But, clearly, that's not always possible, and you might not have the right kind of, say, "culture" person at the programs you're thinking about (you don't want it to see like you just looked at the website and saw that Professor Such Ensuch was listed with "culture" next to their name--you should be familiar with these people's work). At programs where there are multiple people who do something even vaguely similar to what you're interested in, of course list the people you can. But there are about four Top-25 programs in the country where you can go as a straight sociologist of religion (I'm not at one of them--I'm studying with someone who fits one of my other characteristics) so your options really are pretty limited to start with. That's fine, too. Not ideal, but fine, and just be happy you found a couple people scattered across the country who will be excited about your project (just try to make sure they'd be really excited about your project).
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I don't know about minimums, but I think they can be inferred (to an extent) from the averages. SwissChocolate made a really good list of the Looking at those, 700Q is on the low side at top programs. Considering that there are several perfect scores admitted at some of the top top programs admit, it's probably not unimaginably low to be averaged in ([155+170]/2=162.5 or about average), but it is distinctly below average at Columbia-Duke-Madison-Berkeley-NYU. However, OP did of course have an above average V score (169 by the new system, near perfect). From the wording that SwissChocolate quoted, it looks like the two scores were considered together at some places so, at least at those places, OP is probably only slightly below average and therefore definitely above any strict cut-off.
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Two second break from grading but just to calm anxiety.
Ahhhh, oooops.
So listing assistant professors should be avoided entirely then?
No, not at all. They probably shouldn't be the first person you list, though, because they generally can't chair committees, etc. (who knows if they'll get tenure!). We have one hot shot assistant professor who everyone is pretty sure will get tenure soon and, even though they don't have tenure, they got their first student this year (that's very rare: part of the reason is the student's undergraduate adviser was the professor's graduate adviser). We have other junior professors who will probably not get students for years. However, it is perfectly acceptable (and probably encouraged) to list more than one person who you could work with (and not just a list of everyone famous at the department). It's probably encouraged to list a junior faculty member after the main faculty member (we have to assume that some people just list everyone famous at the department).
In hindsight, I think my big blunder with Berkeley's application was listing Willer, who as it turns out, isn't tenured yet -- and supposedly may have other offers from schools in the works. I didn't find this out until after the app process when a grad student at Berkeley mentioned this. And then I realized how stupid my application must have sounded to someone on the adcom.
Welp, there goes Berkeley for me!
Edit: Wait - I just checked. Willer is listed as an associate professor, meaning tenured, no?
Generally, yes. I have seen on CV's rarely "associate professor without tenure" before, but it's rare. It's a fine rule of thumb to assume that associates are tenured. That doesn't mean they can't and don't leave though. We have, in the past five years, scooped up two midcareer faculty from other prestigious programs (and I think only lost one junior faculty member, and that was to a failed tenure bid). Checked his CV and this He has been invited to be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ) and will be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford University) in 2012-13 makes me think he might be considering a move (though he might not be). Even if he is, it doesn't mean he will move. We've been considering one midcareer faculty member on and off for like five years or something (I don't really understand the details) but we haven't made a good enough offer for them (partly because of internal department politics). We've also made two senior offers in the past two years, both of which have been declined (though both professors came out here to look at us).
I'll echo econosocio's advice: apply to faculty in the department to which you are actually applying. You might be more interested in going outside of the department to get essential mentorship, but those people won't be evaluating you from a pile of other students. To be clear, I think it makes sense to look outside the department, but I have been advised to do so after admission. Know your audience.
On my application to my department, I listed only one sociologist and two people in other departments. One of them turned out to be my adviser's BFF who she runs an institute with. If they work on similar things, there's a decent chance they know each other and are part of some center or something together (and then you should say how excited you are about the center). The medical sociologists know people at the public health school, for example. That said, of course you will need to get essential mentorship within your department and you need to be an excellent fit for at least one person within the department (even if you change totally later).
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On 12/10/2012 at 9:29 PM, Josefmoore said:
That's exactly the kind of intellectual response I was looking for. "You criticize my ad hominems? Well, our job market is better than your fucking job market! Ha!"
I mean to be fair, xDarthVeganx's response was at least as substantive as:
On 12/10/2012 at 8:10 PM, Josefmoore said:The last two pages of this thread shows why sociology is a marginalized and disrespected discipline pretty much everywhere in the world.
and certainly more substantive than:
On 12/10/2012 at 9:36 PM, Josefmoore said:Ha. Thankfully, unlike econsocio, I have no intention of ever touching this putrid waste of a discipline. Have fun being the butt of every joke in academia and the rest of society. Learning to become less pathetic, vicious personalities might help.The actual story of WashU's disbanding is fascinating and more complicated than "sociology suxx"! One of the things that really tore the department apart was apparently Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade. There's a famous story of one of the senior professors throwing Laud Humphrey's typewriter out a window saying something like, "You're not writing sociology, you're writing pornography!" It was, apparently, that kind of department, torn apart by the 60's and it never recovered. But you're right in a way: the 70's and the 80's were certainly hard on sociology, but (I think) widespread computing really helped put sociology back on track (we could have been like anthropology!)--and I don't just mean "sociology that uses numbers", I mean all of it. While still it can be the red-headed step-child in a lot of venues, economists and political scientists don't write sociology off--org theory and network analysis in particular are used across the social sciences (except, of course, in anthropology) but are still based in sociology. But in this JosefMoore's defense, seriously, has anyone else tried to read sociology from 60's to the 80's that's not famous? Goffman and Garfinkle, of course, we keep in our bag of tricks, but a lot of it is awful. Like really awful. Like, bad bad. Seriously, last year I read the best selling sociology book ever (the Lonely Crowd) and it is pretty worthless. Of course, Merton and STS kept somethings fresh. Some of the community studies were, you know, solid community studies if that's what you're into. Some the inequality/statification stuff was important (and cited by economists and political scientists, of course) as were a few urban ethnographies. There were other decent pockets, but for a long time, yeah it was kind of bad. There's a reason we read the big three plus Simmel, and then skip to the Chicago School, and then skip to Goffman, and then skip to contemporary stuff (via Foucault and Bourdieu, if you're into the theory thing). Sociology could have easily gone the way of anthropology (everyone should read Ortners "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties" [ungated link] to understand what happened there).
The NY Times article that Josefmoore linked to bemoans the loss of all the "cultural studies" programs, but I don't really bemoan the "loss" of navel gazing "cult studs" and I can't think of anyone in my department who would. While there are still solid chunks of sociology I don't like or read, the vast majority of the work produced by junior faculty at top places (with a particularly notable exception of a scholar who got in hot water over the summer) is really good.
To the wandering political scientist specifically: a lot of really well respected political science work (I'm thinking works like Lily Tsai's Accountability Without Democracy and Varshney's Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life and Anthony Marx's work and obviously Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone) could easily have been done in a sociology department, with only slightly different vocabulary and lit reviews but the exact same results. I hope you realize that. All of those are firmly based in previous sociological research. After sociologists, the people I have the most in common with are political scientists and a little over a fifth of my total graduate credits will be in my school's (top ten) political science department. If we're putrid waste, we're brothers in it because it's not like political scientists don't read Charles Tilly, or Rogers Brubaker, or all the social movements literature to come out of sociology. The political sciencist who taught my nationalism class (if you do IR or Comparative Politics, you'd know his name) said the best general book on nationalism was Containing Nationalism by Michael Hechter (a sociologist). It's not like top network analysis people in political science (think John Padgett from Chicago) don't work mostly with sociologists because sociologists are [edit: generally] better at network analysis than political scientists. There's a reason the article you linked to is twenty years old: it's really out of date. We're way closer now than ever before. My work will honestly probably be read by more political scientists than sociologists.
Edit: I got to stop these massive walls of text.
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If it's a general sociology course on theory, there's not a way to seemlessly include it (other than awkwardly trying to slip it onto the bottom of your CV). Which will look bad because every course will take up the same about of space as your university degree.
However, if you learned a skill in your online course (python, formal modeling), you could easily put it under "additional skills" on your CV and/or a line in your SOP that won't be too disruptive like, "Additionally, over the past severals months I have taken an online course on formal modeling taught by Scott Paige. It gave me the skills to ____ which will allow me to ____ in the future.
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Though I am not yet 25, I am concerned that waiting 4 years to apply to top (e.g. Ivies, etc) programs could go poorly. Knowing that faculty at top programs are primarily interested in reproducing and ultimately replacing themselves, there seems to be a strong preference for younger applicants with long careers ahead of them. While some programs seem to value applicants who took time off after undergrad to be sure about PhD study, is there a general age at which applicants become significantly less attractive to top admissions committees?
The median age of acceptance at my program fluctuates from cohort to cohort but is probably around 25ish. We have had several 30+ students in recent cohorts. Except for special circumstances, they are all in their early 30's, the oldest I believe being 34 or 35 when they matriculated, with most of the others being 30 or 31, I believe, though there was probably another 32 or 33 year old in the past few years. I don't know--age isn't really something we ever talk about it.
The "faculty at top programs are primarily interested in reproducing and ultimately replacing themselves" is true, and so top programs would definitely want students, at least at first, to be "in it to win it" no matter how the job market looks. I believe we only have one full time student in the first four years with any kind of consistent, outside employment, and his employment is related to his thesis; there are also people who do very occasional consulting or write occasional pieces of journalism, or work at places around the university in lieu of teaching/TAing/RAing, but only one guy with a "job" as far as I know. I don't know if other schools have as few people working as we do (no one would begrudge you for attending psychanalytic seminars, etc, however--we have some lawyers who definitely keep up with legal matters), but from what I understand, one of the reasons top schools fund people is so that they don't work--so that are able to "concentrate on their research."
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2) I actually absolutely agree with you about the GRE's utility as a costly signal.
This is the second time, to my amazement, someone on the forum has agreed with me on or argued vociferously from a rationalist model.
Oh, I didn't mean that I actually agree with you for the first time or something. I disagree with you on somethings, granted, but you've definitely had a positive effect on the board. I meant I have actually made that same argument to other people, with that language even (which I got from political science classes, not sociology ones).
Often, across disciplines boundaries, people talk about the same things but just use different vocabulary for it. I was in a graduate political science class on Nationalism where we read Liisa Malkki's Purity and Exile which is without a doubt mainline anthropology. Very interpretive, far from rational choice. It's all about "cosmology". The professor took the book and was like, "It's obviously not in the book in these terms, but I think we could read this in terms of rational choices made by the different actors in the city and the refugee camp" (the refugees to the city people assimilated, the people in the refugee camp doubled down on their previous ethnic identity). He was, of course, right.
You do see rational choice in social movements literature--everyone cites that one Mancur Olson article (I just saw it again yesterday while reading a Sudipta Kaviraj's The Imaginary Institution of India). In Sociology of Religion, rational choice is a large percentage of the core recent literature (more from the 90's than the last decade)--but I get the sense that some people don't like them because there's a sense they, as it were, "don't always play well with others".
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The number of times that I have wanted to post one of my recommendation letters, hoping that people would say that it is not lacklustre. I was given the possibility but two of my LOR to check their letters. I just felt that after the process of writing the SOP - understanding what looks good in a LOR is beyond my energy levels..
Might not be a universally true thing about how letters are written, but if you are morbidly curious, here's one take on letter writing from the Professor Is In blog (her grant template and abstract templates are pretty useful). But honestly, if a letter writer let you read the letter, it's a positive letter.
It's funny I've heard people say opposite things about letters: I heard one professor say "I only take letters seriously from scholars that I know" and I've heard one professor say, "I only look at letters from people i don't know--if I know the scholar, I assume the letter is good" or something crazy along those lines.
LOL this is such nonsense. So basically, letters, statement of purpose, transcripts, writing sample and CV hold very little weight in the admissions process, at least according to a few people on here. That is complete nonsense, it has to be. Obviously there are items of an application that hold more sway or weight with admissions committees, I think what it really comes down to is that no one on this forum actually knows what they are.
Every part of the application, especially in a field like sociology where there aren't hard "Get higher than this score, take these prerequisites, have this research experience" cut-offs, is "the most/least important part" of the application. Admissions Committees are made up of capricious, idiosyncratic professors, who often act in completely different ways from other capricious, idiosyncratic professors. Like I've heard a professors arguing that you should ignore GPA (worked out in my favor, but I think that's absurd). Some will skim letters to make sure that they aren't thinly vieled warnings from colleagues, others will read them more carefully looking for praise. Some will only look at the names at the bottom of the letter, some will care exactly what the letter has to say. There's no one way that admissions committees read these things.
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I mean -- those are around the 80th percentile.
Thanks for the information and support. Economics minimum Q is about 164, and T20 will want to see 166+. Technically it's high-school math. One of the reasons they changed the test was that fields like economics, physics, and engineering did not present enough variation at the top: note that an old 800 only translates to (I think) a 164 or 166 now.
I don't think it's a great system, GRE, but economically speaking it makes sense as a costly signaling device. One "pays" to have one's application looked at by sacrificing inane hours getting good at solving tricky math and verbal problems quickly. When I took the GRE I was still equivocating about economics or sociology, and didn't study at all for the verbal because that month, I was going to be an economist. In retrospect I wish I had, but it is what it is now.
1) I totally forgot that the new GRE went up to 170. For some reason (probably the reason above) I thought it went up to 166. Those scores seem less deadly now. But I know some schools wanted 90% and 90% in poli sci and were open about it.
2) I actually absolutely agree with you about the GRE's utility as a costly signal.
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I agree with you. I think three things come up.
1) Like you said, candidates not applying to anything but USNWR's top 100 universities and the top 50 liberal arts colleges.
2) I think some professors and programs are really bad at helping candidates navigate anything but the R1 job market. Which means a lot of people fall through the cracks.
3) More anecdotally, a non-elite teaching intensive school isn't necessarily looking for someone who potentially thinks of themselves as an unclaimed superstar. I think twhose places want a good teacher. I don't know if this is true in sociology, but my sister's friend who got a degree in history from a top, top program at a top, top private university couldn't find a job (history job market, obviously, in shambles). But one of the issues, she thought, was that a lot of places she was applying to assumed she couldn't handle teaching a large lecture and that's what they ultimately needed, not someone whose research was pathbreaking. I don't know the details of the story because I heard it second hand, but she ended up getting two job offers eventually: a very temporary, visiting assistant professor at another elite private university and a one year but if you fit in here and can do the teaching, we will probably give a TT job offer from a non-flagship state school. I had never heard of the latter arrangement before, and maybe it was unique or got lost in the retelling, but it wouldn't surprise me if a teaching focused department wanted focused teachers, not people who saw this as a stop-gap until they could break into the top 100 universities.
This isn't always true--a lot of top schools end up placing a lot of people with big name degrees more locally (probably because of spousal things). Look at teaching focused departmetns in the midwest--lots of Michigan and Wisconsin people. Anyway, this is highly anecdotal and all the research I know about placement from academic graduate programs looks at who places their students at top programs, which definitely says something, you know?
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also: are public goods problems, theories of critical mass, thresholds, cascades, etc common enough in sociology that a wide range of committee members will have some background in them? Are those models taught at some point in most UG soc education?
I think those are all generally enough to be fine (especially if you make it clear what you're talking about through examples). Sociology is big enough that no one will understand everything. Ethnographers won't necessarily understand the details of a multilevel model and demographers won't necessarily understand critical race theory. Everyone's used to it. So your work should be methodologically and empirically rigorous enough to impress the people who will "get" everything and clear and well written enough for the people who might not know anything about your sub-field. It's a balance, but when in doubt, I think good work that people in your subfield understand is fine (which is not an excuse for bad writing). I understand a lot of quantitative political science stuff (in comparative politics and IR) than I do some of the qualitative stuff in sociological fields I'm not familiar with.
I am a current grad student at a top 15 program who just stumbled on this site. Reading through this thread, I thought I would provide some input. I was accepted to 5 out of my 8 schools--three of which were in the top 20 and one just outside the top 20. While I am sure there is much variation amongst programs, the two comments I heard most often on recruiting visits were "I loved your writing sample" and "you worked with X professor at X university, I love her work! She is great."
The comments I got were how strong my numbers were and how interesting the project in my SOP was. I think it's fair to say that sociology grad apps are a remarkably holistic assessment (I supposed to cruise the poli sci forum on grad cafe--they for real all need to get minimum 160 v and q to be in a top program, it's nuts. That's just to get their application looked at).
AD COM members are not likely to read a lengthy writing sample until they have sorted out who is a competitive, the weight of this document will only come into play if other indicators pass the initial sorting filters.
I think this is very true. But it's also definitely what some people think is the "most important" part.
Also pages say 10-30 pages. Double or single spaced? And I'm using ASA citation detailed on Purdue Owl. Is that going to fly?
I wrote mine double spaced, in Chicago format (footnotes!), which is much more common in history and the humanities where I was coming from (I used a portion of my thesis). I wouldn't tell anyone to do that, but I don't think it was a problem at all. They're looking for promise, not you being there yet. Citations is obviously one of the things they can teach you. Clear or imaginative thinking are things that are much harder to teach. ASA would probably be best, I would imagine any inline (author year: page) citation system would be viewed pretty much the same as long it was consistently done throughout the paper.
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This is a side comment from the OP's post but @darthvegan. A student from a program ranked in the top like mine came in to give a job talk at our business school and when we met with him, he told us that his program "just wasn't placing" (in part because of their strength in social psychology--there are a limited set of universities that hire sociologists trained in social psychology--but also in part because of the expectations of their PhD students so even a lot of the other students weren't getting jobs) and that our program was placing well. We asked him what he meant by that. By placing well, he clarified, he meant "getting jobs at all". I don't know if he's right or not, but he gave us the clear sense that many top programs don't place all the students who want academic jobs in academic jobs. There's this one guy with similar research interests to mine who had three publications when he got his degree (two peer reviewed articles, one in a regional journal, one in a specialty journal, and a chapter in an edited volume. Neither of the articles were stunning but neither were bad). His research topic was potentially interesting, depending on what he did with it. I've been secretly stalking him once every semester for the past three years and he, though he has graduated from a top five program, has never had an academic appointment (I don't know what his story is--how far he looked, if he had geographic limitations or what, if he decided not to work in cademia) but he, as far as I can tell, has never had a job in ademia and I believe he is/was looking for one. My adviser's last student has been bouncing around visiting professorships and adjuncting gigs for the last two or three years (apparently, he'll probably have better chance at academic stability once he can get his dissertation published, is the understanding, but who knows).
Academic jobs are not guaranteed with a PhD from a top program, let's be clear. Top graduate programs have no trouble placing top students into top universities, but don't necessarily place all their students. A lot of smallers programs have better records of placing all their students, I would imagine.
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If you're interested in a "different kind" of sociology programs, there are some applied sociology PhD programs (or applied anthropology), though many won't be right for you, some might be. There's also Cornell's development soc program, but I don't really know what the deal is with that. I honestly don't really know what the deal is, other than PSU is trying to start one (in health and...education I think?) and Baylor already has one (in religion and... something else).
That said, a few people have managed to publish academic books based on their non-dissertation work with only an MA (Philipp Gorski, Matt Desmond, Adam Reich), but all the ones I can think of were superstars in the making and all published while enrolled in elite schools. There are people who are taken seriously in sociology who do not have advanced degrees in their fields--Barbara Ehrenreich has a PhD, but in cellular immunology. (I didn't think bell hooks had a PhD but she totally does--in literature, and Angela Davis obviously has a philosophy degree from Humbolt). But yeah, for the most part scholarly writing happens within academia, and if not in academia, at least by PhD's (there is a slight exception for this in history, and journalists who write about social science). It's a process of credentialing--a PhD is the way to get past the velvet rope, proof that this person has "really thought about these issues", but also, being in academia is a place where people have time to write and to research.
Here's the thing: you don't need to tell your conventional PhD program you're applying to or attending that you don't want to be an academic. It will of course mean hiding part of what you identify as. First semester, one of the junior faculty members comes to us and is like "Yo, some of you might not be pushing for an R1 tenure track job. That's fine. Don't tell us. Until you're ready to go on the job market. You can tell your peers discretely , but never tell us because we won't pay attention to you. We, like most people, are interested in social reproduction--we think we made the right choices and want to produce little versions of ourselves. We want to help you, honeslty, but even with our best intentions we'll pay less attention to you if we know you're going to be going out of academia." This is probably true of almost every (top) sociology program in the country. That said, one of my colleagues has told me that he wants to go into journalism, that's been his goal since day one, (Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large of Time, has a PhD in Poli Sci) and another wants to go into film making. They're working on department requirements and working on "side projects" that they want to do for the rest of their lives. It probably won't be the easiest thing for you, because you'll have to jump through all these hoops that won't matter for you, but it is an option.
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If I remember correctly, a (very) few other places also publish some statistics on their matriculated students. I think I remember being able to find Minnesota's and Yale's when I applied, but that was three years ago so my memory might be a little off.
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If you are looking for brownie points for taking a course in classical theory or a course on globalization, that probably won't mean much from Cousera (or from an extension school).
However, if you are learning a specific skill, then I would guess knowing the skill trumps where you learned it from. If you took a course in, say, GIS and got a certificate for it, all the better, but I think that'd have about the same impact as "Through an independent research project (my writing sample), I taught myself a year's worth GIS. I am now able to do [these analyses]" in your personal statement. Okay, if you had a fancy certificate, maybe slightly more of an impact, but I think people care more that learned how to do, say, multi-level modeling than how you learned it or where.
Is there something utterly lacking in your applications? With a 3.9 GPA and considerably high GRE scores for the social sciences, it seems strange that you wouldn't be competitive anywhere. I could understand additional courses if you had a low GPA, but I'm not sure what you're compensating for by taking them.
GPA and GRE scores are a necessary but not sufficient part of your application. If you look at the results pages, you regularly see people with high schores rejected from top schools. I agree with you, OP probably shouldn't take classes to change their GPA. However, if they are learnign skills they need for their analysis, then they'll need to learn this stuff sooner or later. Demonstrating that you can and will learn this stuff shows something to a admissions committees. If you come in with a limited stats background and say you want to become a quant person, that'll probably take several years of course work. It happens exceedingly rarely at my school (though maybe it's more common at Michigan or Wisconsin, where they really emphasize that stuff and are better at teaching it in department). And if you've already got a stats background, all the better. One kid in my program taught himself basic social network analysis in the six or so months between being accepted and the start of the semester.
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This might offer more complete and useful data for the following schools:
• Columbia
• Emory
• NYU
• Notre Dame
• Ohio State
• Penn State
• Rochester
• Stanford
• Syracuse
• UCSD
• WashU
• Wisconsin
(and also shows where people got their first placement, and how many people dropped out early or otherwise never graduated): https://sites.google.com/site/honestgraduatenumbers/
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Man, well done! I'd heard about some people trying to judge based on percentages in the past, but when we were using the old score, they just never looked like they made sense because the distributions on the two sections were so different on. (I'm taking these numbers from this chart) 630 was a 90th percentile for verbal and 53rd percentile quantitive while the 90th percentile for quantitative was between 780Q and 790Q (out of 800). This meant that missing very few questions dropped your percentile badly on one section and minorly on the another. Having 162V and 163-4Q both be at 90% makes comparing based on percentiles make much more sense, and I apologize for being an old fogey and feebly trying to cling to the past. I was wrong, and it appears you were definitely right (this is likely no surprise to you).
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As for #4, as someone in a graduate program, I can say you probably won't standback and be amazed because no one in the program will know the answer, or will tell you something like "Our year-to-degree has been going down" or just tell you something that's not true. I don't think it's malicious, I just don't think they're outcome oriented like that (and it's a big confirmation bias thing: a couple of successful are the ones they remember). Also, in my experience, everyone who doesn't graduate from the program does so for "personal" or "medical" reasons completely unrelated to the program. Everyone. At every program.
I agree with not taking out loans. I agree only quant wunderkinds finish in 5 or less years. And your adviser will definitely not hold your hand, but, if you're doing good work, your adviser should be encouraging and pushing your ideas further. But in most situations, you already need to already be doing good work for that to happen.
#1 is on the pessimistic side of accurate. Jobs might be of a different quality than you expect (small university instead of R1), but there are apparently jobs out there for people from top programs. You're lucky enough to see for yourself in political science because there is an initiative called "Honest Grad Numbers" which lets you can look at the data and judge for yourself (thank Neal Beck at NYU). We'll see if people keep it up--Columbia's is already not working, but the others seem to be. On visiting day, seek out older graduate students for sure. They'll likely have their own things going on and will have no interest in schmoozing with you. Make them talk with you anyway.
But I would add it's up to you not only to be a self-starter when it comes to work, but a self-starter when it comes to professionalization. I just heard a second year in my program asking things like, "Is tenure really forever?" "What's the difference between teaching at Stanford and Swarthmore? (an elite research university vs. an elite liberal arts college)" and other things like that but not really understanding the answers. Know what expectations are for the kind of job you want and start working towards them in year two or three. Look at people who already have those positions and what's on their CV. Try to do more than them. Get those publications out. Unless you are the chosen one, think strategically about the future from the start of the program, not when you're suddenly faced with the job market year greater than or equal to 6.
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I suggest that you apply next year. This option really sucks - I know! But last year I was rejected anywhere. I'm 100% sure universities did not even look at my file because of the GRE score. I had a verbal score that was identical to your quant score - 150. I am reapplying with this year with much better scores: v:163 and q:161 (and believe me: I am still insecure whether my scores are good enough for Columbia etc.).
If this is no option for you -> retake!! However, even with q:156 there is a good chance that top programs weed out your application. If I were you, I'd definitely add some safety schools (check GRE averages on webpage).
You know you can get a (very rough) idea of what scores work at schools by going to the results page, right? There's selection bias, etc. in the reporting of the scores, but it's still better than absolute guess work. You guys mentioned Columbia so here's what the reported GRE scores if you search Columbia Political Science (and ignore all the Missouri and UBC results). It's a small, self selected sample, but if you do it for a couple of peer institutions (and you guys could crowd source it easily) you should get an idea of what the "lower limit" is, if there is one. If you have no idea what I'm talking about or what the "results page" is, I explained it
Columbia accepted (this is all that reported--the last score is from 2008 before Grad Cafe even included the red rhombus option on the results page):
GRE-V: 670, 800, 800, 720, 680
GRE-Q: 800, 800, 730, 720, 650
GPA: 4.00, 3.70, 3.64, 3.80, ---
[For easy conversion, 670V=164, and 650Q=151 FWIW. I bet with the new numbering system, lower V scores will be accepted because 164 looks absurdly high compared to 151, though it might also result in people wanting higher Q scores, as well. AdComm members are human like the rest of us so they are prone to be affected by how the results are presented. I bet howthe new GRE scores are factored in at each school hasn't reached an equillibrium. So @SwissChocolate, OP's 150Q is technically only a smidge lower than the 650Q that was accepted. I don't know what other schools are "top programs" in Poli Sci but put your heads together you could make this kind of table for all the schools.]
Columbia rejected (there are a lot more rejects I'm not including, check for yourself, this is only like half of last years):
GRE-V: 161, 740, 700, 155, 690
GRE-Q: 150, 690, 800, 147, 790
GPA: 3.58, 3.78, 3.78, 3.50, --
[From the two tables, it appears that Columbia has a preference for absurdly high GRE scores, but absurdly high GRE scores appear to be neither necessary nor sufficient. Just normal high GRE scores seems necessary]
There is a lot of guess work, though, when a lot of subfields accept people individually. So my guess is if just theory people are looking at your app, you can get away with a lower q score, and if just methods people are looking at your app, you can get away with a lower v score. Non-native speakers, in sociology at least, can get away with lower V scores but that's at least in part because they normally have higher Q scores.
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1) Ask your adviser what would look best. If he thinks it's good enough to publish, that presumably means good enough to publish somewhere you'll be proud of.
2) Do you have any desire to publish this thing in a peer-reviewed journal? If so, another option is to do that before you apply (and have on your CV: submitted x article to x journal). If so, then you should definitely not publish it in the anthology. If it's not ready for publication in the place you want yet, just wait for the conference. Peer reviewed papers>book chapters.
3) If not, then maybe having an article in press with in a not-so-great anthology (don't put the press on your CV, just title, editors, forthing) would make you a stronger candidate? This is especially the case if you weren't planning on ever doing anything with this again.
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I'm in Sociology, not Political Science, but let me give my two cents:
1) Learn stats. Know the math as well as you can, even if you're not directly planning on doing something quant-y right now.
2) I know you did a gap year before college, but maybe do something that is not school between graduating college and going to school. I know what I did improved my application and proved to me that I wanted to go grad school.
3) You are in your third semester out of eight or so. I will admit to doing the same things you're doing right now when I need to procrastinate, but just like, really, you will change. For sure. In my second year of college, I was looking up things related to studying the topic I'm interested in, but in an entirely different academic field. Keep your grades up and your take interesting classes that you think you will do well in. Oh, and choose classes based on the professors. And know that you will need at least THREE professors to write letters of recommendation for you, so go to office hours, cultivate those relationships.
4) Research can be your own research, it doesn't have to be a professor's. Write a thesis. This is one of the purely academic reasons why #2 makes sense: you probably want your thesis to be your writing sample. It won't be finished December of your fourth year.
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I'm not a big general theory person, but Giddens's work on the classics (especially Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, which I just realized was written 40 years ago, so "modern" means "classical", weird) is definitely a very common reading of Marx-Weber-Durkheim. I don't know if it's the reading of the "Big Three"*, but it's definitely the supplement people look to at my graduate program for help understanding those guys. (I have a feeling Calhoun will have a lot of Giddens's reading, but I don't know that for a fact).
For contemporary theory, I have no idea.
*Fun, off-topic note: I once saw Eviatar Zerubavel speak and for some reason teaching theory to graduate students came up, and he said something like, "People always tell me that classical theory should be about the Big Three, and I say, 'I totally agree we should teach them Simmel...but who are the other two?'"
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I think all of the schools you apply to now fully fund all their PhD students (though I could be wrong) so it matters less for funding.
As for getting in... I don't know. If you feel like you could do like ten points higher on either score, you can retake it and IMMEDIATELY send out the unofficial scores (a lot of schools won't look at the material until january, probably) and send out the official once you can. Email the department secretaries (not the DGS's) about if you can send in an "update" to your application late. They may say yes and they may say no, but they'd be the people to ask, I think, though maybe DGS would, too. If your CV changes, for example, you're encouraged to send an updates (I know a guy who was already unofficially rejected from a program, but he updated them that he had full outside funding and was immediately admitted). How much they will count it, no one knows, but if you did take it, and did approve significantly, and just sent out a little "update" to schools of your unofficial scores (before they started looking) that MIGHT do something.
If you do retake, find time to study and take practice tests. And examine why you got each question wrong. Maybe worth buying a book with a CD of practice tests (I haven't tried any of the new GRE study guides, but across the board, Barron's practice material is more difficult than say Kaplan's or Princeton Review's, so maybe you want to buy that CD of practice tests. When I taught standardized tests, I'd always give my smart kids stuff from Barron's).
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I don't think (in sociology) most application are literally thrown out because of low scores, even at top-10 schools. At my undergraduate school, one of my friends did work-study in the bio department and she did the grad application presort and (knowing nothing about biology) chucked some relatively high percentage of the applications (a quarter? half?) based purely on quantitative factors (GPA, scores, etc). No professor ever saw those. At my sociology grad program (which is on your list), at least the year I applied, I think one professor did a "presort" and took out a similarly large percentage he didn't think had any chance of admission. However, while I know that professor cared more about GRE scores than GPAs, I know he also reads CVs so I doubt this was based only on scores. I don't think there is literally a "hard cutoff" below which applications won't be looked at it. I think it's much more probabilistic than that, but I do think the probity is s-shaped, meaning it’s flat (an old style 700 isn't considered that differently from an old style 790), and then there’s a steeper drop (for the top 25, starting probably around 650-600), and then it levels out again at a point where it’s very, very low probability that you’ll get in (there’s also an interplay between the two scores, obviously, and an interplay between the scores and what you say you want to do). There are rumors of cut offs at 1200, or 1000. Look at the results page (if you're new to the board, there's an explanation of how to do that ). I glanced through that in the past--there are definitely a few sub 600V scores accepted at top 10 programs, but I don't recall ever seeing two below 600 old style scores reported at a top 25 sociology program. HOWEVER, THIS IS A SELF-SELECTED SAMPLE (people who report their scores) OF A NON-RANDOM POPULATION (people who read grad cafe). The only general information I know about scores is
As you already know, your scores mean you will have a harder time of getting in, definitely, but when my dad (a sociology professor) was emailing his colleagues about top sociology department's GRE expectations before I took the test, one said to him something along the lines of "Most of our applicants have at least [Jacib: low 600s, I think?], but we have very occasionally let in a superlative candidate with scores lower than these. Like, last year we admitted one student who had won her university's undergraduate thesis prize with lower scores" (this was from a professor at another school on your list). I think admissions committee looking for some outside thing to confirm that, yes, this student is a special little snow flake who is just right for our school, a bright shining star who may bring us fame, glory, and repute. Anyway, for at least two schools on your list, I am confident that someone on the graduate committee will at least see your other accomplishments, though I don’t know how they will specifically be “counted” against your GRE scores.
If I had to guess, already proving you can succeed at graduate level work will make your scores matter less (how much less is a question). At least, people on this board have often mentioned getting a terminal masters as a way of compensating for being bad at taking tests. One way that I'm sure some people think of the scores is as an outside way of vetting you: the GRE sees you more neutrally than your letters of rec and your grade inflated GPA. However, Fulbright + masters degree are two other ways of vetting you. As someone who had very high GRE scores, I hope we are in a discipline that your other credentials at least get you taken seriously.
And as for your mention of "this year": the GRE is the easiest part of your application to change. Literally. If you're already thinking multi-year, G-d forbid should it not work out this year, you can reconsider a list of schools next year in light of what you've learned this year and in light of your GRE retake. If you really want to be at a top 25 school, I would guess it's probably possible and you shouldn't discount that option just because you did badly on one test.
What are the most cited Anthropology journals?
in Anthropology Forum
Posted
I assume you`re more socio-cultural or linguistic, rather than physical. Physical dominates that listing because it`s based on citations. Top journals for socio-cultural are probably something like: Current Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, and I guess Public Culture (though it`s slightly different in terms of the articles it`s looking for). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (formerly Man) used to be important, as well, though I don`t know how it`s recieved today. Annual Review of Anthropology is also obviously important, but different. There may be a couple of others, too, that are equally respected.