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It 100% depends on the admissions committee members. I'm sure some expect near perfection, some don't care. I'm sure some want a high overall, some only care about your major. No way of telling. I had a 3.26 overall with an in major something higher, I forget, from an elite school known for <em>not</em> having grade inflation. I got into a top ten soc phd program. But my GRE was 1580. After coming here, I found out who was on the committee and how they worked. One guy did a presort and he claimed that he didn't look at GPA at all ("it doesn't mean anything any more with grade inflation") but he did pay close attention to alma mater (thinking that a school was a better indication of level of education than grades) and GRE ("the only way to make across the board comparisons"). I got in. They wanted me and were like, "Im sure you have a ton of other offers, but here's why we're the best for you.". I had no other offers (I only applied to 5 schools). However, if applied the next year with a different committee, who knows! I'm relating this story not because it's the way school should or commonly do judge, but because it shows that admissions are unbelievably ideosyncratic and are based so much on not just the school, but the character of the people on the committee for that year. One of my friends got rejected by a program and later happened to meet with someone from the admissions committee who said, "Oh we actually wanted you but were afraid you'd work with X and we're trying to get rid of him." Another one of my friends was geographically restricted because of her husband's job and applied to all of the schools in her area. She was doing gender and got rejected from the one that had a gender subfield and into the (higher ranked) school where no one was doing gender (no faculty, no students). The second school, however, just saw somethings in her background that they realky liked and figured if they taught her organizations or whatever, she could learn the gender stuff on her own. Anyone who says "schools count this one thing in this way" is deluding themselves. It's just such an unpredictable process, which is why it's important to apply to a range of schools and not just have your heart set on one or two.

That post, for the record, also includes 2009 USNWR, 2005 USNWR, and the 1995 NRC rankings. They're all reputation based and all pretty similar despite being 14 years apart. Reputation might seem stupid and non-objective but remember that the people who hire us are taking into account reputation and not objective characteristics.

We went through this in detail a few years back. Check out this post: I think it'll answer all your questions and more. I think it's worth reading in full, even if it never reaches one conclusion. There are two main rankings: USNWR (only updated every four years, 2013 will be the next time) and the almost twenty year old NRC from 1995. No one uses the more recent NRC because 1. It's impossible to get one set of rankings and was designed to be both out-of-date and pretty useless. 2. Books aren't counted in the social science rankings and while that might work for economics and psychology, it doesn't work in sociology. There are quibbles, but to me a top five program would be roughly {Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Princeton} and top ten would be those plus {UCLA, Indiana, Stanford, UNC, Northwestern, Columbia, Penn, maybe NYU, maybe Washington, maybe Texas, maybe maybe Cornell, maybe maybe Duke). Notice that the top five category has six schools in it (and you might find people who argue that UCLA, UNC, or Stanford is "really top five") and there are up to 19 schools in the top 10. Those are just roughly the full sets that people draw top five, top ten schools from. It really depends though. Like I was applying for sociology of religion, and in the "top five", I think only one or two have people who really do sociology if religion, you now? A noticeable proportion of the promising "rising generation" of sociologists of religion either did qualitative stuff with Wuthnow at Princeton or quantitative stuff at UNC. There is (very unfortunately) no one definitive set of rankings. I found it more useful to think of there being clusters of peers rather than an ordinal hierarchy. Check out that old post though. The "final list" at the bottom is wrong, don't think I'm pointing you towards that, but there's a lot of good information on there. The wisdom of crowds is more useful than the wisdom of some dude bored at his field site.

Also danah boyd is the best. Look at the blog www.savageminds.com. It's a general anthro blog but they have an interest in anthropology of virtual worlds. They just reviewed a book called "leet noobs". See where that author got his degree. They've also referenced a bunch of other authors if you poke around.

Not my field, most names I know have been mentioned. My only addition: I forget its name, but the program danah boyd went to at Berkeley (she teaches at NYU now). There are also anthro and sociology programs to consider. Boellsdorf is also at Irvine in anthro, Hargattai is also at Northwestern. There's also a program at RIT. In general I'd recommend looking hard at the discipline based programs: a sociologist or anthropologist can get a job at a communications department more easily than vice versa.

I don't know anyone who struck out, but I know a few people who went in wanting to apply for PhDs and then, after the progran, deciding they didn't want to be in academia.

I am a current sociology PhD student at a top ten school. In my cohort, fewer than half the people completed an undergraduate sociology major (other majors: economics, anthropology, political science, women's studies, interdisciplinary social sciences). But the economist is doing fancy quantitative things, the anthropologist is doing indepth ethnography, the woman who did women's studies is looking at gender (and how it intersects with her previous career), etc. I have a religious studies undergraduate degree, but I think that counted for rather than against me because I still look at religion now, just now as a sociologist. Honestly though, I took literally one sociology class as an undergraduate (in which I believe I got a B+), and only a handful of others in political science or anthropology, three or four at most. (My transcript was not the strongest part of my graduate application). If you're studying Latin America or immigration from Latin America, I am sure your Spanish degree will be appropriate. Often, I believe the "related" is to your project specifically rather than "sociology" as a broad field. If you are unsure, just send the director of graduate admissions a short email to confirm that your degree counts. I recently joked with my adviser about this, and I told her that when I was applying to graduate schools, sociology programs responded well to my research interests, and religious studies departments responded, "That sounds interesting but..." Her response was basically, "Well, duh. Your interests are too sociological for them. Of course you ended up here." Just make sure that when you apply, someone can say the same about you. Really sell yourself as a "serious sociologist" with "serious sociological interests". Be sure your statement of purpose sound compelling while fitting into established subdisciplines and debates.

I'll answer this the same way I answer the quant one and give a bunch of good books and articles that I think are really useful for thinking about methodologies, rather than just book on "how to interview", "what is grounded theory", "getting access to your field site", "document analysis", etc. Three books that gave me a lot to think about methodologically thinking about ethnography: Heatwave by Eric Kleinenberg (my professor pointed out, for example, that any disseration can have a chapter on how the media deals with what you're studying; just a great example of how you can construct a thesis chapter by chapter around a central topic without it being stupid), Tally's Cornerby Elliot Liebow (he talks to like what, 6 people?), and Slim's Table by Mitch Duneier, where everything is kind of boring until the last few chapters and you realize he wrote a boring book to prove that "ghetto people" are really just "normal people" and that much of what has been written is selection bias--aka people are boring and normal, even in "the ghetto". Brilliant. I find multisite ethnographies to be fascinating in theory, but I don't think I've read a really, really good one yet; Liisa Malkki's Purity and Exile is the best I've read and gets referenced a lot in both anthropology and political science (warning: I forget exactly what I didn't like about it, but I think part of it is she just doesn't talk to women). If anyone can recommend a good multisite ethnography, I'd be really interested. More historical: not a book you could write for your dissertation but still the best book I've read this year: The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott. Alternative: his Seeing like a State. I want to be him when I grow up. Again historical and something you could acutally do for your dissertation: Gorski's Disciplinary Revolution (or just check out his AJS and ASR articles--he basically just mixes Weber and Foucault in a big way). I love Jose Casanova's Public Religions in the Modern World, rich in theory and historical empirics even without doing archival research--you could probably pull this off for your dissertation. For a cool historical book ("social history" not "historical sociology" for whatever disciplinary boundaries are worth) The Cheese and the Worms is probably the best summer read. It's based on inquisition records and uses the story of this one guy to really help understand an entire system. Interview heavy work: Diane Vaughan's Challenger book people who do organizations seem to really like, but it's long. Her little Uncoupling is more fun, shorter, also about organizational breakdown, and might be a better summer read. Intense qualitative articles I've read recently include: Alice Goffman's "On the Run" (most intense ethnography I've heard of), Dimaggio and Powell's "The Iron Cage Revisited" (no empirics at all, just theory, but not in a bad way; important for organizations). I really liked "The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China" by Fenggang Yang--even though I disagree with it, it opened a lot of ways of thinking about how regulation and organization interact. Neatest little methodological thing I've encountered ("eventful history"): William Sewell's article "Inventing Revolution at the Bastille". It's really good, how we can look at how an event is understood as it goes on. Worth reading for anyone even vaguely interested in historical sociology. A good work to get you thinking about just what counts as data, where you can get data is Jack Katz's The Seductions of Crime (first two chapters are by far the most memorable; I think the last chapter or two are good too. I don't remember any other chapters). He uses a lot of different kinds data. First chapter seems to be stories plucked from almost anywhere, second chapter is primarily based on questionaires his students filled out. For weird methodologies, check out Garfinkle and other "ethnomethodology" stuff. Really innovative "legal ethnography" read Joan Winifred Sullivan's The Impossiblity of Religious Freedom, where she uses the transcript of one minor, minor courtcase to make a compelling argument about the whole concept of "religious freedom". Lily Tsai's book is supposed to be neat methodologically, I think it's "mixed methods"; I haven't read it yet so I can't say for sure, but it's near the top of my list. Other cool "mixed methods" work: (these involve numbers, but I promise no scary math) Saskia Sassen's Cities in a World Economy, Bourdieu's work. The problem with Bourdieu is that he thinks he's a good writer so he gets very self-indulgent. I found Distinction to be incredibly boring. Bachelor's Ball is actually pretty fun, though. I'd be willing to say it's good summer reading. He looks at the same subject at three different points in his career using three, let's say, epistomologies and the articles are gathered into a single book. Part One is young Bourdieu, very empirical both qualitative and quantitative, just solid, solid work, Part Two is almost unreadable, and Part Three is my favorite part (once you get past how he writes).

Optimal matching. Andy Abbott's form of sequence analysis that Stovel uses is called optimal matching. Andy Abbott has done a few weird things with it, besides his famous work on occupations using it, he has a weird little article looking at diffusion of the welfare state that used optimal matching. Sorry, the fact I couldn't remember that name was killing me.

A lot of sociology uses pretty standard econometrics methodology, especially a lot of the more vanilla strat stuff... but some of it does cool, random stuff. Networks is the first thing that is probably outside of the normal econometrics world. "The Strength of Weak Ties" and "Finding a Job" are always favorites, but there are also cool networks stuff deal with other things (Padgett's work on the Medici for instance). There are lots of articles that are lit reviews of networks stuff, so find one of those. Harrison White does crazy things, his piece "Where Do Markets Come From" is dense with math, but great. His concepts of vacancy chains is also really cool. Everything that he's written that I understand is cool (there's a lot he's written that I can't understand. Take a look at Andrew Abbott's review of his book Identity and Control--he basically says you have to read it like poetry, not social theory. Weirdness). Ivan Chase has done some really interesting sociology with some of Harrison White's concepts <i>using animals</i>, the best of which is vacancy chains in hermit crabs and where hierarchies come from (pecking orders) in chickens. Ivan Chase's work is cool in part because it's so weird. Andy Abbott's work about, oh G-d, I'm blanking on what it's called, but his form of sequence analysis is cool. His work is always worth checking out. Andrew Abbott is very well loved by all the quant people I love (Harrison White, then Andy Abbott). Katherine Stovel is also really cool, she's done interesting things with Abbott's sequence stuff, like using it to analyze lynchings in "Local sequential patterns: The structure of lynching in the deep south, 1882–1930". Her adviser and frequent coauthor Peter Bearman is also really cool. He's written some of my favorite quant articles. They're famous for ADDHEALTH which is a huge database and a lot of the stuff came out of that, like "Chains of Affection". But the coolest are these little one-off, incredibly creative articles like "Desertion as Localism" and "Becoming a Nazi". Neighborhood effects research is also big in sociology. The big name associated with that is Robert Samspon (in addition to the empirical articles he has, he has a cool lit review in the Annual Review of Sociology). You should read the Culturomics folks, too, though they're not sociologists. I love stuff that uses instrumental variables, but a lot of the coolest work with that is done by economists. You're probably as familiar with it as I am. With slightly different wording and the exact same results and tables, you could call a lot of the stuff looking at institutions (Acemoglu and his students are the ones I've read the most of) "sociology" instead of "economics". Chuck Ragin, mentioned above, has his weird "Fuzzy Set" sociology and might be worth checking out. Last thing I'd add is mobility tables that(usually) look at intergenerational mobility. I don't know if that's taught to econ undergrads. It's not done that much any more in sociology, but was really important a while ago, and it's useful to see it in case you ever are presented with data that can be analyzed that way. Arizona makes public the readings lists for their qualifying exams. You can see what articles they see are key for stratification and especially statistics and methods. Especially if this is just your summer reading, rather than looking at handbooks, find interesting social scientists and then look at their weirdest sounding articles. 1) it'll teach you the relative freedom you now have in sociology 2) often times they're using weird data because they want to test out some weird method they've never used before 3) a lot of this stuff is just cool. Now is your chance to see what's out there. I know even just learning about a lot of these weird methods has let me ask questions I couldn't have even asked two years ago.

Damn it, I realized I was only tangentially on topic. Sorry, a lot of stuff in my mind grapes. Any degree's usefulness is affected by what you want to do with it. Most people outside of Top 40 departments get jobs. Among the teaching jobs, these will most likely be at local liberal arts college, directional state university, community college, university of a-city-that-isn't-Chicago-or-Boston, etc. and will involve less research. That's fine. Some people at non-Top 40 places also get jobs in things like, I don't know, a state department of ed, for example, something like that. I think they generally know that when they apply for schools, though. For example, I was going to do a study on prostitution in Turkey (abandoned it as too emotionally difficult) and realized that one of the main people who had done work on this was a guy with a PhD from Rutgers who now worked for the Turkish State Police. One can "move up" from outside the Top-40, but it's difficult, and only for people producing pretty exceptional work like the two people from the New School mentioned above. People from outside the Top-40, I would guess, are more likely to be stuck in cycles of adjuncts/visiting professorships, but I think this is in part because they'll often have less geographic mobility (that's how some people end up at non Top-40 programs in the first place--they're tied to a partner who can't move). From what I've seen, singleness/partner's mobility matters a lot for academic success. Also, if you can have a partner who can support you taking time off to write and publish, especially early in your career (I've met two or three people for whom that's mattered a lot). Moreover, if you look at a lot of the "Outside the Top-40" schools, they're TINY. They only graduate one-to-three PhDs a year so you have to take that into consideration. Often people choose between a smaller outside the top-40 place and somewhere just inside the top-40, you know? And at that point... on reputational surveys, they'll always be low because fewer people have encountered their graduates, especially if those graduates are not geographically mobile, but some of them smaller programs are surely recognized as "close to equal" to average students from bigger, middle ranked PhD programs, at least regionally. But yeah, ultimately it's useful or useless depending on what you want to do. If you want to work at a place like the University of Michigan, a degree from Michigan State University might be useless. If you want to work at a place like Central Michigan University, a PhD from Michigan State might be exactly what you need.

Schools outside of the Top-40 get jobs at more teaching heavy rather than more research heavy places. For example, look at the New School's "Hire a PhD Candidate" page and then click on the individual people--they all post sample syllabii. That's not something you see on at equivalent pages for Top-10 programs. There are certainly people who "move up" from the New School--Javier Auyero at UT-Austin is one, Jose Casanova at Georgetown is another--but these are generally superlative people, and their paths are not direct. Notice Javier Auyero adjuncted for a year, took two visiting professorships at weird time in his career to do so, and also got a ton of grants and awards leading up to his first book, and was also a perfect fit for the New School, and one imagines got a lot of attention (and social capital in professional networks) from prestigious New School professors. As a general rule though, one moves down and not up. Things can violate this: for example, if you go to BC, say, and your adviser is Peter Berger and he talks you up and says "This is the most promising student I've ever had", you'll probably get a better job than your cohort-mates. But it's not just who your adviser is, it's how much they fight for you. My dad was on a faculty search and a very prestigious adviser basically went out of his way to make it very clear, "You want this guy, this is the guy for you, I'm vouching for this guy's potential and talent." That helped convinced my dad and get this guy the job. The guy's former adviser was right, of course, the student got tenure easily, but this particular adviser has a great placement record and I think it's clear that that's in part because he not only goes the extra mile while the student is writing a dissertation, but, for people he's willing to stake his reputation on, he's willing to really spend social capital on them when they're on the job market. One can move much further down than one can move up. Sometimes, I've looked at a sociology department at place I've barely heard of and see Michigan and Wisconsin grads mixed in with people with PhD's from schools I wasn't aware had Sociology PhD programs. Some of that is self-selection, I'm sure (one of my friends is in Princeton's Comp Lit program, who I'm fairly confident is smarter than me, is planning on teaching at a community college when she graduates because that's where she's committed to teaching students who she feels need the most committed teachers. Teaching as a beruf), but not all of it. A lot of it is that people, especially at some programs, people can fall through the cracks, not have someone mentoring them through publishing, not have someone kicking their ass to get the best work possible, not someone to fight for them on the job market. In general, I'd say that the New School and especially Yale probably punch a little above their rankings weight class, and other schools probably don't. However, keep in mind that at all programs, and probably at less famous programs especially, there's a HUGE variation in placement. At lot of it is how much your adviser works for you, what you have the potential to publish in your first five years (what you've published already is more important for indicating what you will publish, in terms of both quality and quantity, rather than indicating something in itself, I believe, if you miraculously have 4 letters from great people saying "this is a dissertation ready to be turned into a pathbreaking book", I think you'll be fine), what your topic is (criminologists in general have an easier time getting jobs at middle tier places because they're in demands, cultural people probably have a harder time everywhere; and the there are trends and emerging areas. I've been told that I'll have an easier time on the market if I work on Islam than if I work on Judaism). Generally, as the study cited above, like hires like. Elite private schools hire elite private school people a lot, big state schools hire big state school people a lot. This is partly due to professors networks above (fighting for someone makes a bigger difference if you personally know someone on the search committee) and this is partly a product of perceptions of teaching. One of my friends in History got a degree from the best school in her subdiscipline (an elite private school), but a non-flagship state college only offered her a one year trial weird thing because they weren't confident she could handle teaching huge lectures.

For people coming from something else, I think it's especially important that you come off as a "serious student" (not an early mid-life crisis person), because people really do care about your graduation prospects and your job prospects. If someone suspects you of potentially being a dilettante or otherwise not committed, they're not going to let you in. My dad is a sociology professor and when I applied to both religious studies programs and sociology programs, he wouldn't let me mention to the sociology programs that I was applying to religious studies programs. And the one department I did mention it to, the chair actually used that exact same word, "serious", and said "Administratively, you're free to apply to both the religion department here and the sociology department here. However, blah blah blah this might be seen as the mark of an unserious student." I didn't end up applying there. Having had a career first, however, is not in itself a mark of unseriousness. If it relates to your research, I think it can be a serious bonus. I know several people who have spent 5+ in a career before joining a sociology PhD program, from a variety of backgrounds, including law, journalism, public policy/city government, and (all kinds of) business. Generally, their sociological interest is in some way related to their previous job, but it's not necessarily the same thing (so a lawyer would do something related to law, probably, even if they practiced, I don't know, family law and they're interested now in how law affects housing policy). I think last year the incoming cohort ranged from (approx) 22 to 35, my year from 23 to 32; that's normally the kind of range we get, I think we got roughly the same this year. I can tell you this: at my school, once you get in, your chronological age matters a lot less than your cohort age. I have to sometimes remind myself about who's actually older and who's actually younger. The girl who is like my "big sister" in the program is actually my age and we graduated college the same year, but she went straight to grad school, so she's three cohorts ahead of me, and has taken me under my wing, looks out for me, gives me advice, all that good stuff. It's definitely a relationship though where she's "older". My "little sister" in the program, the kid I look out for and have "don't worry, everyone goes through this, kiddo" talks with, is like eight or nine years older than me (I think) but in most aspects of our relationship, I'm the "older" one. Think of as you will be "reborn in sociology". All the people in my cohort, from 23 to 32, are more or less peers. I don't know if that's the normal experience (I've heard it's different for people with childen, but that's a relative rarity around here), but that's definitely our experience here.

It ebbs and flows but I don't think the feeling disappears for a while, if ever. Don't stress it. It's funny this has come up recently a lot in my department--personally, I feel it more now as a second year than I did as a first. One of my classmates who's a little further on than me was recently having a little kvetch and was like, "Oy, I don't think my dissertation topic is that good, I think it's a little boring, I don't know if I can switch but it probably wouldn't be worth it" and all this other stuff and I tried to confide in him, "Yeah man, I for sure know the feeling," and he was like "You? Don't be stupid. No... everyone loves you, you're doing great. Me, on the other hand..." I think the doubt's pretty universal, though it's not constant over time. For me, my doubts weren't so much after being accepted, meeting my peers, coming to school, doing our required course work, but this year as I move into a more serious project (changing from my original proposed project), I get the "impostor" thing bad, though I guess at this point it'd be fairer to call it a "how will I ever measure up" thing. Pretty much at some point everyone will get it, unless they're an asshole. Don't stress about it. This year and last year some other graduate students in my department flipped out a little because "the admitted students are so much better than we are." But then we went through our credentials cohort by cohort, and it turns out on paper we all seem impressive. It's just once you're in the program you're not a GPA, an alma mater, a paragraph of life experiences, a bag of tricks, and a well articulated project--you're Jimmy or Johnny or Sally or Sue. People are just folks pretty much starting day 2. It's weird we had to think back and be like, "Oh yeah that colleague of ours could have had a professional career in X" and "That friend of ours came into the program with this really impressive graduate degree" or "That person speaks this many languages" and we especially forget about the parts of our own resumes that sound impressive to other people because, to ourselves, they're just normal. Like this thing: Well of course we do! Because I mean my undergraduate degree is just my undergraduate degree; it's not a big deal because as far as I'm considered thousands of other people have it; if that's what makes me qualified, most of the people I hung out with over the course of four years are as qualified. That degree's not that special to me. Or the years I've spent living abroad--that doesn't seem impressive to me because as far as I was concerned, I was mostly just chilling, you know? A disturbing percentage of my peers and friends there pathologically drank to much. But on paper to other people it (apparently) seems quite different. But that thing that you did, whatever it was, that skill that you have, wow, I couldn't do that so therefore that's special. Two of my close, European trained friends in my program, I'm really impressed with their math/quant skills. Perhaps "envious of" is the better adjectival phrase. I think they're big deals, and they're like "This? No it's easy." On the other hand, they're impressed with my ability to recite facts off the top of my head, and my abilities as a writer, and a lot of the more humanistic skills I picked up as an undergraduate, and to me, that stuff's just basic, "Oh anyone can do that... but math! You taught yourself how to do cluster analysis last weekend!" and they're like "Pish, exactly, I did it over the weekend... it's no big deal. The fact that you already know so much about religion and you are really familiar with a wide variety of cases in your field... that took a lot of time to develop and compared to you, I don't have that and I wish I did." It's like one of my Turkish friends would be like, "I'm so impressed with your guys' Turkish--like I can't believe how well you can speak it," and we'd respond, "You're joking right, Bestoş? We speak busted, pigeon Turkish and you just said that sentence in immaculate English" and she'd just say, "Oh c'mon, every one can speak English...but learning Turkish! I'm really so impressed with you guys." If you go around the table in the middle of your first semester in your program, and there's someone who doesn't in some way feel like an imposter, they're either a genius or an asshole. And judging by the fact that even the most promising and impressive students in my program (at least speaking of the people in the first and second year cohorts who I know best) have confided in me that they feel/felt like impostors sometimes, I can make an educated guess about which one of the two they are.

I didn't read the whole thread so I'm sorry if I'm repeating stuff, but you guys know there's a big google doc out there with all the adjucting salaries. Here's the impetus behind the project, here's the massive google doc, and here's the website for "The Adjunct Project". I know NYU adjuncts get the same pay as the graduate students do (it was one of the weird things they did to crush the graduate student union there). Luckily, sociologists tend to be less likely to fall into the adjuncting trap than recent English PhDs, but it's one of the way the labor market could move...

Yeah the thing is 1) I think you need institutional access to use the database, though that might not entirely be the case. I don't know, I always access it through the library. 2) In most cases that I've tried at least, if you search by adviser you get what people have chaired, but you can't search by committee very well (though often times the committee is listed on the first page, it's generally not included in search by "adviser"--though confusingly sometimes it is). 3) The search for advisers is not that reliable. Searching my adviser "First Name Last Name" turns up a few hits, but searching simply "Last Name" turns up about twice as many of my adviser's former students, but I don't know if turns up all of them them, though it also definitely turns up a bunch of people in engineering or something who had an adviser of the same last name. Which means it's probably easier to find most of Michael Buraway's students than most of William Julius Wilson's. 4) In addition, it's really good for finding the range of projects potential advisers have advised. My adviser, it turns out, has advised several pretty random projects, which I like. 5) It's good for finding out what unpublished work is happening in your subfield right now--the key word search is actually quite good 6) The coolest thing is that you can look up famous faculty members' dissertations! I recommend everyone look at the abstract of Andrew Abbot's thesis, I thought it was hysterical.

I am probably of the opposite opinion. Professors are important, but they also transfer schools, retire, go on sabbatical, and (G-d forbid) get sick or die. There is a thread called where a lot of people discuss what is influencing their decision. At my school, many students have switched topics, etc. so that who they came in here interested in working with isn't always the same as who they end up working with. I've met other people who have the same topic, but ended up having a better relationship with a different professor than the one they initially came here to work with. I know I came here only to work with one professor, but there are probably now three or four more who I additionally really like working with. I know one girl whose major subfield is one that no one in our department works on. She is very happy with her decision to come here, and can't imagine herself anywhere else (she actually is now working closely with at least three professors who like and support her project). It also depends where you want to be, for both the course of your program and afterwards. Visit both if you can, and see where demography PhD's from both Albany and Maryland got jobs (ask those two professors where ALL their recent advisees got jobs for the past... oh five to ten years). Also if you stiill have access to journals etc. through your undergrad institution's library, you can look up advisers on ProQuest's Digital Dissertation Database (if you don't know how to access it, email your school's librarian) and that will also tell you the names of specific people's previous students in case they "forgot" any one (the search function is actually less than perfect, especially for adviser) and then you can google them and find out where they got jobs.

I would like to say that unless you work at a think tank, advocacy group, or a professional organization, everyone has to teach and research. Teaching and research are not antipodes. The teaching load (which can be as low as two courses a semester and as high as five) and the research expections for tenure vary, but you still must do both at any school. Choose a random professor at a local, not so famous small liberal arts college or the random big, directional (Western, Central, etc.) state university and look them up on google scholar--they still have to publish. Their teaching loads are higher so their expectations for publication are lower, but among social science professors, everyone has to do both. For what it's worth, from the small sample that I've seen, a lot of graduates from less prestigious programs go to work in places that require them to administer and research, but not teach (places like the state correctional system, for instance, or a non-profit advocacy organization), at a higher rate than those from more prestigious schools. Anyway, the point is, like everyone said, find out from the DGS where recent grads have gone (see if you can get a population not a biased sample) and get an idea of what attrition has been like, and ask yourself, is that where I would be happy in seven or so years? Hell, that's what people should do even if they get into Michigan or Wisconsin or any better known program. I actually like the idea of contacting the recent grads--those with jobs--because they'll be able to tell you better. See if you can get one on the phone, even. Ask them about their own experiences and their colleagues' experiences. One of my former TA's convinced me not to apply to Religion PhD programs because he could only find a job at a community college despite the fact that he had gone to one of the very top religion graduate schools. He said that in that field, there simply weren't enough jobs out there. It's one of the main reasons I switched to sociology (with the same project). My dad teaches at a university with a small sociology program ranked outside the top fifty (if you only graduate two or three or whatever PhD's a year, your program will never be in the top 50) but they still manage to get jobs all over the country--more so in the area around his university, but he tells me that's mostly because they like our city and don't want to move (especially if they have a partner with a stable job). Usually they get jobs at schools I haven't heard of, but I just saw several at a conference I went to with him and they seem happy. From his telling, it's definitely the case that people from smaller PhD programs choose to stay locally rather than they are forced to do so. And he just generally wishes they wouldn't choose to do so.

When I was looking up the relative prices of the Columbia MA and Chicago's MAPSS, I saw this: To be considered for a fellowship, applications for the doctoral program must be submitted no later than December 15. Applicants to the free-standing M.A. program are not eligible for funding and must submit their applications by March 15. I would guess that all the PhD admissions have already been sent out for most of the top schools, and schools with formal waitlists have probably even contacted most of the people on their wait list (I've heard of some schools keeping informal waitlists, but I don't know how common that is). Large, top 25 private schools especially seem to send their admissions letters out in big batches (with maybe a few trickling out earlier, but few if any coming later). I would also guess, however, you are still in the running for the "free-standing MA program" (a few rejections out already), and considering the applications for that were only due four days ago, in all likelihood most decision haven't been made yet about it.

Making you pay 30 grand instead of 45 grand isn't my definition of "throwing money at you". These are expensive degrees no matter how you cut it.

Man, I always recommend people take time off between graduate school and undergrad unless it's a professional program that you absolutely need and have been preparing for for the past few years and has a definite job at the end (say, a medical degree or a masters in some economic-y thing). Even law school, I tell people to go work in a soul crushing office for a year or two before they commit to it. But really, this might be your last chance to discover what's important to you before you get placed into a clear career trajectory. If you do go to graduate school, this is last chance to gain experiences and skills that aren't won't get in graduate school. Start a band, or move abroad, or with your GPA go try to get a consulting job where you develop certain skills and a certain bank account, or just get a Joe-job that pays 10 bucks an hour (basically the same take home you'll be getting in graduate school) and just see your friends and have fun, whatever, just enjoy being out of school. But if you're not sure 110% sure, next year is not the year to go to a PhD program, and even if you are 110% sure, have a year of fun chilling with your friends or move abroad or something. Do City Year. I moved to Istanbul directly after college and lived there for three years. I had never been to Turkey before I moved there (protip: TEFL jobs are pretty easy almost everywhere outside of Europe). By the time I was done, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and study, and it looked good on my resume for graduate school. A lot of my friends from Istanbul also ended up going to grad school (in linguistics, in law, in history, in anthropology, in creative writing, etc.) and they have all used the skills and experiences from Istanbul in their graduate work. I happened to fall in with a particularly intellectual group of friends so that's probably not representative of everyone's experience (there's also a lot of what my exgirlfriend referred to as "training for alcoholism" in expat populations), but whatever you can do, get a job that opens windows and helps you figure out what you want to do. I went to Istanbul convinced I wanted to a PhD in Religion and by the time I was ready to apply, the questions I was asking received a muted reception at religious studies programs ("This sounds like a great project, and a I look forward to reading it, but unfortunately, we don't have anyone who could advise you here") but got sociologists excited. But seriously, you want to stay in school because you've always been good at school, most of the people who apply are in the same boat, but who knows, maybe you're really good at something else, too? Our job market is a bit better than the job market in the Humanities (you hear less about sociologist stuck in endless cycles of adjuncting; though ambitious or geographically restricted people might bounce around for a few years), but you should still read these two articles, "So You Want to Go to Grad School" and "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" or really any number of pessimistic pieces by the same author. You have to realize that by choosing a PhD, you are giving up a world of opportunity. And an MA in sociology probably isn't that useful in most fields. You should be really ready to deal with the bargain you strike. I am very happy with what I'm doing, but I carefully considered and explored the other options that interested me, and really, other than a career in public health which would also require years more of training, it's hard for me to imagine myself doing anything else.

There are two unrelated Howard Beckers in sociology: Howard S. Becker who was born in 1928 and did symbolic interaction, deviance, wrote "Becoming a Marihuana User", the Boys in White, and Art Worlds among others and is sometimes referred to "Howie Becker", and Howard P. Becker, born in 1889, who's not so well remembered today, but was president of the ASA in 1960, so a book from '66 is probably referring to him. If you go back and check the reference, it also definitely says the 1920's. I didn't put the initial in because there wasn't one in the original, but I agree with you, the timing doesn't work with Howard S. As a side-note, Park (who was already 40 when he got his PhD in 1904) died in the 1944 but apparently formally left Chicago in 1933 (retired?) and then taught at historically-Black Fisk University from 1936 until the end of his life, which is pretty awesome, especially at that time, and especially for someone who could have literally worked at any college in the country.

"You have been told to go grubbing in the library, thereby accumulating a mass of notes and liberal coating of grime. You have been told to choose problems wherever you can find musty stacks of routine records based on trivial schedules prepared by tired bureaucrats and filled out by reluctant applicants for fussy do-gooders or indifferent clerks. This is called 'getting your hands dirty in real research.' Those who counsel you are wise and honorable; the reasons they offer are of great value. But one more thing is needful: first hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and the slum shakedowns; sit in Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter burlesk [sic]. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research." (An unpublished statement made by Robert Park, recorded by Howard Becker while a graduate student in the 1920's, and first published in McKinney, Constructive Typology and Social Theory, 1966:71. Park, for those of you don't know, was probably the most important figure in establishing the Chicago School and therefore, by extension, American sociology).

Also, sometimes people just really care about a topic, or are willing to support any interesting ideas. An ethnographer in our department has two students now: one ethnographer and one who does very quantitative neighborhood effects stuff (I think, I know it's quantitative). One of the top quantitative people in the department has mainly had quantitative students, but also has had a few qualitative historical students, and now has another qualitative student, just because the two of them really get along together. My committee will be two people who do the same general topic (one purely qualitative, one more quantitative but also very theoretical) and two people (again, probably one qualitative and one quantitative) who are just people I like and want to read my work. Most departments have a "PhD's on the Market" category on their website (especially in the Spring). Look who is on their committees: at some schools, it might be very homogenous qualitative and quantitative (I'd imagine this is more common at larger departments like Wisconsin and UCLA), but at others, there will be a huge mix of people on committees (I'd imagine this is more common at small departments like Princeton and Iowa). Like look at CV science girl just posted of a qualitative sociologist. Her committee was: Monica McDermott (Chair) [ethnography], Tomás Jiménez [ethnography and interviews], David Grusky [mainly quant, often quite sophisticated stuff], Matthew Snipp [mainly demography]. Things like that are why the overall quality of the department matters--graduate students in sociology who use qualitative methods aren't put in a segregated little corner where numbers are strictly verboten, they're part of a department. Personally, I think I'd have an easier time working with someone who was quantitative but loved sociology as a whole ( someone like Andy Abbott) than someone who regularly employed the terms "hegemony" and "knowledge-power" (not naming any names). Not that there's something wrong with that, I would just not find it particularly useful for my work. There's more to take into account than just methodology. I'd suggest finding people you want to work with and then figure out who's in their departments. Honestly, at all top-25 departments, I think I could only find like 6 or so clear potential advisers.

Word, sorry I didn't read the context.