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FentonForche

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  1. I remember being impressed by how very few people in my cohort, if any at all, came from what you would call an "elite" undergrad university. I went back and looked at the school ranking, and it was 19th at the time that I entered. We had one woman who had gone to Berkeley, and that was it...Almost all of us, myself included, had gone to quality liberal arts colleges that were in Princeton's top 300, but not on the same level than the schools that most of you are referencing.
  2. Hey all, I posted a similar message in the sociology section, but thought it would be good to query you guys as well Here's my situation. I did an MA in poli sci, informally focusing on religion and politics (BA in philosophy and poli sci). I'm looking at going back to finish my PhD, but I'm considering disciplines outside poli sci (namely religious studies and sociology) since religion is really at the nexus of what interests me. I'm exploring departments now, and am trying to locate schools were students can really approach religious studies from more of a social sciences angle. So far, three that look really promising are UC-Santa Barbara, North Carolina, and Northwestern (where it appears religious studies phd students can actually cross train in a related department). Are there any other places you might recommend? Thanks!
  3. I'm not sure how qualified my opinion is, but I have come to believe professors micro-analyze this stuff far less than the applicants do. Send them an email if you want, just don't act like a sycophant. It may or may not get you anywhere based on how active that prof wants to be in admissions decisions. Where I went, the admissions committee was a pretty closed circle of 4 or 5 professors + 1 current grad student. This was a poli sci program that was in the US News Top 25 at the time, but not top 10. I was somewhat friendly with the one grad student who was on the committee, and she kind of clued me in a little about how they operated. GPA and GREs that were low would get your app pushed to the side early in the process. If you scored insanely high they might make sure your app got special attention, but no one thing was a golden ticket. Once you made it past that stage, they'd start to look more at the totality of your application, and from there things got murky. If you had a faculty member advocating for your admission, that helped, but not everyone who was admitted had that going for them. I was an example of the latter. Once admission letters went out, they assigned one faculty member to every admit and had the profs get in touch with them. The prof might be the person that was advocating for you, or it might just be the faculty member they think "fit" the best with you. The guy who they deemed "fit" best with me seemed to have no clue about who I was or what I was interested in, and obviously had nothing to do with the admission process. One thing that stuck with me was how some pretty arbitrary stuff that you can't always control can get your application tossed. Case in point, one otherwise decent candidate had a rec letter from an Ivy prof that read something like "not strong enough for a top level program but would probably be fine in a school like yours." Needless to say, the app never made it out of the first round, and from no fault of the student's. He just made the mistake of getting a rec letter from a tactless jerk.
  4. Hi Spaulding...thanks for the info, I really do appreciate it. You might have melded my post with another one--I have no interest in Turkey, I'm definitely on the American side. I do understand people are likely to see it that way. My approach to that is probably going to simply be not disclosing to any department that I'm applying to departments outside the field. I would rebut that the interchangeability of the sociology of religion, religion and politics, and religious studies is so high, especially in the context of my research topics, that it's kind of silly to give too much weight to the mottled venn diagram of the humanities and social sciences...but I'm sure that would go over like a lead balloon >
  5. Well, my circumstances are a little odd, so the universe of schools/programs that I'm considering are kind of a quirky bunch. It's very important to my wife that we live near some of our family--and that means either the Denver area or the Bay Area out here in California. I might be able to sell her on a few other places, but it would be hard on her and I'm not sure I want to do that. So with that in mind, I'm considering programs that span three disciplines (Political Science, Sociology, Religious Studies) across two metro areas (Denver and San Fran), and I've come up with the following list of options: 1. UC-Davis, Sociology dept 2. UC-Davis, Political Science dept 3. Stanford, Political Science dept 4. Stanford, Sociology dept 5. Stanford, Religious Studies dept 6. University of Colorado, Political Science dept 7. University of Colorado, Sociology dept 8. University of Denver, Religious Studies dept For reasons I won't bore anyone with, I've opted not to look at Berkeley's options. From here, I've kind of done a process of elimination approach. 1. UC-Davis' Sociology dept doesn't seem to have anyone doing religion, and on their website they give short shrift to the area. So that kind of crosses out #1. 2. I've talked with the Poli Sci dept at Davis, explained my background and interest, and they don't seem to care so much about matching student and faculty research interests. I think I'd have a decent shot of getting in there. They're still on the list. 3. Stanford's poli sci department would be a huge longshot for me, but the Religious Studies dept doesn't have anyone doing contemporary Christianity and politics, and the Sociology dept doesn't seem to have much interdisciplinary work with religion either, so I figure this might be the Hail Mary of my application set. 4. See above, not much in religion 5. See above, nobody seems to do contemporary (modern day) work. 6. Might have a fair shot here. I don't know a lot about the dept yet--the guy who ran my MA committee though is buddies with somebody here, so maybe that would help (it might hinder me too though, I'm not sure how cool he was with me leaving the program). 7. Seems heavily weighted to criminology and deviance, so I'm opting not to look too closely. 8. This little program probably isn't very competitive, but they've got at least one prof doing the sociology of religion and overall, I like the interdisciplinary nature of the department. I'm definitely applying here. So I guess as I reason my way through this, I don't currently have a sociology department on my list: Davis, Poli Sci Stanford, Poli Sci Colorado, Poli Sci Denver, Religious Studies But I'm definitely still examining sociology programs as much as I can, and if there's an angle to all of this that I haven't considered, I'd be delighted to hear anyone's suggestions.
  6. Greetings all. I was wondering if people familiar with the academic climate of Sociology might help me out. Here's my situation... I'm interested in returning to complete my PhD. Generally, I'm interested in politics and religion, so I suppose that would put me in the 'Sociology of Religion' subfield...The last time I took a Sociology class, I was an undergrad. I didn't major or minor in the field. Here's my academic background: BA, Political Science and Philosophy, 2000 MA, Political Science, 2005 MBA, 2008 Obviously, I've bounced around quite a bit. The more I research programs, the more I am considering Sociology as the best field for me to move into rather than Political Science or Religious Studies. Does anyone know if Political Science is treated as enough of a cognate discipline that I wouldn't be discriminated against too much? Or am I looking at a lot of remedial work before becoming a legitimate candidate? Also, generally, how competitive are sociology grad programs relative to other disciplines? I don't sport the kind of credentials a lot of people on this forum have...I think my GREs were 630v/770q, with a 6.0 on the analytical writing--but that test is so old I'll surely have to retake it. I think my GPA was a 3.8 as an undergrad, a 3.9 in the MA program, and a 3.7 in the MBA program (hey, they grade harder over there). I've never published anything, and my recs would probably be decent but not from anybody famous. When I went through the PhD application process with Poli Sci, I was summarily rejected from the top 10 programs: Mich, Berkeley, Princeton, Wisconsin...I think Chapel Hill rejected me too. Then I got in to the mid level schools: Washington, Texas, Maryland, Florida. I wouldn't be shooting for the moon in sociology either.
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