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myrrh

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    Sociology

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  1. Oops again. Are you applying to master's program or PhD? In the former case, please forget about what I said. I am not familiar with independent MA programs.
  2. Oops, sorry for my wrong assumption. In your case, maybe you can spend some time before grad school to think about some research project. Many people do have some research ideas and some basic sense of the literature relevant to their research when they start their grad life, although I don't think it's technically a necessity to enter a grad program. In other words, at this stage I would not say it's "required" for entering a grad program, or not even for surviving your first year, but having even roughly a research project is good. It helps you write grant proposal; it helps you strategize coursework or course paper; and it help you have some sense of who you are academically -- which is a huge source of anxiety in the first a couple year. So my suggestion is basically the same: start working on some project (or research idea). It is much more time consuming than picking up undergrad sociological knowledge and, in my opinion, more rewarding than it in the beginning of your grad life.
  3. Your V and Q don't look good for top schools, but I am not sure how you are to explain it in your SoP. For V, a good writing sample maybe helps a bit; for Q, maybe you could mention your quantitative skills learned prior to grad study. But I mean just maybe.
  4. I assume that you have a proposed project on your SoP. If so, I recommend that you keep working on it instead of reading a textbook. You will be extremely busy in the first semester and are very unlikely to enhance your project in any systematic manner, whereas you do need to have a good research project the very first minute you enter grad school. For example, for the sack of fellowship applications.
  5. I think UC Berkeley counts. It would be rather weird to say one cannot do what Eric Klinenberg did at Berkeley.
  6. i'm not a big fan to people's urging others to decline offers just because they are waitlisted. however, for those who already got some offers, here's something i'd like to say. when you have secured some offers which are more appealing to you, declining those you are less interested in would be a good thing to do. this is not really for those who are on wait list. it's for the sack of being nice to those departments. they may need time to send a couple more offers, rearrange the funding packages and so forth. sometimes you might be nominated for a university fellowship, and if you don't want to attend their program, declining before the university fellowship deadline will allow the department to nominate someone else, and it's a big help for their recruitment. and unless you don't like any faculty member in that department, or you will never work together with any of them, or you will never try to find a job there, it's always nice to be nice. and yes i know now it's too early to talk about this...
  7. i think the issue is whether you incorporate your teaching experience well into your research potential. teaching ability, by itself, is not very much what top programs are looking for. if teaching makes you rethink some aspects of a certain subfield, say something about that; if you worked with your students on some project and they ended up publishing it, do write about it. if you were awarded as the best tutor of the year, well, maybe it's worth mentioning, but i would say you can leave it for your CV. if the only thing you achieved is a perfect evaluation score from the students, no, you should have something more important to say. if your teaching experience inspires you and you apply to sociology program simply because you want to be a teacher -- never say you are applying just because you wanna teach. first, they want to see applicants who want to do research; second, this kind of statement will even make them doubt whether you know what phd program is about.
  8. For you question, yes. Schools "generally" (according to my experience) notify about funding before people make decisions. As a matter of fact, schools should do that -- to "woo" the accepted students. It's not unusual that a school give people information about funding after offering admissions, but supposedly it should be earlier than people's final decision (namely the decision you make by 4/15) anyway.
  9. It's impressive that an applicant to grad school has a published paper. Some of the applicants to top institutions would have book chapters or conference presentations, but journal article are kinda rare, so it's a good sign. However, I believe top schools emphasize the quality of your work rather than a citation on your CV, and your paper might probably even hurt you if 1) it's published on a bad journal and you treat it as an achievement; or 2) the paper is your writing sample and it's not a good one.
  10. According to the the report page, last year the first admission came from Chicago, which was a super early admission. It is, too, this year. However, the majority of U Chicago admits will not appear until Feb. Lat year, U of Chicago was the only institution which sent admission before Jan 2010. Later on, An (yes, only one) admission to Brandeis was reported on Jan 1, 2010. Again, there's only one admission reported. The wave of admission got it's real start by the end of January. The first institution which sent a batch of admissions at once was CUNY, accompanied by several single admissions to Berkeley and UNC Chapel Hill. After several days (by the end of January as well), another big new was about UW Madison's admission released. UCSD, US Davis, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and UT Austin started to send admissions in early February. Afterwards, there were some Berkeley or Chicago admissions. Meanwhile, Duke was still interviewing people. When it comes to other schools, my impression is most big names would have decided who they want by the end of Feb. Also, after the middle of Feb, you could see more and more rejections from the institutions which had sent admissions. Many top schools have no wait list reported. So, for the top school applicants, there are not a long way to go. Just wait for roughly 50 days.
  11. If you have a MA paper, try to publish it. It helps a lot keeping you in academic atmosphere and it helps when you wanna apply to phd programs.
  12. It's normal. Last year I believe there's several early admits. However, the majority of admits came very late, even later than every other top schools. That's my impression anyway, check out the admit report and you can find the formal record (of course, the coverage of gradcafe admits report is arguable).
  13. Just saw there's a reported admission to Chicago. Good job! Anyone wanna claim? I think it would be fun to attend ASA meeting on someone's own campus in first year(:
  14. I think your GRE is fair for some top sociology programs. The critical part of your application would be your SoP - why are you coming to do socio? What have you done and how they made you a prepared prospective socio grad student? What are you going to focus on (not only area, you'd best have some probable topic) in the future? Will it related you your prior study in management? If yes, how will you translate your experience about management to sociology work? Also, you need a writing sample that (most ideally) shows you can think sociologically. I would best contain some "sociological insight".
  15. I am attending a school, which would be said as good by people, and at least one in my cohort majored in PS for undergrad. So don't worry about your background, just let the adcomm know how smart, well-trained and committed you are!
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