myrrh

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think UC Berkeley counts. It would be rather weird to say one cannot do what Eric Klinenberg did at Berkeley.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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(:

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".

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!

I think your research experience is quite strong...but your GRE is quite low for top schools. Yes, GRE is only a part of your application, but it's a part, or even a (somehow) critical part. I don't mean that adcomm will put applications in a row, from the highest GRE to the lowest, and pick up the first 20 applicants. However, I think you have to have a "basic" score. Over 700 in both sections will never guarantee your admission, but a lower-than-1000 in total will probably be a big weakness. Take the test again and get a score decent for top schools (some schools will say their admits ave is 1300), if you can. Then write a good SoP, pick up your paper (solo-authored one) as a writing sample. I guess you will be very fine.

Welcome all newbies! I applied to 13 schools for 2010 fall term. Looking back, I think it's kinda too many. The school list was so long that I didn't have enough time to tailor every SoP or personal history statement for each of them. In the end I did it, but not as in a manner as thorough as I wanted to. BTW, I even had no school course to take nor full-time job to do, thus I put all my time on application stuffs, but 13 schools are still too many for me. Plus, I applied to so many institutions partially because I was not familiar with higher education system in the States, and I had no idea about which school would like me. In short, I didn't know for what kind of school I'm good enough for admission. I think the OP might have more resource than I do and he/ she can find out where should he/ she applied to more easily. If the OP has a school list of about 12 institutions, I will recommend his/ her talking with some professor and gathering information about all those schools, perhaps he/ she will find it easy to pick up some of those schools to apply to. BTW, here's a thread for you guys in this subforum: Don't forget to check out it!

Thanks for the stat. It's so interesting. I'd like to, however, remind everyone here two things. First, ,methodologically, this data could not really be treated as some "ranking thing", as it's already assumed those 11 schools are the "top schools" in the very beginning. However, the trend of "self-reproduction" is very remarkable so this data is telling us a lot. Second, if we are talking about the placement and we think it's a part of how good an institution is, we could take the grad student cohort size into consideration.

For the OP: I think the most important thing you can do to help your chance is work hard on your future research plan. Of course you will and should retake GRE, but unless you can gt some score like 1400, it will not help out too much. It can prevent you from getting hurt by the numbers thought. If you can take some courses and make your GPA higher, it would be good; however, it's sometimes a long way from 3.3 to 3.5. And those PHD programs have a lot of 3.5 applicants. So, after all, I will highly recommend your working hard and hard and hard on your future research plan. Not only make it interesting and feasible, but also make it match the schools you're applying to.

I think it's an imitation, too. Most Tang portraits shows a sense of stable and calm and a lady playing with some animal is more like a Sung subject. At the characters on the left is very unlikely to be written Tang - because the first word looks very like Tang itself. To my knowledge, people generally don't write down a dynasty's name if they are living in that dynasty. For them, that dynasty is not a part of history and has no need to be notified. They just write down what year it is. And yes I'm going to Berkeley, so if you decide to go there, let me know(: BTW, I forgot that I have a Tang painting profile picture, lol.

@OP: basically, I'm with the others. But if it's your dream school and you don't have another offer from some institution equally ideal as the no-funding one, I think you can write to the dept and ask for some more details. It's not very likely to happen that a school has totally no chance for a student and let him/ her starve. There are supposedly some positions anyway. Perhaps you have no fellowship in first year or even are not eligible for assistantship in your dept, but have you asked the language center at that school if they need some native speaker of your language? Well, it's just an example. I really tried it, but there's not a position like that, at least this year. Another guy did it, as I've read somewhere...... I tried it because I was admitted to a good school without funding, but they said I can perhaps have some assistantship position in the first year. I just have to figure out where they are on my own. The dept would notify the admits the available positions but the placement of those positions would be available only in the summer. As a result, I even contact a professor in the Eastern Language Department although I am doing sociology. Well, in the end, I got admitted to another school and that's where I really wanna go to. So I stopped the job-hunting. But after my decision was made, the no-funding dept started to mail us informing tons of positions. Ces't la vie........ BTW, I guess your profile picture is some Tang painting or something mimicking Tang. Is it? @American in Beijing: I think choosing between north/ south side of CA is tough, but I hope you're going the north as I hope I can meet you someday. I'm working on China, too! Anyway, each one of them is great and congrats!

Well, I don't really know that much, but here's another thing. The department asked the Jan 22 admits to inform them by March 1 if they were not attending in fall. So I think the second round has just started very lately!

They made their first round acceptance on Jan 22, so I guess now is maybe the second round. Also, as I know, at least two admits have gave up the offer from CUNY and have written to the department to let them know. Good luck!

About my SoP: I know that most schools want an about-two-page SoP, however, for those which accept longer SoP, I did write a longer one. As a matter of fact, my original draft is a five-page one, as the school with best fit to my interests accepted 12,000 characters last year (this year they cancel the maximum and the staff told me that 12,000 character would be fine). I got accepted by that dream school (of mine) in the end, and the five-page version SoP goes like: (1) Firstly, after a short but interesting story about my fieldwork for MA thesis, I talked about my MA thesis research, and my recent works based on the thesis. I mentioned my publication in this part. This part has almost no change throughout all versions of SoP. (2) Afterwards, based on my previous research experiences, I drew a broader theoretical (or at least conceptualized) framework, which I didn't have time or ability to fulfill during MA training, and told the readers that's exactly what I wanna do in PHD program. This part is always tailored. (3) Then I pointed out what would be required if I want to do a research based on the theoretical framework. They are all specific research areas, approaches or topics. This part is always tailored. (4) In the end, I listed several (usually three) professors in the program I was applying to, whose interests and topics were just what I mentioned in part (3). This part is of course tailored. Practically, I did it in an order reversed to the steps above. That is, I found out the professors' name and interests (part 4), then I figured out what I can learn from them (part 3) and finally I built up a framework based on both my previous research and the professors' interests (part 2). Hope it helps.

I think your numbers are great, or at least least least fine for top schools. Actually they are very similar to mine with slightly higher UGPA and slightly lower GRE Quantitative. My AWA is much lower than yours, but as a non-native speaker of English with well-written writing sample, I think maybe we can ignore my AWA. For your reference, I'm accepted by two schools you hope to attend, while rejected by one. Anyway, I would say, no worry about your numbers. Yes, if you retake GRE and get 700 something in verbal, it will be great. However, given you don't have that much, I would suggest your spending time building up your documents. You would have good fits with some schools, but what important is HOW YOU SHOW THE FITS, and it depends on how you write your SoP and writing sample.