pi515

I emailed Boston University today asking if they could provide an update and they replied with a brief informal rejection email and said an official rejection letter would be sent out "shortly". Hope you get some better news from BU.

I'm also still waiting to hear from Boston University. I haven't received any acceptances and BU is my last chance so I'm hoping those of us who haven't heard from BU yet are on an informal waitlist. Good luck!

Very cool! Thank you for being so prompt with declining offers. And congrats on all your acceptances!

Is anyone else waiting to hear from Boston University? I see two acceptances on the Results page; last year there were only two acceptances posted as well so this is probably it for BU? (They say on their website that they make only 10 offers or so). BU was my last hope.

Great tips @goofylemon - thank you!

NYU has this message posted on their page so they would probably just ignore your inquiry: APPLICANTS TO THE SOCIOLOGY PHD PROGRAM SHOULD RECEIVE THEIR INDIVIDUAL ADMISSIONS DECISION NO LATER THAN MARCH 15. PLEASE DO NOT CONTACT THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT REQUESTING INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ADMISSIONS DECISION PRIOR TO MARCH 15.

I have also not heard from NYU (or Columbia) yet. I'm assuming rejection as well but would love some closure.

So strange! I know these top programs get hundreds of applications but one would hope they'd keep better track of their decisions. Hope you get some great news from NYU soon! I haven't received any correspondence from NYU yet so after reading your post I'm hoping they forgot to inform me of my acceptance and will be contacting me any minute now.

I've seen people use the "Other" option to do that (instead of "accepted", "rejected" or "wait-listed).

Oh wow, that's terrible!!! How does that even happen?! They really owe all those mistakenly contacted last night some SERIOUS apologies. I'm really sorry it turned out to be an error. Seriously Columbia, do better!

That's wonderful, congrats! Someone else mentioned a while back that they got an acceptance email from Cornell a few days after a bunch of them were posted on the Results page so it must happen occasionally. That's really terrific. Congrats, again!

@HopefulSocPhD Thank you for sharing. I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties. I've applied to five programs and it looks like I have been rejected by four of them already. I also thought I had a decent chance but it seems I hugely underestimated how competitive PhD admissions are. My undergrad GPA was 3.90, with honors and I won a distinguished honors award for my thesis; my GREs are 168/159/6.0; I have a social science-related master's degree from an ivy league school and LORs from well-regarded professors in related fields; and prior experience in both quantitative and qualitative analysis. But I'm much older than most applicants and my topic isn't one that very many programs would find a close fit so I think I needed to have made a much stronger case for myself in my SOP (which I thought I did but apparently it wasn't enough). After reading advice from others here on grad cafe, I think I could improve my writing sample and get some additional research experience in the coming year but I'm not sure it would be enough to get into a top-20 program, or rather I think that it would still be a long shot given how arbitrary this process seems at times. Because I'm really passionate about my research project, I most likely will give it another try next year. Hope we all have a lot more luck next time! <hugs>

@macadamia tea That's really interesting to know: would you mind elaborating a bit on how you conveyed the fit with the department in your SOP? For example, did you mention the research of specific faculty members and then talked about how your proposed project fit with it? Did you pitch your project as an extension of the faculty research agenda? Did you focus on just one faculty member or several? Any advice in terms of how to best approach demonstrating good fit would be greatly appreciated it. Like @kelris (thank you for starting this thread), I haven't had any luck this application season, and in retrospect, I don't think I've made the links between my project and the research agendas of the faculty members explicit enough -- in my head, I thought those links would be obvious when reading my project description but given that the admissions committees read hundreds of applications, I should have been more direct. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, it's very helpful.

@goofylemon I agree with you that it's likely that the spread would be somewhat larger if similar studies were done using data from Sociology departments but I'm not sure it'd be significantly so. If you look at placement records, even at some of the top schools, you'll see very few tenure-track positions. Take Brown's record for example, listed here. I count only 3 placements in the top50 schools out of 44 students who have graduated since 2009, with the remaining students in post-doc positions, at universities abroad, or outside of the academia. That's 7% placement in top50 departments, with just one student getting a position in a top20 program. That's not to say that you can't find a meaningful, rewarding position unless you're graduating from Harvard or Berkeley -- it's just highly unlikely that it will be a tenure-track position at a top50 program. So I think whether rankings are a deciding factor would be dependent on your career plans. I think it's a sorry state of affairs that prestige, so narrowly defined, matters this much in hiring but as long as it does, it doesn't seem irrational to pay attention to the rankings when making admission decisions. p.s. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm questioning your decision, goofylemon - Brown is an amazing program. Congrats! My intention was to point out some reasons why one would be so insistent on paying attention to the rankings. I whole-heartedly agree with you though that there are many other factors one would be wise to take under consideration and that we shouldn't let rankings alone drive our decisions. Congratulations on your acceptances!

I think the reason behind so much focus on rankings here (and elsewhere) is that rankings matter tremendously in hiring (see the study reported here, for example). There are a few Sociology programs that are known to have excellent placements -- the placement records of most other programs, including some in the top 20, are quite dismal. If you look at Sociology faculty pages, you'll be hard-pressed to find hires even from Cornell or Yale, not to mention graduates from lower-ranked departments. Even most lower-ranked programs rarely hire graduates from lower-ranked programs so chances of landing a tenure-track position if you're not graduating from a top-10 program are slim. And so if one's goal it is to find a tenure-track position at a research university later on, prestige/rankings/placement records matter. I agree with you that the order of priority you mentioned -- "#1 your publication #2 who is your adviser, #3 your recommendation letter, and maybe well then your program" -- would be a more reasonable basis for hiring. Unfortunately, research indicates that this just isn't the case. Having said that, I applied to a lower-ranked program and would be thrilled to attend it if accepted because the faculty's research matches my interests very closely. I'd attend knowing, however, that my chances of later on getting a position at one of the top20, or even top50 schools would statistically speaking be none.