pi515

And hang in there @HopefulSocPhD I can very much relate. I'm also a teacher and an older applicant. In fact, at 40, I'm more of an outlier. Although I have some research experience from undergrad and grad studies, none of it is directly related to the type of research I'd like to pursue in a sociology phd program (my recommenders were anthropology and poli sci professors). I'm also transgender and my proposed project relates to the emergence of the transgender rights movement so my research agenda isn't a "great fit" with too many departments out there. In other words, I'm not an easy sell. But even though this application round has been soul-crushing thus far, I'm not giving up. As per the helpful advice of many of you, I'll look for research positions for the coming year, revise my writing sample, start contacting professors whose work interests me, and maybe even try to publish a paper or two (though first I have to write something of publishable quality!)
Hugs to all my fellow applicants who have seen nothing but rejections thus far. We'll be ok! 

declined Yale for UCLA. Hope it helps someone who might be on the waitlist. Yale's fantastic, and one would be lucky to go there.

Here's to hoping! Best of luck to you as well. 

I've just declined my BU offer (I was one of the acceptances on the results page). I hope this opens up a spot for someone else!  I haven't heard of anyone being waitlisted, so perhaps they send acceptances in waves?

Just got an email from my POI at Johns Hopkins and I'm "high on the waitlist." They only have 5 funded positions, so unlike some other depts they only offer 5 in the first go-round. I'm happy to still be among the possible admittees, as there were 150 applicants. Though I have utmost confidence in my research agenda and scholarly abilities, I don't come from Ivy or elite private schools, and I'm a bit of a "late bloomer" in terms of my paper record. I'm happy to be among you lifelong high achievers Congrats to those who got in on the first round. It was insanely competitive. 
On a totally unrelated note, Baltimore is a cold and dreary city, and I hear the building that houses the sociology dept is haunted... Just saying...

I agree with you here. I didn't spend much time on the specific faculty sections of my statement, and maybe I should have. I wish I knew when I started the process what I know now. I think I might have saved myself a lot of stress (and some $$$ on things like the GRE)
Even though honestly, I am still not sure how exactly this whole process works. I didn't contact any faculty at all during this process. I had no idea people did that until I joined Grad Cafe in January. Also, I got accepted to the places I put one faculty member in my statement and rejected from some where I listed four. I don't have publications or crazy gre scores...so who knows!
The one good thing about it being a little bit of a crapshoot is that everyone has a shot!

I mentioned specific faculty members, but not at length. My statements were about equally balanced between research experience, substantive interests, methodological outlook & experience, and faculty.
I only applied to places where I was sure I could pursue my research interests, but I felt like faculty didn't need to study the exact topics I am interested in, so long as there was enough substantive overlap that I could e.g. imagine coauthoring with them. I could have gone to greater lengths to adjust the interests and methodological bits to fit the places I applied, but found I couldn't really make a convincing case for an agenda very different to my actual interests. I think that was because I didn't feel confident/informed enough to do so.
Instead, I used the faculty section to talk about specific elements of around 3 people's research that I thought had significant overlap with my interests. It looks like places with the biggest overlap - i.e. the closer my interests & methods sections were to past and current faculty research - were where I was admitted. I think that if I had taken the time to really tailor those sections to more places, I might have a few more offers, though obviously I can't know for sure. At least this way I won't be worrying about fit when I make my decision.

Well. I'll second what @rising_star said. This is particularly important if your area is in econ soc. Some econ journals took almost 2 years to reply (WTH). If, ever, you did not get any feedback from the journal by the time you apply. It is better to put the following lines in your CV.
         MANUSCRIPTS IN REVIEW
     Joe Doe   TITLE, In Review.  (You can choose to disclose your submitted journal, but it is likely unprofessional).
Better yet, if you get a Revise & Resubmit (R&R), it is really 99% done (most of the times) for sociology journals. In many of the journals I know, if you don't really screw up your revision, you can eventually get your manuscript published! This is a sign of success for your manuscript. In this case, you can certainly reveal the journal name, especially if it is a well-reputed one. 

If you can't give me some good news, then please give me some closure!

Oh my god... are you serious? That is so messed up!!!   WTF Columbia??? Get your shit together... seriously. Wow. I'm speechless and I bet you are pissed. Damn them.

In a cruel twist of fate, Columbia PhD acceptances yesterday were a clerical error. They didn't even apologize in the correction email. 

Hey @pi515 I appreciate your comments. While there are only 2 out of 42 graduates in Brown ended up in Top 20 TT position immediately upon graduation, I would like to comment that this is only a record of initial placement. It should be noted that even in Harvard, the initial placement for Top 20 TT is only 4 out of ~60. In this way, the rate between Brown and Harvard (top 6) is roughly 5% vs 7% (which is minimal difference). Also following your method looking at the initial placement of Princeton (which is widely accepted as having the best placement rate), their initial TT placement rate for top 20 is only 5 out of roughly 60 (that even includes a soc-joint appointment!), which is 8.5%. That says, the difference in top 20 TT placement rate is only 3.5%! Of course one can argue that 5% vs 8.5% is a 70% increase, however with the sensitiveness of data, the 70% is rather meaningless.
 
P.S. I found someone gave me a bad reputation on my previous post simply because he/she did not "like" my contents. A bad reputation is generally given to an unhelpful answer or malicious content, which is against the community standards of intellectual exchange. It looked like I really broke that person's heart by saying Top 10 placement is not necessarily better.
        While I really don't care someone pressing that red button under my comments, I would like to say that is exactly an example of how you will see a few of your peers being incapable of communicate well, even at some finest programs in this country. I never want to start a fight, nor I use any offensive words in my comments. Though, I got really annoyed this time. 

@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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Thank you for paying it forward @qeta! Great advice, thank you!

And hang in there @HopefulSocPhD I can very much relate. I'm also a teacher and an older applicant. In fact, at 40, I'm more of an outlier. Although I have some research experience from undergrad and grad studies, none of it is directly related to the type of research I'd like to pursue in a sociology phd program (my recommenders were anthropology and poli sci professors). I'm also transgender and my proposed project relates to the emergence of the transgender rights movement so my research agenda isn't a "great fit" with too many departments out there. In other words, I'm not an easy sell. But even though this application round has been soul-crushing thus far, I'm not giving up. As per the helpful advice of many of you, I'll look for research positions for the coming year, revise my writing sample, start contacting professors whose work interests me, and maybe even try to publish a paper or two (though first I have to write something of publishable quality!)
Hugs to all my fellow applicants who have seen nothing but rejections thus far. We'll be ok! 

I think if you have a POI already you can reach out to that person to ask about your application.  If not, then the grad admissions director who may be the person who gets this question most often.  I would probably send along something thanking them for their consideration, saying you want to make the most of the year to come, and you are particularly excited about this program.  Is there anything that they can say about your application specifically, was it a fit issue?  Do you lack research experience, etc?  I think that showing a strong interest and a desire to improve goes a long way ...

it is not supposed to be an insult. Just because you are not personally offended does not mean that it's not offensive to other women, who you do not speak on behalf of. "No need to make a deal of it" is where you stand. That the term was directed at you, is not really relevant. The word was used. It's offensive. You don't get to hush a conversation just because you personally are not offended. Your contribution says something about you personally, and not the conversation in general.

If you had an issue with it, the kindest response would have been to address it to the individual via PM and given them the option to edit the post, rather than publically shaming them. THAT says something about YOU.

sorry to mis-sex/gender you. it can be offensive.
not interested in starting dialogue. My intention was to police you, which I did, and I would do it again.

I was kidding, making a joke to bring some lightness to the stress.  

Want me to call NYU? I mean I didn't apply there but I would be willing to call and see anyways.