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Longing for Learning

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  • Location
    Chiba, Japan
  • Application Season
    2018 Fall

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  1. Thank you so much for your detailed reply! That gives me some direction for my statement of purpose. Your explanation also made me realize that I'm already familiar with a fair amount of anthropological work on my topic of interest--I just didn't consider it "technical" enough since it didn't explicitly use the broad terms I'd mentioned earlier. That said, I have several articles/book chapters from Japan anthropologists discussing related topics, so I'll start by giving them a closer look to gain a better understanding of their approaches and how they might apply to my situation. Thank you also for your advice to take a more exploratory tone. The idea of competing with MA holders to gain access to programs with acceptance rates in the (sometimes low) single digits is intimidating, but your words have given me some perspective.
  2. Hi everyone, I'd love to get some input on statements of purpose for cultural anthropology PhD programs, specifically for those without (related) graduate degrees. I understand that some of this has been discussed before, but I don't feel it's been touched upon for those with unrelated BAs, and how expectations may differ for them. I earned a B.A. in East Asian studies around 10 years ago, and have been living and working in Japan since then. I have a fairly defined research area that I'd like to explore (within Japan), have acquired proficiency in Japanese, had very high undergraduate grades, and did well on the GREs (166V/160Q/6.0). I've spoken with POIs at a number of institutions, and received encouragement from a couple of faculty (and just "feel free to apply" from a couple of others). To this point, I feel like things are fairly encouraging. However, I'm getting mixed messages on this forum when reading about the statements of purpose. I'm able to explain what I want to explore, why I want to do so, and the basic way I'd like to approach my investigation, but I have very little theoretical training that would inform my specific methodology (such as applying a political economic approach, a structuralist approach, a cultural materialist approach, etc.). A poster in one of the sticked posts on this forum frames theory as absolutely essential in SoPs, and mentioned that he had several references cited in his. I'd like to ask those who are planning to apply, and those who have been accepted to PhD programs: how much theory was in your SoP? Did you come from an unrelated field, and how did this affect it? Is applying to PhD programs with very little grasp of anthropological theory basically futile in my position?
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