awesome3141

Not sure about Georgia Tech, but I do know Carter Butts went to CMU. So they have trained top-tier sociologists. That is a good point though, this person might not be a sociology applicant!

What are your interests? Without knowing your interests, I would probably recommend you take the Minnesota offer. Minnesota is a very good program, is well-respected, and has good placement- people that go to Minnesota can place anywhere if they do the right things. As someone that got in to Minnesota and Washington this year- I wouldn't waste a second year trying to get in to Washington. Their stipend is TINY, despite having a very high cost of living. In my opinion, I'm not sure people can actually afford to attend Washington without having to find other financial means. Additionally, in my experience, Minnesota is way better respected than Washington in Sociology, despite the fact Washington ranks a little higher right now. Cornell, NYU and UPenn are all better schools than Minnesota but they are also all very hard to get into. Cornell's acceptance rate hovers around 10%, NYU's is closer to 3%. IDK what Upenn's is but I'm sure it's no higher than 10%. You might get in to one if you applied, but just because of how competitive they are there's a very good chance you just don't get into any. And other schools you got in to this year (e.g. Minnesota) will be hesitant to give you a second offer if you don't take the first. I don't know anything about CMU.

Thanks for your reply. First off, I'd like to note that the majority of my comment was not meant as advice so much as just a description of my experience. I stand by my one piece of general advice which is that I encourage potential applicants to try and get research experience if they can. There are a ton of barriers that structurally disadvantage international students in academia, I absolutely agree. My research experiences all started from either cold emails or as referrals from professors that know me from cold emails. I actually didn't benefit at all from experiences/knowing people at my undergraduate institution. I have pretty specific interests in sociology and in order to find people to work with, I literally had to cold email people that had no clue who I was at various institutions I had absolutely no relationship or affiliation to. I sent 10-15 cold emails right after I graduated undergrad. I've found that many professors are actually pretty receptive to wanting voluntary research help! That's another thing to note, is I have been not paid whatsoever for helping professors. The understanding is the experience is mutually beneficial, as the professor gets help with a project and I get the experience of conducting research out of it. I've been "working" with about 5 professors for 2 years. The funny thing is because it's all virtual, I have not met a single one in person! My main point here is that I didn't directly benefit from institutional affiliation, job options, pay for labor, or geographical location at all in my research collaborations. I can't give an expectation to if other people will have the same success as myself if they try this strategy. I fully acknowledge I benefit from certain privileges given I am a domestic student. I will just broadly state that I got my opportunities from cold emails to total strangers- I hope others are able to try and be successful at this strategy. My general advice for cold emailing is: 1. pick a researcher whose work fits what you can already do (as much as research can be a learning experience, professors are more likely to go along with letting you work with them if you can already do much of the skill they need). 2. don't pick anyone that's too famous. (really well know professors will not respond to your email). 3. look for less famous coauthors of really famous people (oftentimes these people are doing the exact same research but because they are not famous they have no students to work with and are more open to cold emails). 4. Say that you want to go to grad school. (if professors know you want to go to grad school, they'll better understand why you want to work with them and are more motivated to give you a worthwhile experience) Anyone can message me if they want proofreading or more specific help/advice on cold emailing professors.

100% research experience. I don't have anything else going for me. But I am a very motivated person and I really enjoy research and I think it's what I am best at. Beyond that though, quantitative research is where sociology is increasingly moving towards, despite in my opinion not nearly enough sociology undergraduate students being strong quantitatively. Computational/big data sociology is an even more increasingly popular component of sociology, despite only a very small number of sociology undergraduate students having computational/programming skills. So I think just by being a quantitative/computational researcher, I have a bit of an admissions advantage. I in general just have a ton of research experience. I'm barely not in poverty and have worked a menial hourly job for the last two years but have worked my butt off research-wise and used all my free time to work virtually with a bunch of different professors. As I've gained more skills/methodological experience, professors have networked me in with other professors and I've worked with some top-notch sociologists (multiple NAS members). I have a ton of varied serious research experience on my CV. I also have multiple very high-impact publications (articles in Science and PNAS). I would say I probably had very good LORs (but IDK because I haven't seen them), because I've worked with well-known profs and they really respect and care about me. But my SOP was definitely absolute garbage, and besides finding and replacing school names was not at all customized to any school I applied to. I didn't even adhere to word/page limits in most cases, or follow prompts at all. I did explicitly state my research experiences and articulate my intended future plans though. My advice for anyone thinking about a Sociology PhD is to try doing serious research. Most undergraduate research opportunities are drudgery. See if you can have a serious role in collaborating with a professor and if you can publish with them. If you enjoy the experience, great- you should go to grad school! Because that's basically ALL grad school is about, people don't care about test scores or how well you do in classes then. If you don't like doing research, you should 100% not go to grad school, because you're not going to enjoy it, and you're taking someone's spot that would. I'm a huge proponent of social justice, but just because you like social justice, doesn't mean a sociology PhD is for you. IMO, a Sociology PhD is for people that are proponents of social justice AND want to use research as the vehicle to support it. An additional note for low-GPA applicants. I'm straight out of undergrad and have a sub 3.0 cumulative GPA. I applied to three schools that had STRICT 3.0 GPA cutoffs for their graduate school admissions and I got in to two of them! So I would encourage most people to ignore those policies, either they're not totally enforced or there are steps the admissions committee can take to get around them for applicants they really want.

The cycle is certainly winding down! What is up with Princeton and Cornell? They both are pushing it in my opinion. It has been a tough cycle overall. I've heard that the number of admitted students is down still significantly from COVID. There's also apparently a growing number of applications. I encourage people to try again though. There's no shame. I am in my second cycle and utterly failed my first time- I was like 0 for 15 when I tried two years ago. So far this year I'm at 8a/1w/6r and I only applied to top 25s! My undergrad GPA is also a 2.9 cumulative due to some personal challenges I had in undergraduate. A lot of people, especially professors, have made me feel horrible about myself because of my bad undergraduate performance. I've had terrible self-confidence and depression in large part because of it. I worked for years to try and prove myself. I truly feel on top of the world finally getting into schools this year. To those of you that didn't get in this year, if you really want it, do not give up!

If you feel comfortable, could you share the names of the two schools you are deciding between, what your area(s) of interest is/are, and what your long term career plans are.

Are all Harvard acceptances out? Saw one acceptance and waitlist in results. It seems like more should be posted in results if they released them all, but I also don't feel like they split acceptances up temporally.

This is a sociology thread.

I'm waiting on UM as well. I'm a little bit freaked out to see their acceptance rate last year was THREE percent. https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDoctoralProgramStatistics/ProgramStatistics?:embed=y&:showAppBanner=false&:showShareOptions=true&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no&FOSDParameter=All+Rackham

Probably because they are an elitist institution and want to set themselves apart from other schools by better dramatizing offers of admission. That being said, I'm personally hoping they are doing another day of calls (only 1 person posted an acceptance) and that I still have some small chance of getting in.

Well it looks like Harvard is currently doing their infamous acceptance calls. I hope someone here gets one!

Hello! I'm sorry to hear that this cycle's been tough so far. I think a lot of us empathize with that. My general advice to anyone is to not do something just because your family/parents want you to do it. It is inevitable to value their opinion but don't give so much weight to it that is significantly alters your life plans from what you would desire yourself. That being said, I would really recommend accepting the offer and not re-applying. If it's really a good program and you would enjoy being there, why not take it? PhD admissions are increasingly competitive and having the mentality that you should wait another year because you can do better is dangerous. For one thing, few PhD students actually go to their dream dream school (the school they would go to in a perfect world with infinite possibilities). It's easy once you get an acceptance, to say well how much better can I do? But the tradeoff of waiting and taking another chance is very risky and really not worth it. PhD admissions have a high degree of randomness and if these two public schools are really top-tier, your admittance is going to be far from certain, no matter how spectacular your application is. It's really a huge risk. Your post is somewhat vague about it, but if you were already rejected from your two dream schools, I would really really really not recommend applying again. Unless, something radical happens before next admissions cycle, they're going to feel the same way about you next year as they did this year. While admissions committees generally change year to year, the DGS has the most influence on admissions and they mostly stay the same year to year. If you turn down this schools' offer to you, it's going to be difficult to get another offer from that program. Students that turn down PhD offers are less likely to get a second offer from that program. Frankly, your likelihood of getting accepted into any program I think is reduced because you are already a PhD student elsewhere. This is generally a red flag for admissions committee and unless you have transparently exceptional circumstances, I think might limit where you can get in. I've only known two people that have transferred between PhD programs and in both cases they went to a far lower ranked program because of better fit. And by far lower, I mean they were students at a top 10 sociology PhD program and went to 30-50th ranked schools. The limitation of all this advice is of course that I don't know the full details of your personal circumstances. I also don't know what any of the schools that you're referring to are, so am making assumptions there too. Tl:dr my advice is take the offer, but not just because your dad said to. If you already got rejected from these two programs this year (which it sounds like you did) I would really really recommend not applying again and suggest you just take the current offer.

They are usually one of the last places to send out acceptances and rejections. I wouldn't expect to hear anything from them for at least a week, more likely 2.

That's a good strategy and similar to mine. My mentor who is just starting as junior faculty at R1 school told me to draw a line at top 25 by usnews standards if I want to go into academia given the current job market. He said anything below top 25 and R1 is virtually impossible and tenure track anywhere would not even be a guarantee. He said that I should go to the highest ranked school I possibly could. I can't say I totally agree, but I deferred to his judgement and applied to 17 schools (thank god for fee waivers) all in the top 25, with most of those 17 concentrated towards the bottom of the top 25 since I don't want to waste time on rejections. I'm still waiting to hear back on 6 programs but have gotten in to 1 top 10 program so far. I'm having an existential crisis though because I feel like that top 10 program is actually a really bad fit though and several of the lower ranked programs I got into seem like a much better fit. I feel like my mentor will push me to take the top 10 program offer though. I'm grateful to have gotten in anywhere considering how difficult this season is, but starting to think about making decisions now is extremely nerve racking. Tangential- but this is a really interesting analysis on programs and placement in sociology: https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/who-hires-whom/

A professor on admissions committee at top program tweeted that "the pool was RIDICULOUSLY strong this year" and that she had heard the same elsewhere. Her guess was that "this is mostly a temporary effect of pent-up demand"