slothy

I will be there despite not being in the program (didn't realize the submission deadline was so early... next year). Mainly going for the networking value, although the opportunity to pick up free and cheap books, software demos, and food is a big plus. And it's an excuse to visit SF! There's a lot of cheap hotels around the conference site this year, too - it really shouldn't be too expensive...

What are you hoping to do after you complete the Ph.D.? I'm guessing that you're not terribly concerned about the tenure track since it sounds like you're already financially secure. That gives you the freedom to expand the scope of your search a bit beyond the top-ranking departments and consider geography. I have found sociology to be very meritocratic relative to the other fields I'm familiar with (namely law and poli sci) - if you're able to dedicate yourself to producing and publishing quality work, I think you'll be taken seriously wherever you study. Why not start taking courses at the nearest school with social science grad courses as a non-matriculated student this fall so you can begin the process of accumulating credits and gaining the letters you'll need this application season? Most grad courses only meet 1-2 days a week, so don't be afraid to look at universities a few hours away from you. That would give you connections to faculty that might be able to consult with you on your applications, even if they're not experts on religion themselves. There are plenty of flagship state schools doing good work that would love to have you - especially if you could forgo fellowship support in these lean times. I would also suggest you look at universities with good interdisciplinary research groups in religion (they might be formal programs or they might be informal cliques... you might have to ask around a bit to locate them. A few that I can name are Duke, U. Washington, Notre Dame, maybe Berkeley and Princeton - I'm no expert on religion, though.) If I were you I'd suggest trying to attend the ASA meetings in San Francisco in August. Travel costs are low enough that you could still feasibly plan a trip and it would give you the chance to try to meet some of the people you might want to work with in person - this could be particularly helpful for you if you don't have good academic LOR's. Finally, when you look at programs, I wouldn't be particularly concerned with the number of courses they offer - what is more important is the number of faculty, both in their soc department and across campus, that you could see yourself working with. That said, you really only need one strong mentor (as long as he/she doesn't move or die while you're in school) to be successful in grad school. Hope this helps!

I can't give you a good answer to your question since I'm not well-versed in the sub-field, but I can tell you that the best approach on these things is to find someone who knows what they're talking about and ask them. US News tends to have some validity as far as *faculty* prestige and overall *faculty* research output is concerned - which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't relate to placement, but their model simply does not measure quality of graduate education. That said, just to throw in my own anecdote for the little it's worth, I visited Duke a few months ago and I was very impressed with the infrastructure they have there for social psych research in their "SSRI" research complex. They clearly are willing to support their grad students logistically on original research projects there, so it might be worth looking into - and I think the department doesn't attract a lot of social psych grad students, so one might benefit from a low student:faculty ratio in social psych.

While I'd agree that worrying isn't necessary, it is smart to be planning for the realities of the academic job market down the road. At a minimum, I would say that it makes sense to keep a Plan B in mind at any stage in life. The comment about international universities is perceptive in the sense that geographic mobility is a necessity on the market, although it is unfortunate that maybe 10% of ABD's on the market really have worldwide availability (and it can be hard to come back stateside once one goes abroad for academic positions - kind of a "damaged goods" phenomenon.) The job rumors sites are a good source of information, although there's debate (which I've completely ignored) about how early one should start reading them.

Does anyone know if I'm supposed to have recieved a Net ID by now? I started the online forms a month and a half ago...

Depending on how narrowly you define world systems, how about Columbia?

I"m in the same boat... there's been some helpful posts over the last few weeks in the "Cornell 09" thread in the Meet and Greet section.

I think your reasons for pursuing a PhD sound fine. I've actually used the federal pay scale argument on my parents. The conventional wisdom for "two-body problems" in graduate admissions is to pick a handful of large metro areas with a lot of academic institutions to target your applications towards - namely, DC, NYC, Boston, So Cal, SF Bay, Chicago, perhaps the Raleigh-Durham-CH "triangle"; there might be a few more good ones. It's not uncommon for couples to attend universities in completely different cities and endure long commutes from places in the middle - e.g., living in NYC for Princeton and Yale or living in Trenton for Columbia and UPenn (sorry for the Ivy League examples). This maximizes the probability that one or both of you will be able to attend an institution above "Tier 4." Obviously this is most common in the Northeast for geographic reasons. And it's always risky to bet the farm on one university, even if it's Tier 4 - these forums are filled with stories of applicants (myself included) who were rejected from their "safety" programs. Good luck!

They're online. Anyone else disappointed with how their choice fared?

EUI has a decent reputation in the US - although I can't think of any top sociology departments where I've seen EUI alums on the list of faculty. I think of it as where the top Ivy/Berkeley comparativeists go when they're ready to take an extended vacation. My guess would be that EUI grads tend to stick to the European job market because the institution strikes me as kind of fitting into that whole "Erasmus" / Euro-themed culture (sorry if I can't come up a better definition... I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly what I'm getting at here, but my experience at a very internationalized Scandinavian institution was that most of the Europeans were happy to be European with their big fat stipend checks from the European Commission and didn't necessarily aspire to cross the pond). My instinct would be to direct you stateside if you're thinking you want a US academic career (or probably even a UK academic career). If not, I would still urge you to come to the US if you're thinking of sociology - or really anything other than qualitative comparative politics or theory, but that's just my biases perhaps. Due to language barriers, cultural factors, differing priorities on research, and a host of other factors there are deep divisions between how social science is done (and what type of work is prioritized/valued) in the US and the EU (with the UK as something of a middle ground). And I can of course think of many reasons why one might have a major personal preference for living in Europe - when I was over there I realized how thankful I am to be an American, but I recently talked to an European over here who felt exactly the opposite. I'd be happy to try to answer any more specific questions you have (I try to keep up with the differences between European and American soc and poli sci), although I'll warn you that I've never actually been to EUI so I can't really comment on that institution specifically beyond what I've already said.

I'll add that I think there are very different cultures in different disciplines on this. In my R1 soc dept (admittedly I'm an undergrad but I think I have a good feel for how the department operates), they don't even bother unlocking the building on Sundays and as far as I know nobody has access. On the other side of campus in engineering and the bioscience labs, it seems like there's always lights on on Sunday nights and you can see people working late into the night. Most of the stories I've heard about overworked grad students seem to come from the "hard" sciences - there's plenty of pressure on RA's in the social sciences, but I get the impression that it tends to be less deadline oriented and a lot more of the off-the-clock work is done from home.

Geography isn't (to my knowledge) one of the disiciplines ETS tracks GRE scores on, so it's hard to give you a quantitative answer. However, I would be inclined to say that they're similar in the sense that there's a fair bit of variance in the "numbers" of admitted students and both attract an interesting mix of backgrounds. If you look at geog rankings you'll notice that most of the Ivys and selective private schools don't offer geog Ph.D's, which means that it's the typical big-state schools that lead the disicipline (Berkeley and Madison come to mind, which happen to be #1 and 2 for US News soc - although there's a lot of debate about whether those rankings are justified). I would imangine that fit matters a great deal since, like soc, geog is an extremely diverse disicipline. Some departments (U Washington, for instance) are really interdisicplinary social science programs with an emphasis on spatial inequality, whereas others (e.g. one of the so cal UC's I think) have much stronger ties to geology.

I'm going for sociology. I'm really struggling with housing... the posts here have been really helpful though. Does anyone know if I'd be completely out of luck if I had to wait until mid-June to come out and look for apartments? I'm an undergrad coming from the West Coast so it's not like I can easily drive down for the weekend, but on the other hand none of the university's housing options look ideal...

I will be attending Cornell. The biggest factor was the "feel" of the department in terms of how the students and faculty approach the discipline - there's no single professor I feel committed to working with there, but I got the feeling that it's a department that encourages quantitative, empiricist, professional soc; the extra-departmental resources (especially the ILR School) were also important to me. And, despite the warnings from so many people at Berkeley, I really do think I'll enjoy the location.

Not sure how this will help, but anyway... Northwestern would be *a* top choice - but it's not far enough ahead that I'd accept without a visit. I'm also waitlisted at Chicago (w/ the usual MAPSS offer @ about 13k tuition) - once again, it might be better for me and it was higher on my initial list when I started this process, but I really don't know how successful the recent reforms in their PhD program will be and the waitlist letter didn't even promise a full stipend. I was informally waitlisted at Stanford but they just informed me that they won't be extending an offer. I was accepted at Columbia for a terminal MA but it was pretty clear that there would be liability for tuition there (and not a single person from the department has come forward to contact me... not a good sign). Since they're not offering funding, I don't see any reason to even bother contacting them to decline. And Indiana waitlisted me, too - a real surprise to everyone in my department who encouraged me to apply there as a "safety" (I told them they shouldn't bother extending an offer). My choices were UNC and Berkeley (both of which I've turned down largely for funding/support related reasons, although I'll admit that the more and more I read the rumor mill the more and more I question the wisdom of turning down top five programs so fast) and Duke and Cornell. Right now I'd say Cornell is higher than Duke on my list, but I have a little more investigating to do. Still not sure how this would help you - was there something more specific you wanted me to tell you?

Unfortuantely no... this has certainly been a factor prolonging my decision making process. Northwestern has been teasing me with the prospect of something opening up, but going on comparing the number of offers posted on this board to the size of their target cohort, I think they actually might have seriously underestimated the number of people who would attend.

That's very interesting - I've been seriously considering Duke and someone on their adcom said this week that I could go ahead and take my time up until the April 15th deadline because it's so late in the process that they wouldn't bother making an offer from the waitlist. I guess this is more pressure to make a decision quickly...

From reading your post it sounds obvious that you want A and are just having trouble working up the courage to stand up to your mentor. I'm having a hard time imanging such a small field that you could seriously dammage your career prospects on the basis of one strained relationship, though - I've been learning that American sociology is a very small world over the last couple months, but even if my undergrad mentor was upset with me over my choice and somehow managed to prevent me from ever working in my state's public university system I wouldn't really care that much. (But, then again, I have a great working relationship with him and I do truly value his opinion - your situation sounds different.) Do you feel that returning to your country where this one guy holds all the shots is what you really want to do? Or, worst case scenario, could you envision yourself going for a H1-B or career in a third country? Ranking matters (not so much within the top 10-20 programs in a field, but very much between, say, top 10 and 20-50), and IMHO you want to keep as many options open as possible. And having good mentors *really* matters - I'll join the chorus observing that it sounds like you're being abused by this guy and risk being exploited by his buddies at B. One of the reasons why I'm having such a hard time rejecting my school B is because the people there really want me to make the best choice and are willing to acknowledge the strengths of program A...

Hmmmm.... my initial reaction would be to say NYU to increase the odds I'd get into Northwestern on the waitlist, but I'd probably have to turn them down at this point given that there's just a week left. It would be helpful to know more about your interests here. For example, if you were into org theory Northwestern would be an obvious choice in terms of reputation and productivity/placement - I really don't know much about NYU's strengths, but I'm sure there's people here who know more than me. I've been struggling with Cornell versus Duke and one of the professors I've been corresponding with had two suggestions that I think have helped me "break the tie" over the last couple days (particularly the later suggestion) - your mileage may vary with this approach: 1. email a few of the best "fits" at both schools and ask them to send you the abstracts for their most recent projects or works in progress (i.e., stuff that might not be on the website). Read them and ask yourself which you'd be most interested in working on - even if there isn't RA work available on a particular project, it might help you sort through the nuances of particular professors' current interests and approaches. 2. ask yourself what skills and competencies you'd like to achieve outside of core sociology coursework, and compare the opportunities for both at the universities you're considering. For example, are there any languages you think you might like to learn? Would a strong econ or poli sci department be an asset to you? Any specific advanced quantitative skills you want to pick up? I have a feeling that you would be able to draw significant distinctions between NW and NYU here. Also you could ask yourself what enabled you to count out Michigan. Ask yourself what about Michigan didn't appeal to you - was it too big, too little faculty-student interaction, too heavy service requirements, ect...? Then ask which program is most like Michigan in those respects.

Let me get this straight - Penn State is giving you until the 10th basically to decide whether you want to be considered from the waitlist? That is unethical... although I realize there's nothing you can do about it. What would be the repurcussions for backing out of the job contract? I understand that it's generally unprofessional to break those sorts of contracts, but when you're talking about an important life decision like this I think you could be forgiven for backing out later. If you go for the Penn State degree with the intention of a US academic career, your career path will be dramatically different and I would imangine that it's unlikely you will ever have to deal with this company again.

I thought of one more variable for you to consider: in general, do you consider yourself to be more drawn to quantitative or qualitative work? If you're strictly qualitative, Draper might make more sense for you. However, if you lean quantitative or even mixed methods, I would encourage Chicago. Draper clearly identifies itself as a "humanities and social thought" degree that happens to incorporate themes/coursework from social science departments, whereas MAPSS is a social sciences degree - many of the MAPSS courses may be theory based, but if you want to pick up some methods courses or dabble in quantitative methods I think MAPSS would be the obvious choice. And I think having finished at least one quantitative methods course would make you much more competitive for soc PhD programs, as I would say that the majority of RA work opportunities demand some basic quantitative skills. (Just from looking at New School's sociology website, it looks like they would also be able to offer some decent methods training.)

I'd like to add to the crowd telling you not to discount MAPSS in your situation. Knowing nothing about your financial situation, I'd say that one year is a lot less debt than two since I'm guessing that tuition is similar at these places. Although it's only one year, it's known as a very rigorous program whereas Draper and New School are more questionable. I think you might have gotten the impression from this board that MAPSS is dubious in the sense that most would agree it's not a great option relative to top-15 PhD programs, but I'd say its a standout relative to the other options for an unfunded terminal MA. You will be taking "real" PhD level courses with PhD students - while it might be harder to get professors attention as a MAPSS student, you will probably have just as many or more problems at Draper or New School on a MA track. The only problem in your situation might be that you would have to take a year off between your MA and PhD in order to get the full effect of MAPSS in the admissions process during which you might not be able to legally stay in the US, but at least you wouldn't be accumulating debt during that time (and you could be working on getting your thesis published, ect...).

I followed up with Jeremy when he sent the waitlist email and he was very helpful. He said that the waitlist is stratified by specialization, so they can't give you an exact idea of where you stand, but he'll give you a general idea of whether you're high or low.

I was rejected - not a suprise; b-school was a long shot.

Just got back from UNC and another program (hence my silence on this board for the last few days). I was *very* impressed with the quality of the applicants they admitted - I bet they will get a fantastic cohort. On the other hand, I didn't feel like I connected quite as much with the faculty I was interested in working with there as I did at the other program I visited. I also got the impression that it would be difficult to get too much attention working outside demography and perhaps a couple other strengths - I got the impression that the grad student research presentations were representative of the strengths of the department, and Hamilton might be a lonely place for people with other interests. The grad students were not universally happy, although I