slothy

Finally an official waitlist letter. They had a very roundabout way of saying it, though - we are unable to accept you at this time but we also don't want to reject you yet. Disappointing.

I said I might consider MAPSS if they actually came up with a decent funding package. However, I doubt the scholarship is negotiable, given the tone of the letter and program website (and the "second class citizens" attitude towards MAPSS students noted in a post above). I might go to Chicago for the MAPSS weekend anyway so that I'll already have the plane ticket in place if I get into Northwestern or Chicago Soc and, well, it never hurts to have more options. (It wasn't clear if MAPSS will be paying for travel, although I know they have in past years.) I think it's likely that my parents would pay for everything if I really decided MAPSS was the right path and Chicago didn't come up with anything more for me, but I really don't want to ask them. Honestly, the schools I've gotten into were really the bottom half of my list. I had my heart set on Northwestern, Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, or Stanford, and everyone in my undergrad department told me I would be a shoe-in for at least one of them.... right now it's looking like waitlist at all five. Yes, Berkeley is a strong department, but for me it was really a fallback - I just don't see a fit with the department's culture and I'm really sick of being lost in a big-state soc department where everyone fends for themselves, even if I seem to be good at it. Berkeley's attrition rate terrifies me and I could easily see myself being lonely and unhappy there. Berkeley also said they'll "have to see if they can come up with a way" to cover out-of-state tuition; that's not something I want to see any doubt over (if they didn't the costs of Berkeley would get far closer to parity in costs with MAPSS). I have serious doubts about the feasibility of transferring with a MA into another top-15 program. And UNC and Duke, even if one pretends that they are functionally the same program, aren't really a strong fit for my interests. Cornell might be, but I'll have to visit before I know for sure.

I got the exact same letter, as I've noted on another thread... Glad to hear that I'm not the only one who got 2/3 tuition, since I know they've given full tuition wavers for that program in the past. I might be interested in MAPSS (even though the letter did sound a tiny bit condensending, the whole "just missed" language) if they could give full tuition and work out some sort of RA position, but somehow I get the impression that's very unlikely. There's some interesting threads on this forum if you search for "MAPSS"... I'm very suprised that they offered it to me, since it sounds like MAPSS is designed for unfocused applicants whereas I thought my interests were relatively specific.

You could get the letter I just got via post - being placed on a "short waiting list" due to their budget problems with the option of enrolling in the one-year "MAPSS" degree with a fractional scholarship (mine was 2/3 tuition - $27k out of 40 - the difference is still more than twice what I paid for undergrad). Even though I have offers that are obstensibly far better, something about Chicago really appeals to me and I'm thinking about at least going to the weekend for MAPSS (not clear if they're paying for travel).

I feel ya - I have a feeling that I'm on 5-6 waitlists this year (including the two that have explicitly told me I'm waitlisted) based on what's been posted on this website. I guess something about my applicaiton just screamed "waitlist"... in a normal year I think schools send out significantly more acceptances than waitlists. As I've already speculated on this forum, I think this year is particularly bad for waitlists since schools really can't afford to take the chance of overenrollment (and many of us have applied to more schools than we would have in a normal year).

IMHO, this would be a much better reason for passing on Irvine than concerns about whether you would like the social climate.

Frankly, I think you're making too big of a deal out of a single thread on a rather anonymous online forum. This kind of reminds me of when an expert on grad school admissions came to my campus to give a lecture and when a student said something to the effect that they're worried about going someplace too hot or too cold, he replied "are you crazy enough to think that they'll ever let you go outside?" The point is that you'll be so absorbed in your studies that you won't have too much time to be bothered by the general social climate of the school/area. I'm sure that the soc department is not representative of the larger university in the sense you've described, as sociology grad cohorts tend to be rather diverse and cohesive to my understanding. Transferring between PhD programs is difficult unless you're good at networking and can really make a convincing argument that your current program isn't meeting your substantive needs (i.e., research interests). It will raise red flags about why you weren't happy at Irvine and if you say that you're just transferring because the town is, well, typical of American sun belt suburbs it probably won't get you very far. Keep in mind that you won't have much control over where you end up teaching after you graduate!

I'll throw out my experience as an example of one of the ways writing samples can matter, keeping the story vague for obvious reasons: I've been told through third-party sources that one of my writing samples may have been seen as too conservative for at least one of the sociology programs I applied for, even though the conclusions I reached (if anything) could be seen as suporting an Obama administration domestic policy proposal. I do worry that it may have had an adverse effect at a few other places I applied, but I worry more about what it says about the disicipline - I've always known that I'm a bit more centrist than most sociologists, but it was shocking to hear that it made at least one of the professors I mentioned in my SOP worried that he might not get along with me just because the conclusion my data led me to wasn't ultra-far left.

That's great... I had heard that the weekend was cut through my contacts there, so my guess is they somehow pulled together some more $$ at the last minute (which probably explains why it's a month later than past years)!

I'm really sorry that the OP and SDeviation aren't having better results. You both sound like you're prepared to make a real contribution to the discipline. That sounds likely, although it's possible you're having trouble meeting the Graduate School minimums regardless of whether departments are voting to admit you. Northwestern is not the most quantitative department, UIC probably felt you were so overqualified that you'd be unlikely to accept (I think that's what happened to me with Indiana) and Chicago appears to be taking a smaller than usual cohort this year. Why didn't you apply to more of the big name demography schools (or at least some other upper midwest big-state schools - Wisconsin, Indiana, ect...)? Sometimes it can be seen as a red flag that you haven't thought about where your real academic fit is when you primarily apply to schools in one metropolitan area. Given that schools are so idiosyncratic in their treatment of the GRE, I think it's best to apply widely when you have low scores to increase your chances of hitting a department where they're not an issue. I'm guessing you were somewhat geographically limited to Chicago based on the schools you mentioned, but nonetheless if you were considering Michigan it seems like you have some flexibility. Another possibility might have been that you seemed like you weren't focused enough on the academic side of the discipline, particularly if you said anything in your SOP about wanting to return to Mathematica/RAND/whichever firm you consider "foremost" (I'm really not up to date on private sector social research). At least it sounds like you'll be able to be productive over the next year if things don't work out for you in this cycle. It took me several hundred hours of work to bring my score from 1100's to 1420, so you might want to consider taking some time off to really focus on that GRE if you haven't already.

I've still got nothin'...

I'm really curious who the others folks that posted rejections from MIT Economic Sociology (or Org Studies) are, since it's targeted towards such a small niche in the discipline. I was under the impression that there's no other econ soc/labor/work people on this board, was I mistaken?

There's certainly a trade off: if you study what you truly love, your research may be of higher quality, which might benefit you on the job market. On the other hand, if you let yourself drift towards where there's demand, your work might suffer a bit but you'll face (relatively) less competition for jobs. I think it never hurts to think about how you can frame yourself as having multiple subfields of specialization. For example, while I'm probably going to priamrily be a work/labor specialist, I'll probably try to write a few papers and take some coursework that could be considered political soc with the hope that it (beyond intellectual fulfillment) might help me become competitive for positions in public policy/administration schools and maybe even poli sci departments. And yes, it's probably a good idea to find paper topics that have some methodological or substantive connection to policy or business... this is probably harder for race/gender and theory people than demographers, criminologists, ect... I would think.

If you think you're going to try to use your soc Ph.D. outside academia, then I'd say NYU would be the obvious choice based on geography - there just aren't that many interesting jobs for social scientists in the Northwest (probably not in TN either). Of course, you might want to pay extra attention to other factors if you're looking non-academic this far in advance, i.e. availability of advanced methods courses, attrition rates (people who decide not to go for academic careers have a way of ending up ABD), departmental culture with respect to academic careers, ect...

I would consider ranking between NYU and UW to be effectively equal, but I would argue that Vandy is a notch lower on the soc job market totem pole. (Not a great metaphor, but I'm too tired to come up with a better one!) NYU is a very competitive department to get into, so if you're in, congrats! (UW is also having a very difficult time this year, they've cut their visiting weekend and much of their cohort will not have funding from what I understand.) UW would be a great choice for sex/gender, criminology, and demography, but beyond that it gets a little hard to put together a committee of like-minded faculty. On the plus side, they'll have a newly renovated building next year! I was one of the posters trashing NYU for its approach to caring for its grad students, but if you visit the department and everything seems OK and you have a 5 year funding offer, I certainly would consider it seriously. Fit would be my most important criterion for choosing between your choices, since none of the departments you're looking at are indisputably top-15. Most of the problems I've heard coming out of NYU have to do with undergrads and unfunded MA students getting a lousy deal for their tuition money, but obviously that wouldn't be a concern if you're happy with your funding package. If you're seriously thinking about NYU, you might be entertained to look up "Take Back NYU" on Google News when you get a chance - their demands were certainly eclectic, but you have to admit that they had some points with respect to the lack of transparency in private university administrations these days.

Personally, I don't think graduate schools really do much... to me they seem like just another layer of bureaucracy between colleges and departments. At my university they seem like just another hurdle in the admissions process and they sponsor a few lectures a year - nothing really special. Almost all departments have a secretary that focuses on grad admissions anyway. I really don't see anything wrong with UConn giving departments greater autonomy in administering their grad programs.

I distinctly recall seeing medians for Indiana (I think it was around 1250 combined GRE and 3.5ish GPA) on their website sometime last year, but I can't find them anymore and am too lazy to check the Wayback Machine... but I'm fairly sure they're around there - I would imagine that Indiana's medians are probably a little below Chapel Hill and Duke (given slightly less university prestige and a location that probably turns off a lot of applicants), which are posted on their respective graduate school's websites.

The only school that's officially waitlisted me is Indiana - I'm really not sure if I'd be interested in their program if they accepted me, so I'm not going to outright decline just yet. However, I'm not heartbroken, if a little puzzled given how clear I thought the fit was and how far above their medians my numbers were. I'm pretty happy with my choices already, although part of me is still hoping for one of the places they're always hyping on orgtheory.net (i.e., Stanford or Northwestern). I'm still guessing that I'm probably on a waitlist at Stanford, Chicago, Harvard, Northwestern, and maybe Columbia based on nonresponse - the only program that I've applied to that hasn't been accepting and rejecting people (going off of Grad Cafe) is the MIT Business School Econ Soc program, although I doubt that there's many posters on here who've applied there given where everyone's interests seem to lie (please correct me if that's wrong!).

I always address professors by their first name, something about "Dr. Surname" just feels like high school to me... but then again I probably do have a bit of that sense of entitlement undergrads feel that was recently discussed in another part of this forum. So if you do go with first names, you're definitely not alone - the only circumstance in which I would address someone as Dr. or Professor would be if they addressed an email to me with Mr.

I can't either...

I would say definitely minus tie and you probably don't need a jacket, depending on the weather and what you're comfortable with... the email Duke sent out made it sound like jeans and a t-shirt would be normal, but personally I wouldn't feel comfortable dressing like it was just another day at school (although I don't want to stand out too much). As a disicipline, sociology tends to be far more casual than the other social sciences (from what I've observed at my department and ASA), so you might want to take that into account... I would bet that a lot of your colleagues won't really be dressed up.

To take things completely off-topic... The EUI sounded like a great program until I read that you have to be bilingual and pay something like $20,000 a year in tuition... I really wish there were more places where middle class Americans could feasibly get a PhD in Europe without a mountain of debt. There's even some great internationalized programs in places like Leiden and Brussels. It's just the European tuition structure and the almost complete lack of tuition waivers/TA/RA work that make things difficult... but if we have to put up with foreign TA's I say so should Europeans...

I think EUI is usually a 1 year gig, maybe two at most. I dobut they'd be taking first year grad students with them though....

I'm the sociology field... didn't even realize developmental soc was a seperate program there.

I really don't know... they're a small department (only 50 grad students!) probably taking a smaller than usual cohort. Kind of suprised that I'm getting early notification from them (and UNC) despite silence from 5 of my top programs. If anyone else here gets in I'd like to know!