slothy

Is a resolution from CGS really legally binding? My understanding is that the CGS is a private nonprofit with no governmental ties whatsoever. I would agree that any department that tried to force decisions prior to 4/15 could get into serious trouble with its university grad school and/or CGS, but I don't think the CGS resolution could really be the basis for legal action.

(Deleted on account of this post having been very presumptuous of me.)

Yes, do you have any news? Haven't seen anything on the results page yet, figured they'd be notifying next week.

So, are neutiquamerro and migrationdude the only ones who've heard from Berkeley? If they're doing anything close to 40 offers (which they might not be - I got the impression that UNC and Harvard are really cutting back) this year and considering the number on this board who've probably applied, I'd say that there's still plenty of offers to come (although perhaps not with fellowship support).

I came across this link a while back; although I'm primarily applying to soc programs, I thought the questions seemed very relevant to any non-"hard" science disicipline. http://www.apsanet.org/content_6925.cfm And it looks like there's another useful link at the bottom of the page. Hope this gives you a starting point!

It depends. I might do it if I thought the networking would be truly useful. And if you think the chance of attending is slim, well, you never know if a visit might really make you reconsider your skeptcisim about the program. When you consider that (assuming the program is housing you with current grads) the cost of the plane ticket and whethever you might get from the department (in professors' time and tangible goodies) is probably around $400ish, to me it would be worthwhile to even just slightly better inform such an important life decision as where one goes to grad school. It is very considerate of you to consider your impact on your programs though, particularly in this economy. As for sightseeing, there probably won't be any time - usually these things are fly out on Thursday evening and leave Saturday morning sorts of events. In the back of my mind, though, it has crossed my mind that these weekends would be a great opportunity to finally get elite frequent flyer status.

Well, they're certainly keeping me waiting... no word from either Berkeley or Stanford, despite having confirmation that they definitely recieved all my application materials... maybe I'm ending up on a waitlist?

That wasn't me. I haven't received anything in writing yet.

It was a phone call from a potential mentor. I got the impression I was special.

For anyone who's heard, did the admit letter/phone call mention anything about a recruitment weekend? If so, when and will they pay travel expenses? I've heard that a lot of the big state schools are cutting back this year, wondering if Berkeley will do the same

And I'll also add that I think there is very real value in the professional skills one gains in the process of doing TA and RA work that is comparable to what a lot of us truthfully would be doing anyway. Learning to be comfortable while addressing large groups of people, managing projects, writing proposals, tactfully critiquing peers... on some level, acquiring these skills in the supportive environment of most soc departments is probably better than the skill sets many of our peers are getting working in dead-end administrative or retail careers.

I've heard the "the only reason to do a Ph.D. is to become a professor" advice a lot, but I've come to the conclusion that, while the idea of an academic career should be apealing to most people doing Ph.D.s, it's definitely not a waste if you're in the social sciences and are aware of how you can leverage your (hopefully) quantitative methods background into an applied field. In fact, there was a big session at ASA this year (one of the career workshops) full of people making six figures doing market research, workplace training, evaluation research, ect... I think it all depends on how you investigate those sorts of opportunities during grad school. I would guess that most tenured professors haven't really spent a lot of time investigating the job market outside higher ed and thus are more likely to buy into the idea that PhD's are overqualified for anything else. It's also worth noting that a Ph.D. can translate into a very healthy federal pay grade if you choose to go into public service (and happen to be a US citizen) - places like HHS, Education, CRS, GAO ect... are full of social science Ph.D.'s who stepped off the tenure track, although my impression is that things are slightly tougher for sociologists than economists or political scientists. You'd also find many soc Ph.D's working in respectable (and at least comparably paid relative to TT) administrative positions at just about any major university. As for me, I'd say that an academic career is my default plan post-PhD, but I realize that there's a high probability that I won't even finish and I certainly plan to make an effort to network with non-academic employers.

Answered in a PM.

I think you should be a fairly strong candidate. Your GRE's are strong, your English seems to be fairly good and US universities like students who already have proven themselves in Master's level coursework. Turkish schools are relatively unknown to most American academics (honestly, the only Turkish universities I've even heard of are Bogazici and METU). Therefore it will, of course, be difficult for you to collect LOR's from faculty known in the US; my advice (although this is of course conjecture) would be to try to identify faculty who did graduate work in the US or who might have a good idea of what US adcoms look for in letters. I wouldn't worry about your undergrad major GPA at all. There is a lot of ambiguity in the process of translating GPAs between the European and US systems and, as far as any Graduate School cutoffs are concerned, they will be looking at your cumulative (3.5, far above any US cutoff point) as opposed to your GPA in econ courses. In fact, I would just fill in your cumulative GPA on applications and leave the major GPA blank for them to calculate if they so choose (which they quite probably won't - this is what I did with my study abroad grades in the ECTS system that were very difficult to translate).

Actually it did cross my mind that perhaps I shouldn't post this today in the interest of the mental health of my fellow applicants... sorry if I ruined anyone's Super Sunday!

I just got an acceptance at UNC by phone - posted on results page. Didn't hear about funding.

I'll answer line by line: 1 - One of the nice things about soc is that it attacts people with a wide variety of backgrounds. People occasionally get in who have never taken a single soc course! If you're in that category, though, you better be able to explain why soc is appropriate for your plans in your SOP. However, soc academics frequently complain that too many of their students lack the quantitatve background to succeed in their first year methods sequence. Thus, it would be of real benefit to at a minimum get a strong grade in an introductory stats course, with the more quantitative courses you can take the better. Econ is defintely one of our sister disiciplines (even if many sociologists detest economists with all their rational choice theory), so some exposure to it can't hurt, especially if you're thinking about economic soc as your subfield. 2 - You might try asking someone at the programs you're most interested in this question. If your research plans are such that language background might seem necessary to an adcom, you might want to downplay that part of your research agenda in your SOP. You don't want to be taking 100-level language courses in your first year of grad school (although it does happen), so I'd try to get started on that lanaguage ASAP - if you're not able to get it in before admission, you might say in your SOP that you intend to do a summer program right before you enroll. 3 - Noooooooooooooo! Language skills aren't *that* important, and if you do a master's program you'll just have to go through the misery of admissions again 2-3 years later. Master's program funding is generally difficult, and there simply aren't that many quality master's in soc programs out there. That said, you might consider a MA in area studies if you're truly unsure whether you're willing to commit to the disicipline of sociology (i.e., if you might be leaning towards comparative religion or something of that nature). 4 - All fund at least some students (in the US, at least), but not all fund all students. Chicago and Wisconsin are two that I know have admitted students without full funding before. At the Ph.D. level, I'd say that 90%+ of all admission offers come with funding, though. 5 - Research is very important. I would implore you to start doing whatever you can as soon as you can. It's not too late to get some decent research experience on your CV before applications, but you should approach professors about opportunities as soon as you can. Don't worry if your research isn't directly related to what you want to do in grad school - your first priority should be to use research as an opportunity to get face time with your future LOR writers and get a better understanding of what you're getting yourself into with a Ph.D. A little research experience will go a long way towards overcoming any concerns about lack of language experience. These are just some ideas off the top of my head. You should confer with your professors to get their views on these questions - you'll have to get to know 3 of them before applying anyway, and most are more than willing to discuss grad school with prospective students. Hope this helps!

Maybe I'm just missing something here, but I really don't have any problem with what Brooks said. He never claims that institutions are the be all and end all of everything, just points out that institutions (and particularly well-established, exclusive professions) influence people in the direction of orderliness. Maybe I should rethink this whole sociology thing?

Actually no... for such a high-ranking program, I would have expected a placement list to be front and center on their admissions site, but I couldn't find it - although I could just be missing an obvious link somewhere (it's happened before). I can't think of any stars in my subfield that have come out of Madison recently, but I could certainly be misinformed or unaware... I wasn't trying to dampen anyone's excitement about Madison, just pointing out that these big-state programs have real problems that one should always investigate before committing five to eight years of their lives to a PhD program. I would still jump on Madison (or Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Chapel Hill, ect...) if it ended up being my only top-15 offer. And if you've been admitted this early to such a strong program you will surely have a lot of choices to evaluate.

That's about what I would expect - the relatively weak completion rate is one of the reasons I didn't bother applying to Madison. If I were one of you who just got your acceptance letter/website message, I'd be very interested to learn about how many of those who left did so because they disliked something about the program and how many failed (or felt they were in real danger of failing). IMHO, so many students leaving for either reason should be a real red flag. At big state schools it's usually possible to find funding through other departments/centers on campus that don't have their own dedicated stream of grad students if you don't get funded through your department (if you're proactive enough to seek such opportunities).

At the moment my focus is on the American labor movement and its political activites, although I'd consider myself a generalist in organizational theory, the sociology of work and compartive social welfare policy (especially in relation to labor and employment relations) at this early point in my academic career. At the risk of personally identifying myself more than I already have, the sociology programs I applied to are: Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Berkeley, Stanford, Indiana, North Carolina, Cornell, Columbia, MIT (Business School), Duke. Also a few poli sci departments that seemed like a good fit (although I'd prefer not to identify them).

I was also advised that it's not that important to make contact before application (I'm applying to a mix of Poli Sci and Soc programs) and that there was always the risk of rubbing someone the wrong way or consuming myself with concern that non-response was a bad sign (as I think someone was feeling in another thread). Given that I really couldn't think of anything genuinely important to ask anyone, I just left my potential matches alone. That said, one of my recommenders said that it could be helpful in some circumstances - although there could be more of a correlation between strong applicants and pre-application contact than a causal factor in the admissions process.

There probably aren't any professors out there that would perfectly match your research agenda as specifically as you've presented it, so you'd probably be looking for a department with a few good people doing varied work on race and immigration and a few people focused on the developing world. While the US News subfield rankings can be somewhat useful as a starting point, they might not be all that great for someone whose interests overlap on a lot of topics. Brown comes to mind, although it's not a well-ranked program - and while rankings are imprecise, as a general rule I'd say the job market prospects are going to be significantly better for grads from the top-15 programs than from below the top-15. Only you can decide whether it would be worth it to you to go to a low-tier program in spite of the difficulty you'll face on the market, and as has been said many times on these advice boards, it doesn't really make much sense to apply to places that you wouldn't actually be happy attending. If those five schools are the only ones you've come up with that would work for you, you either have very narrow interests or you need to do some more Google searching. If you're finding that people you want to work with aren't at PhD-granting institutions (or are at weak programs), you could also look at where authors of articles you like did their Ph.D.'s. Also try searching the ASA conference program. Sorry if you were looking for more specific ideas, but to be honest most of us aren't experts on the discipline outside of our subfields ourselves...

To further explain my assertion that quantitative is the most important section, I base that on conversations I had with a couple program reps who told me that with the demise of the "real" analytical section, the quantitative section is the only part of the test that truly measures logical reasoning skills without the limitation of the size of your vocabulary. This is partly because the verbal and AW sections aren't considered all that valuable anymore - people are catching onto how capriciously the AW section can be graded (most grad school writing isn't 5-paragraph essays), and the verbal section focuses far too much on vocab. Anyone who graduated from high school should have had some exposure to GRE level math (and it can easily be reviewed), so there's (at least a perception of) less advantage for those who invested in Kaplan courses, came from fancy private schools or had time to invest in hundreds of hours of independent studying. Specifically, I think it was someone from Cornell Soc that said breaking 700 was really important to them. Also Q is an important indicator of whether you're likely to succeed in your first year methods sequence (even if statistics isn't true math), which has a lot of implications for how likely you are to succeed/finish - you really need to be able to master linear regression to be a professional sociologist, even if just to be able to understand what's being published in the field (if you're one of the few sociologists doing strictly qualitative work). Sure, a big vocabulary is nice to have sometimes, but it doesn't really translate into an aptitude for original research.

Although your verbal and AW scores are a bit on the low side for most of the top-15 programs, your Q score is extremely strong for sociology - and I would say that Q is by far the most important section. I wouldn't worry about your scores so long as you did a decent job of proving your writing skills in your SOP and writing sample, unless your SOP was narrowly focused on a desire to do qualitative ethnographies of Mongolian goat-herders or something like that.