slothy

First of all, students coming from top SLACs are often least likely to have TA experience, since those programs are at the top because they have the faculty to cover all their classes. TA experience matters much less than RA experience - most top-20 programs don't really emphasize teaching in their grad programs anyway. I mean, I can see how TA-ing would be a nice "extra" to stick on one's CV, but it's really not a strong indicator of likeliness to succeed in grad school. If you're worried you haven't gotten enough research experience because you've been lost in the crowd at a big state school, ask yourself whether your letter-writers are better known than the typical liberal arts college prof. At my big state R1, I can't think of any of our professors who aren't at least modeartely visible in their subfield, and I think (hope) that helps quite a bit. Having letters written by completely obscure profs is a common obstacle for SLAC applicants, even ones coming from really competitive colleges, and they often need lots more research experience to overcome that obscurity. That said, if you're really worried about your faculty not being supportive of undergard research, you can always take matters into your own hands and do research independently....

I know of at least four with 12/15 deadlines that have started the process of making their first cuts...

I wouldn't equate nonresponse with rejection. Professors are busy people who often don't have time to reply to all their emails or tell themselves that they'll respond later and never do. Regardless, sociology isn't a discipline where potential grad students are expected to contact faculty...

Well, don't despair too much, a lot of soc applicants don't spend enough time laying out a coherent research agenda (from what I understand) and while your SOP probably could have been more balanced, your research background will probably shine through via the substantive expertise you showcase. Those three items are probably worthy of an addendum. Sending something might also help assure your programs that you're self-assertive enough to be competitive for publications/external funding/job market/academic careers in general. But be quick - most of the places you've applied are probably already reviewing applications or will be within the next two weeks. Well, I was just in one of my mentors' offices today talking about the applications we're getting for our own program (I'm not applying), and one of the things he said hurts a lot of our applicants is that many are coming from SLAC's and are submitting recommendations from people who don't really seem to have a strong idea of what the big R1's are looking for... in general, I think you really need to educate your mentors as much as you can, especially if they haven't been actively engaged in research for a while. So, I guess at least you're not alone.

Yes, you really are torturing yourself posting here; there's a reason I haven't posted my stats. Are you kidding me? (Hope that doesn't come across too strong...) Socialization into the profession is probably the number one thing I would imagine that adcoms look for after some general sense of fit (of course like everything this is conjecture). The majority of my research is not only out of subfield but out of discipline - and I was sure to highlight it. Soc applicants aren't expected to know exactly what they really want to do before the second year at earliest, and publishing like this is a really big deal for undergrads in our discipline. As for notifying programs, that's a tough call... I would ask one of my letter-writers rather than take any advice dispersed in this forum. Maybe one of your recommenders would agree to send it as an addendum to their letter, so you don't have to worry about coming across personally however you're worried about coming across as (can't think of the word). Frankly, your co-author should be pulling every string he can for you, given how much you probably paid to attend a top-5 liberal arts school. BTW, were you an Honors Program student at ASA this year? Now for good news - as for your chances, I'd bet on you getting a couple admits minimum. Your GRE's are respectable.

I can't believe this thread is dragging on an on... anyway I ended up discussing the Columbia word limit with someone who has extensive Ivy adcom experience and he said not to worry about it "*at all*" (asterisks his) and decided to take his word over anonymous Internet people, although I do still worry a bit about that decision. I do agree with the gist of the comments here that total disregard for word limits doesn't reflect well on one's ability to follow directions, although I also tend to feel that directions from graduate schools (rather than departments) are to be taken with a grain of salt. I did, however, make sure that my statement didn't exceed two pages to make sure it didn't stand out *too* much. One of my departments belabored a 500 word limit extensively on their webpage, and I took them very seriously. I started from scratch and truly do feel that I lost a significant amount of substantive content and placed a lot more faith in them closely examining my CV than I felt comfortable with. Maybe I'm just a terrible writer, but for me it's a lot harder to make oneself stand out when one has to condense four years of research work into 3-4 sentences. I felt like I was just name-dropping without conveying any understanding of my potential mentors' work than couldn't have just been gleamed from a glance at the department's directory, which I think is a real no-no with these sorts of things, but oh well....

As others have suggested, documents are noramlly exempt from customs forms (no matter how much you had to pay for your transcripts). The worst that could happen would be your package being delayed by one day max if they have to open up the envelope to determine that it's just documents. You're worrying about nothing. Relax.

I'd say that's not huge.... it would have been huge if you had mentioned that professor in a statement for another school or something like that.

When I said post as a seperate thread, I meant you should click on "Sociology" at the top of this page (two lines under the logo) and then "New Topic" to start your own thread, because right now you're technically replying to someone else's post, not making your own. Since you asked, I've applied to Cornell, Chicago, Northwestern, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Indiana, North Carolina, Duke, and MIT Business/Econ Soc; don't really expect to hear back on any of them until late Feb/early March at the earliest, but will post if I hear anything earlier (that's what this board is for...).

tahagedo: You might get more replies if you post this as a seperate thread, but I'll go ahead and put in my two cents. Indiana is considered very strong in the sociology world and if you've been pulling strong grades in their soc courses that will earn a gold star for your application (not to mention great LOR's). You've already proven that you can succeed in graduate work, so your GRE score won't be too much of an issue; however, if you think you could nudge your score up towards 1300 (especially if you didn't study much the first time) it might be worthwhile to retake this summer - a higher GRE score will be particularly helpful for external funding (e.g. NSF fellowships). It's too early to say how the 2009 application season will be affected by the economic downturn, but I'd say you have a strong shot at a top-15 program, but be sure to apply widely and work hard on finding good faculty matches. None of the schools you listed are out of reach, although you might want to think twice about applying in Canada (or Minnesota for that matter) if your goal is a strong US R1 tenure track placement - the reality of our disicipline is that it's important to go to a top-15 program for stong academic job prospects. Don't know where Washington stands (I've heard conflicting arguments about whether it belongs in the top tier of programs), but staying at Indiana would probably be a good option if you can (especially because it will probably be easiest to transfer over credits from your MPA). Consult as much as you can with the soc Ph.D.'s you know at Indiana on the application process - they will probably be much more knowledgable about where you should be applying than us Internet folks, and in so doing you will be laying the groundwork for strong LOR's. Hope this helps!

If I understand your situation correctly, you're a federal STEP or SCEP (are those the right acronymns?) intern and are just trying to drag out your student status in order to continue eligibility for your position - which, having done STEP in DC before I can completely understand! If you're attending a public university with a low cost of attendance, I'd suggest that if you want to stay where you are you should just delay your graduation and take the minimum number of credits you can get away with. But if you're at American or GW or one of those outrageously-priced schools, I'd say that by all means you could take a shot at applying to some of these programs you've listed, but it wouldn't be the end of the world to take a year off. Have you discussed your situation with your supervisor? They might (should) have a feel for whether you'd be able to get your current job converted into a career position or whether you'd be likely to find work within the department as an internal candidate. It happens more than you might think - I know of an intern where I used to work who was rehired as an emergency hire based on personal connections and as far as I know is still there. Just get on it right away - your last semester will slip away before you know it. And you'd probably be a strong candidate for working at another agency or on the Hill if you were so inclined - your DHS experience should set you apart from all the Obama-obsessed grads who will be moving in this summer, especially if you start looking in the next couple months. So, anyway, if you're just seeking to keep your federal student job, I'd get on top of networking as much as possible. Those sorts of jobs are specifically designed to bring people into the federal system, and if you've been doing well they will likely want to find a way for you to stay after graduation. Also, is there any chance your agency would help pay for your degree? You should look into it and if so, definitely metnion it in your applications.

I think that depends greatly based on the program - and it's difficult to say where and how it would help. Also depends on how one defines community experience; big difference between being an officer in the sociology club and working at a think tank or some other full-time, post-graduate experience. Probably matters most for programs that are heavily invested in the public sociology "movement" (e.g. Berkeley).

Either your expectations are unrealistically low or mine are unrealistically high; those numbers (especially GPA) are probably at or above their medians. I mean, I'd concede that the chances of getting into any single given research PhD program are at best 50/50 even for the strongest applicants given all the variables at play that are out of one's control (it really seems to be random sometimes...), but I certainly wouldn't be pessimistic on the basis of a profile like that.

Thanks for sharing that - it makes me feel a lot better about all the applications I've sent out! Unfortunately one of my LOR writers has made clear that he's frustrated with me for applying to what I think is up to 18 schools now...

One of my writers still hasn't uploaded a letter for a 12/15 deadline and the department won't reply to any of my emails about it... I think that most 12/15 deadline schools will take supporting materials through the week after new year's (professors generally don't like spending their winter breaks reading application files anyway), although there's no way to know for sure unless you hear it from them.

I think that, in general for social sciences (at least poli sci and soc), a 1300 combined GRE tends to open the doors for a lot of the top ranked programs - that is, just as a very general starting point. I really have no idea about specialized criminology programs (refering to your profile specifically). The weight given to GRE's varies considerably from program to program; most would probably put more weight on research experience backed up by strong LORs. I know that, among the consistently high-ranking programs in sociology, Berkeley and Northwestern both post mean/median GRE and GPA data on their websites (although I don't quite get why Northwestern's applied verbal GRE is higher than its accepted student GRE mean... they can't seriously be getting an applicant pool that averages in the 98th percentile). I think I've seen data on the graduate school (broken down by department) websites for U Washington, Chapel Hill and Duke as well to get a sense of numbers in the 10-20 ranked departments and to compare disiciplines - you just have to search around. 'As for extracurriculars, I think the only thing you can do that carries much weight is research. Get as many RA-ships, conferences, even publications if you can in before you apply. A lot of people entering sociology programs tend to have work experience (typically not in corporate America though, more likely in the public or nonprofit sectors), although I get the impression that's more because the disicipline attracts people returning to school after a break than because adcoms are significantly predisposed towards them. Hope that helps. I really wish more of the top programs (i.e. Ivies) would post quantitative information, but that would probably reduce the application fees they get to collect from cluelessly unqualified applicants every year...

Assuming that a 3.48 translates to a respectable class rank at your institution, it shouldn't be too big of an obstacle if you're taking grad level courses. Hope you had A's in your soc courses! Top soc programs don't tend to be too GPA-obsessed from what I understand. You have very strong GRE's for sociology which should also help your case if you can make a compelling argument in your SOP for sociology with so little direct background in the disicipline. You should also be forewarned (as I'm sure you know) that the majority of soc research seems to be quantitative - some might wonder why someone who's been doing ethnography wouldn't be more interested in anthropology. I'd be suprised if you don't get into at least one so long as you made a compelling argument for research fit at each one - although all but maybe NYU are rather competititve.

I think it's a tough call... you would be selling yourself a bit short with Rutgers given your profile, but on the other hand it's very difficult to be so constrained by geography. You really have to decide if there's a faculty match there and how far from NY is too far... are you thinking of daily commuting, or just close enough to drive home on weekends? If you're searching for other respectably-ranked schools in the region, I know that SUNY Albany is fairly well ranked (25 on US News? - no idea what their deadline is though) that, if my knowledge of Northeast geography is correct, might not be too much further afield than Princeton/Yale. Maybe also Stony Brook on Long Island, although I think their program is pretty obscure.

The good news about funding is that at the programs we're both looking at some funding is virtually assured if we get in. Hopefully, anyway. (That is, assuming you're a US citizen... I know that some state schools discriminate a bit against foreign students.) I would think that most private universities will offer a strong 4-5 year funding package for a soc PhD (with the notable exception of Chicago; I know they offered one of the grad students who ended up in my department a 1/3 *tuition* scholarship on her first application and 1/2 *tuition* on her second try - so they actually expected her to pay $16k a year on top of living expenses or something like that, which I think is completely unreasonable in a field where many jobs only pay 35k a year!) And you do have at least some ability to bargain with the programs you're most interested in if you have at least one strong funding package - it's not that uncommon to ask programs to match each others' offers, so it's a good idea to have one program on your list that should be less competitive *and* has a record of providing strong funding packages. Or so I've been told. As for the straight-from-undergrad issue, I really don't know why so few sociology undergrads go straight to grad school and why so many grad students have extensive work histories. At my school sociology has a bit of a reputation as an athlete major; a lot of our students really have no idea what they're doing... which makes it really hard to organize the department's undergraduate events. So maybe there's just not many of us interested in applying out of undergrad? I've been told by multiple professors not to worry about applying as an undergrad (at least the departments know we're more likely to be happy living on a grad stipend if we've never had "real" jobs, and thus more likely to finish - so maybe we're "safer" in a sense). That's interesting about being able to apply to both programs at Harvard - perhaps my advisor was misinformed. He said that many of the people he knew who had done social policy were disappointed with it, although it does open some doors. I'll take another look at the application... I have to get around to it at some point before January 2nd I suppose! And good luck with the NSF... I would have applied if I wasn't completely swamped with coursework this fall. And you've got 2 more tries if you don't get it this time!

My list of Soc programs is very similar to yours (7 overlaps) and my profile is similar as well (exact same major GPA, Q, and AW score; really just replace liberal arts college with big-state research university...). I'm really worried about the economy this year, I know my university's program (not one you mentioned) is likely to cut funded admission slots this year and I *know* we're not the only program hurting right now - in fact I would say that the anticipation of funding problems was my deciding factor in not applying to Wisconsin and Michigan, and makes me pessimistic about Berkeley. Thankfully sociology is one of the less competitive fields in the social sciences, so I'm hopeful about getting into a top 10-15 program (you've really got the top 10 in your list, save maybe Cornell or North Carolina) and I would be hopeful about your chances as well - very few sociology majors have extensive research backgrounds as an undergrad. On the other hand, I know that something like 14 out of 17 in my university's cohort this year entered with post-BA work experience, so I do worry that coming straight from undergrad may be a disadvantage (but not worth taking time off to me - I know I'd get bored really fast if I wasn't in school). I felt like I'd be more comfortable with a "safety" on my list, so I added Indiana - despite being in flyover country, it has a reputation as an up-and-coming department with a strong social policy/labor/economic soc concentration (my specialities) - similar logic motivated my application to Duke. I also decided against NYU because it's on the finges of the top 15 (i.e. there's disagreement about whether it belongs in the top tier of programs -> not great placement) and NYU has some serious university-level problems with funding grad students, not to mention the lack of a strong research fit. As for Harvard, I've been advised to just apply for their sociology department directly and not bother with social policy since admissions to the social policy program is extremely competitive (even by Harvard standards - they only take 2 a year and Harvard only lets you apply to one program if I read the application correctly - you have to pick between general soc and social policy) and you can take the same social policy classes and do the same social policy research as a "normal" soc grad student there. The way I see it, why risk not getting into Harvard at all just for the sake of getting to take a few extra seminars that have a reputation for being extremely dry anyway? Sorry for the extremely long reply; I just got excited by seeing someone else with a similar profile. What subfield do you specialize in?

Your stats are pretty good; I'm suprised you had such poor results last year. However, the funding situation will probably be particularly poor at public universities this year (especially in the University of California system), so it might be worthwhile to diversify your list of programs a bit if you have your heart set on starting next fall - Yale and NYU are the only ones on your list where I'd say you would almost certainly be funded if admitted. There are a few good large-endowment schools out there that you might want to consider with deadlines that haven't passed yet; one that you might be a good fit for (given your interests and life experience profile) in particular is Johns Hopkins. Good luck!

Being published will be a big leg-up that few applicants have in sociology. Although your GRE scores are a bit on the low side, being an international student nobody will expect a marvelous verbal score. If you really are struggling with English, though, you might consider taking a year to really focus on being able to communicate in English before applying, especially since those big-state schools may want you to teach undergrads (at my institution that is the main reason we require the TSE in addition to TOEFL). Also, all the sociology programs you listed are rather competitive, you might be well served to conder some lower-ranked programs. Finally, it's a definite red flag that you failed or withdrew from graduate level courses. You will need to have a comeplling excuse for those grades; a B is considered de facto failing in some US programs, so you will need expain why the schools you're interested in shoud be confident that you will complete your PhD this time around.

The nonconformists comment was supposed to be tounge-in-cheek (I had just been reading a disucssion on a forum about how grad students with straight A's are viewed unfavorably by some as risk-averse). But I like this quote! And, for what it's worth, my statement's now down to 1300...

Yeah, I know I'm taking a risk by abusing the word limit, but with the deadline three days away and my mentors swamped with finals to grade, I really don't have a choice but to submit what I have at this point, and it's a risk balanced against not fully conveying what I need to... Anyway, I just won a fellowship in which I was way over the word limit, so long applications don't *always* get "chucked" and I thought that successful grad students were supposed to be nonconformists!

While I see where some of the posters are coming from here, I simply don't view Columbia's directions as reasonable here. I am probably going to be very ignorant of Columbia's 500 word limit guideline. I mean, seriously, most of my statements have been running around 1700 words (I have a lot of research experience that seems worth describing in some detail plus I have to explain why I'm changing disiciplines) and other than a few sentences in the conclusion I really can't identify anything in there that's not adding something to the application. And I just noticed this limit when I logged into their application a few days ago (for a 12/15 deadline); if they were truly serious about it, I would think there would be something on the departmental website - somehow I have a feeling this requirement came from the grad school and not the specific department I'm applying to. I might cut out some of the results of my research to get down to 1200-ish, but then I'd just be restating my CV, supposedly another SOP no-no... I'm sure people neglect to notice Columbia's limit or notice it so late that there's nothing they can co all the time, so I won't worry too much about it. And I'll probably reduce my font size/line spacing/margins on Columbia to keep it under 2 pages... just to make it seem like less of an outlier.