hoobers

Depending on the strength of your record, a lack of Soc coursework should not be a problem. Do apply to more programs: the extra time/application fee is quite minor compared to the costs of your overall education. Keep MA programs as a last fallback.

You're potentially in excellent shape, assuming your record is otherwise strong enough to get into top programs. The quant skills will help your chances with just about any top department. A soc class wouldn't hurt and would demonstrate you've thought about the discipline switch seriously, but it is not necessary. If you took an econ soc course it would be even better. You can also demonstrate this in a strong statement of purpose. Have a good argument for why economic sociology is a better fit for you than econ, and do this without either badmouthing or praising econ too much.

It's pretty hard to translate GPAs between countries. I don't know anything about Turkey's system, but there is a chance that high grades are much harder to get there than here. I would ask around to see if that is the case. If so, point this out in your application. But the best thing you can do to make up for a low GPA is high GREs. GPAs are notoriously hard to compare between different departments and schools, even within the United States. If you can manage to get a high GRE score, you should be able to convince the ad com that the GRE is the real indicator of your intellectual abilities. Good luck!

GRE scores are pretty important, but if the rest of your record is awesome then you should be able to get away with claiming that you just test poorly. How seriously a department takes the GRE differs a lot from school to school and from year to year, based on who is on the admissions committee. So just make sure you are applying to a whole lot of departments so that you hit some admissions committees that don't take GREs too seriously. From what you say about your record, it seems like you have a great shot.

I see from your profile that you are from Turkey. Public schools often have a hard time funding people who are not US citizens. Some simply aren't allowed to do it, or have very restricted funds for it. Also a lot of public universities have different tuitions for in-state and out-of-state students, which means that it would cost the department more to support you. This differs from school to school and is worth looking into. If you email the departments that interest you and ask for funding for non-citizens, they will probably tell you. Private schools rarely face either of these restrictions.

Pick up an American Journal of Sociology or American Sociological Review and read those. That's the kind of work that you need to be doing if you are interested in participating in the disciplinary conversation. To the extent that sociology has a core, it isn't the classical theorists that often get paraded as such--at least, not if you judge by contemporary publications. Unless you are actually specifically interested in classical theory (or history of sociology), there isn't too much reason to know them deeply. You'll almost certainly read enough of them in your graduate career to know them at the surface level at which they are usually used. Rather, the de-facto consensual center of the disciplinary conversation is a set of methodological (mostly statistical) tools for answering empirical questions, and a set of epistemological principles that underlies those. Some 75% of the work in the major journal relies on them, and it would help your career to understand them deeply. However, most people have trouble studying methodology on their own until they've already gotten a fair amount of training in it, so it's ok to wait this stuff out. Everything else is Balkanized among the subfields (though some theoretical ideas are used by many subfields: for example, network analysis is on its way to joining linear regression as a central method). Other than the stats and the first-year courses in social theory, most of the reading you'll be doing in grad school will be specific to your subfield. The better you know it, the faster you can start contributing to it: so it's useful to start reading it early. However, if you're going to read something outside of your subfield, you might as well read material from another discipline. You'll have less chance to do so in grad school, and there's a chance it'll teach you something novel to "import" into soc.

The list isn't up yet, but if you search for your name, you *sometimes* get it. It's only worked twice for me now, out of 20 attempts or so (keep on reloading it in hopes that only one copy of the award shows up, to remove the doubt that this is a bug!!)

No idea what's going on--4x entries for me, with both my BA and PhD schools in all caps and not. But: it says I got it? Should I believe it?

The three best things you can study in undergrad to prepare yourself for academic research are: (1) Statistics (2) Computer science (3) Other mathematics This isn't to say that quantitative skills will necessarily be useful for your future career as a researcher: plenty of social scientists do purely qualitative research. However, quantitative skills are both more broadly useful than anything else you could spend your time learning, and also the most difficult to pick up on the spot if you haven't had the proper preparation. It's a shame that most soc BA programs don't require a year of stats and a year of computer programming. Soc undergrads would have a much easier time getting jobs out there in the world if they did.

Carter Butts is probably the best person in the world to get a social networks training from. He's at the head of his field right now, works very closely with all of his students, and has truly insane amounts of research funding. His adviser at CMU was Kathleen Carley, who was quite strong in the 90s, but he is far ahead of her now. The only caveat about the UCI program is that you end up pretty far outside of the mainstream of sociology, so it's not the best place to go if you final goal is to teach at a top-tier sociology department (even if you intend to specialize in soc nets). But since this really doesn't sound like your goal, go with UCI.

My undergrad is in a STEM field, and I think it actually helped me a lot during applications. Most social science undergrad programs have laughably bad math/stats training. Since a deep understanding of quantitative methods requires (at least) calculus, probability theory and linear algebra, a STEM BS is probably a better preparation for sophisticated quantitative social research than a sociology BA. As long as you're not applying to be trained as an ethnographer, this should give you a big boost during admissions process. The only caveat is that you might have to try a bit harder to show that you (1) know what sociology is and (2) have really committed to being trained as a sociologist.

Your numbers are strikingly similar to what mine were when I was applying to schools, and it sounds like even the "qualitative" parts of our records arepretty similar. I got into about half of the schools I applied to, all of which were top programs, including a number from your list. I have a lot of confidence that many grad programs are willing to overlook bad GPA if you have stellar GRE + strong letters of rec. So, I think you're in good shape! And, in retrospect, my personal statement was pretty awful, so that should give you some confidence, too... though decidedly *not* the license to write an awful personal statement, I hope . My two pieces of advice are: (a.) to apply to more than just those 5 schools. I would at least add Berkeley and Stanford to the list, since they are both strong both in econ soc and overall. And also perhaps Chicago and UNC or UCLA. Your record is strong enough to probably not need second-tier backups (though your profs would have a better sense of this), but do apply to more first-tier schools just in case. and (b.) get a prof or at least an advanced grad student to glance at your personal statement if you can. I mean, I am looking back at mine now, and maaaaan I wish someone would have told me how bad it was. I can just imagine the confused looks on the faces of the admissions committee when they read it. The academic habitus seems so easy once you get it, and is apparently so hard to fake when you do not... (though I suspect admissions committees may be ready for this) Best of luck!

You are right, given how bad NRC scores are in general, the GRE scores are probably not that trustworthy either. Those particular numbers don't seem overly sketch to me, though. Do you think they are too low?

You definitely don't have to have very good GREs to get in, but they do matter a lot if you are applying to the top departments. I can only speak for my own department (which is top 15), but I know from a prof on our admissions committee that they give GREs more weight than any single other piece of information. A good friend in another soc program (also top 15) says that he heard the same from the faculty there. The admissions process is of course very qualitative, so there are no hard-and-fast rules, but it makes sense why GREs would come out as the top criterion: they are far easier to judge than either the quality of letters of rec or of statements of purpose, and are more reliable than undergrad GPAs (because of grade inflation and lack of standardization). By the way, though the NRC rankings are pretty ridiculous, but I bet that the average departmental GRE scores they report are probably correct (hopefully, they got these scores directly from ETS?). Anyway, they only have the average quantitative score, but you can see what it is for any graduate program: http://tiny.cc/pzc6i . To save you some clicks, here are some average quant GREs for the top 5 programs (top by US N&W ranking, that is): 726 for Berkeley, 706 for Wisconsin, 733 for Princeton, 724 for Michigan, 722 for Harvard. Now, let's look at the 20th through 24th program: 668 for Penn State, 665 for Arizona, 654 for Maryland, 661 for Minnesota, 734 for Yale. So, with the exception of Yale, it really looks pretty consistent with the programs sorting the applicants by GRE score. Of course, this single score isn't enough for a rigorous analysis of interactions among admissions criteria--but what's certain is that the top-5 programs don't take too many students with low quant GREs.

Thanks for calling. I wonder why they are dithering on it. Maybe they can award them out of the existing budget, but would rather not?