sleepycat

So I was right. lol *fingers crossed I'm part of the 8*

Must be department policy because my POI didn't get back to me. I hope I get a phone call soon. *takes deep breaths*

I totally agree with the sediment about wanting to burn down the place at a top 10 because I challenge things like crazy. I do get there is very traditional scholars on the forums and that is good in its own right and that may get you into Princeton, but I seek to challenge and move the discipline forward and at Princeton, it is more about reporting data then challenging norms. I might get challenged at NYU if I get in, although I made it very clear about my intentions in my ps and I will assume they agree with my projects if they let me in.

Epic, I think you offended practically everyone that could not get into or did not go to a Top 10. Sure you get a lot of freedom where you can teach, and prestige is everything, but not everyone can get into Top 10 nor aspires to be there. This is obviously a problem in academia and frankly, the elite ivory tower needs to be taken down a notch and realize sometimes it is not just where you went for grad school, but the quality of your publications and ideas. The ivory tower will protect its own, but that is only a group of only a small group of scholars.

I can first hand experience that there is a shift. I noticed several programs are taking a wide variety of students and disciplines. This is really great for me because I have a background in interdisciplinary studies. Also I use ideas from other disciplines and see how they fit within sociology and the social sciences at large. I think that by staying within one discipline we loose different ways to study current phenomena as the traditional methods could be loosing some flexible and liquidness of what we are studying now.

big foot

omg I love the image lmao

I did too. lol When you think we will hear back because I am dying right now to hear anything?

peanut brittle

Anyone applying to UCSC? Am I alone? :'( Oh well better pool then!

I love playing Second Life, great place to study too. I really like reading and try to read everyday, but I haven't been reading in the past week for whatever reason. I love forums like GradCafe and I am currently writing an article on them. I like to watch CSI (all three) and sometimes Project runway. Sometimes I play the Sims 3. I also love love love sleeping, hence the username. lol Also going to the beach in the Santa Cruz area, although it wasn't the reason why I applied to UCSC.

I think where I base my data is my school's training, at least in the way I see it, and how many people actually go to graduate school (We are ranked 38/153 of alumni in 2007 that pursue soc phds.) My friend, however, who goes to the same school says it more has to do with the fact we attract lots of private high school kids who are better prepared for college and by extension, grad school. I think this also has to do with what major you are picking because others will naturally lead to an advance degree over, like psych. idk my goal to go to grad school was largely set from my second year of college so perhaps that is blinding my vision.

My school trained me very well in methods and theory and I have a BA. In the Soc program, there were two, quant and qual, and in Anthro, ethnographic methods. There is even a methods course for community involvement. Two theory course for soc and one for anthro. I think it depends on what level the university/college is at. My UG school was big in the social sciences so there was that and we are top 40 liberal arts with our consortium top 5, 10, 25. I think the higher they go the more the focus grows on academic and training future scholars rather then training a workforce.

As I was rejected five times, I know the feeling of rejection really well. First you get mad, then comes the anxiety, then comes the realization that you weren't a good fit, after four times in a row you are mad at the universe. The fifth makes you wonder if you are doing the right thing in the first place and decide to take a break for awhile, but you don't take a break from your reading or thinking and realize you actually like and feel passionate about your goals. You think more realistically and continue to march ahead despite five rejections. In a way, you grow and really put a lot of effort into your applications and it makes everything better regardless about how the application comes out. The next school is lucky #6 of the school you applied to and know that means better times are ahead.

I think i know which program.

As one who does Qualitative, religion/culture, and technology/media studies, plus a slightly more public/activist bent to my research, I found it tough to find programs that have overlap of the four, but of those three I have found I have applied. I usually have to apply to big programs because religion and technology are up and coming subfields and aren't as common as immigration and gender. I have applied to two great fits and one good/great fit. I think fit is tough to figure out on our end because we have no clue on what the criteria is for the specific POIs are looking for or why we were rejected in the first place. I am sure it is tough to get the POI to admit that criteria to us and I wish there was more transparency on decisions considering we drive ourselves nuts during this process. I have a feeling we will understand that process once we are all on adcomms if we teach at universities.

got my degree last year and currently unemployed but I am reading like mad, both Sociology/theory and fiction. However, i am itching to go back to school so :/. I also am working on an article to submit to a non-sociology journal.

linear analysis

Looking at the grad students page can give an indication if this is true of the department. I didn't apply to Boston U because of it and I know BU, Columbia and Brandeis prefer an MA for the Phd. program.

Technically, I graduated with a interdisciplinary degree that I created that included the soc and anthro in the social sciences and religion in the humanities, so I picked degree in social science and humanities. I also see a shift in what is being done in the LGBTQI sector where it is shifting to more of a Sociology of Sexuality, analyzing behavior and the like, vs. queer theory. Personally I like the critical theory based stuff because it validates my experience of the world (I'm LGBTQI) and my research on categories comes from my problematic relationship with them. I really like this poll because it shows how diverse the forums here are and by extension the rest of the field.

silence for me means they haven't started sending out stuff

chocolate shake

I am almost strictly qualitative. I come from an Anthro background, so there is that. I also really like the richness of the type of data I get from the process. One of my most frustrating talents is observation, largely because you can't win trophies with it. I feel mood and environments, so I can pick up what is going on really well. It needs some more work because I can tell you something innately but I can't describe it well. I also have a strong visual memory. I am a qualitative methodologist. I am currently looking at new ways to process observation data, through the use of social metadata/tags and tag clouds, on which I wrote my thesis on. The idea is still in the development phase, although it is coming together. My other project looks at researcher reflexivity and our relationship with our subjects and seeing if that can be reframed within working with our subjects rather working on, for, or against. I have a love/hate relationship with quant because numbers make me go a little hazy and I recently learned interpreting regression lines at school, but can see where they would be beneficial.

I sent an email similar to the one posted above to my NYU POI. I didn't get a response though. :/ Santa Cruz was very forward in saying it is not the best idea to do so.

the wait right now is killing me. I want to hear back from someone, but I have to wait patiently I guess. I hear back from UCSC next week and the week after that NYU and then a few more weeks, UMass