FertMigMort

What surprised me the most: I think it was the GRE cutoff. I never wanted to believe it existed even though I had suspected all along. Also how much the GRE was even discussed. I feel very lucky that I got such a high score on my first time around and never had to take it again. It seems silly to me that a bad score on one 4 hour test can really control which schools you can reasonably get into. Fellow reviewer's opinions: How differently each application could be read. I would read one application and think "heck no!" and then show up and have other people say "heck yes!", sometimes for the same reasons that I was against an applicant. I think that's the value in having discussion and not having 1 person making all of the application decisions. Questions you haven't asked: I actually think y'all have covered many of the questions that will help you the most. If I think of others, I will post them. What I would have changed on my own applications: Probably my statement of purpose. I didn't tailor them as much to each school as I should/could have. I think I did a good job on explaining deficits in my application, but I basically substituted each school's name into a couple of slots and used the same SOP each time. That was clearly a mistake now, but given how many similar applications we got this year like that, it's not something that's widely understood. Part of that was because I wasn't sure why I wanted to go to graduate school, other than desiring a Ph.D. and having a lot of smart people telling me that I should go. I also think I would have done even more research than I did ahead of time. Although I checked out school's websites, I now know that that information isn't always updated frequently and doesn't have details like that imaginary department that you mentioned. There's no way to tell by looking at a department's website if the person you really want to work with wants to move closer to their family and has been looking for open spots on the East Coast. Or if a young hotshot is about to get poached from a school that can offer them more. Or if a 4th year professor failed a tenure review and is on probation. I would email DGSs, graduate students, and professors I was interested in working in to get a feel for a department before I applied. I get several of these emails/visits each year in the fall and I never mind answering questions. The distribution: I think this is tied to fit. It was brought up several times in the meeting too, like "hey, isn't X retiring soon?" as a reason that someone might not be as happy here. I wouldn't say that anyone was precluded from admission because of it though. The one exception might be in smaller specialties. So if a department is really heavy on culture and only has 2 gender people, the people applying for gender might have a slightly harder time getting in. I would advise people applying to work with 1 person in a department to have contact with that person BEFORE applying and to widen their interests so they can work with more than just that one person. Like in the example I just gave, find an intersection of gender AND culture that could make you more appealing to that department than someone who just studied gender. As for your hypothetical situation, I'm not sure what our committee would have done. We seemed to get plenty of great applications in any strong area that we had, so we had no problem filling slots with great people. I don't know if that's what normally happens or if it would play out like you mentioned. I hope it would be the latter. Great questions! Thanks for the compliment.

Wow, that surprises me. I had a friend admitted to NYU a few years ago that declined almost immediately after getting the financial package. It's better than Northwestern, Rice, or any of the Ivys?

Slightly off-topic, but here is a link to a discussion about GRE scores as cutoffs for admission with some peer-reviewed citations. A cursory reading of the literature makes it sound like GREs are thought to predict something, but it's by no means clear cut. Because not everyone that takes the GRE applies to graduate school, you have some inherent bias in the statistics because of attrition. I haven't come across any literature that conclusively states what the cutoff for a GRE should be to predict the best outcomes (even this is vague! What is a good outcome for one person isn't for another) for graduate students.

I think this echoes my experience, with my school being one that doesn't seem to have an age cutoff.

I completely concur about this point. That's the most valuable thing that I learned from my service was how arbitrary the process is. The next time I don't win a fellowship or grant, I'm not going to beat myself up about it as much, because this whole process is run by subjective human beings pretending to be objective. There is an unknown criteria that seems to make some students stand out and others not as much. I wish I could articulate better what it was. Thank you! I am wondering how my DGS would feel if she read these posts. I haven't violated any rules, but people seem to want to maintain secrecy to make it seem more serious. I feel like my service just enables me to give better and more specific advice for people applying about things like SOPs. I wish I had known all of these things when I was applying to graduate school, my 4 admissions now seem more like luck and a great GRE score than anything else. The GRE cutoff totally matters. I wish it didn't, but it does. Study hard for that thing. I think my 327 got me into schools that otherwise wouldn't have considered my low GPA and odd background.

I have been wondering this too! Unfortunately, I am not privy to that part of the process, so I have no idea why that would be the case. We have a waitlist, but I have no idea if its secret or public or if the students on the waitlist know. I would be really frustrated too. My only guess is that it's because of funding. You'd still think they could tell you that you were admitted though! Good luck waiting, I hope this was a small distraction for you.

Age: Age was never discussed or mentioned in any of our committee's conversations. Our department has several older students and we generally have a range of ages from year to year. I think that is just the norm for us, but it may differ elsewhere. If anything, I think that younger students are sometimes seen as not having enough experience, although it's usually not framed in terms of age. I personally can't think of a reason why I wouldn't admit an older student if they had a good fit and I thought they could succeed in our program. Switching fields: This one is tough. We had a remarkable range of applicants from a variety of backgrounds. That was probably one of the most surprising aspects of my service. (I'm unsure why, because I had a non-traditional background as well!) I think the most important thing for people switching fields is that they "fit" within the department. Our department lends itself nicely to people coming from certain disciplines that are sometimes coupled with sociology and sometimes separate. Other departments are similar, but with different disciplines. For example, I have a friend whose background is in psychology, but is getting his PhD in a sociology department with a heavy social psych focus. In that case, it's a clear issue of him being a good fit for his department. We definitely took things into account like LORs from certain disciplines tend to be... less effusive than sociology. *cough* ECONOMICS *cough* So when we read those LORs, we tried to keep that in mind. Overall.... and I'm not sure if this gets at all of the aspects of your question, it really goes back to fit. When an applicant proposes research that can be done well in our department, the committee rarely quibbled about their background.

Happy to demystify some of this process! Undergrad rankings: I can honestly say I don't think this was ever mentioned. The only exception might be if you come from a department with a very strong SOC program. The LORs were much more carefully scrutinized from those schools. If a Bob Hummer, Bob Wuthnow, or Marta Tienda wrote you a mediocre letter, that was definitely looked at harder. In some ways it's almost a disadvantage to come out of a strong SOC undergrad, unless you were really a shining star there. We never saw a part-time undergrad transcript that I can remember, so I can't comment on that. I will ask friends on other adcomms and PM you if I know anything different.

You're welcome! LORs: I wish I could allay your fears, but unfortunately we did get some lukewarm letters of recommendation. We never had one come out and say "don't admit this person", but it was clear when the letter was tepid. The general feeling on the committee was that the student was to blame because they chose the wrong person to write a letter. I disagree and would never write a LOR for anyone if I couldn't write them a strong letter. Other LOR red flags: If you are on your Masters and don't have a LOR from your thesis chair or if none of your letters are from sociologists. If you are an international student, you should have at least one letter from someone in the U.S. if possible. I can't really think of anything that hinders in a letter. It helped when there was some sort of deficit to have the LOR explain why. For example, we had several LORs mention that the person's low GRE score wasn't representative of the kind of work they did in class. That was very helpful.

We were more interested in the Master's GPA, and in general the GPA didn't matter unless it was low. The GPA was rarely discussed at our meetings, which surprised me. We were more interested in grades for classes that we felt were important prerequisites for our program.

Pre-sorting: I read every single application until I got to the point I felt they were disqualified. So for example, if I was reading an application and someone had a low GRE and then mentioned a substantive research interest that we didn't have any faculty in, I would quit reading. Sometimes people would get low enough scores from the whole committee that we didn't discuss them further in a meeting. The exception would be if someone wanted to argue for them as a candidate. In the case of a 297 GRE, that's below the cutoff, and probably wouldn't have merited larger discussion unless the applicant was very strong in other areas. Order of reading: I just read them in the order the materials came in. It was roughly the order you described though. Common mistakes: Not identifying WHY they wanted to come to our institution! Several people that were otherwise strong candidates were sunk by a very vague personal statement statement. (See my definition in a response above) I can't think of one single disqualifier other than the GRE cutoff, which was imposed by the graduate school rather than the committee. Even if someone had a low GRE score, if they had an otherwise great application, they were usually an admit. People with poor fit were almost never admitted though, regardless of how great their GREs/GPA were. Research experience: Yes! This was VERY important to the faculty members of the committee. They were extremely impressed by publications (this was almost required for people coming in with an M.A.) and research experience. I also thought research experience was important. Examples of things I'd consider research experience: internship in undergrad, working in a lab/with a professor as an undergrad, and senior honors theses. That said, if you don't have any research experience, I think if you explained why in your personal statement, it wouldn't be a deal killer. Maybe you had to work your way through college or came late to sociology. For undergraduates, publications were icing on the cake. For masters students, they were more of a necessity. I consulted with a friend who was on an adcomm at another school and she said that publications were weighted more heavily in their considerations. It probably differs from school to school. When in doubt, ask the director of graduate studies before you apply. Were there people with great scores/recs/writing samples/everything else who weren't let in because of poor fit? YES!

Fit: It's a combination of these things. I looked at what the applicant had identified as their future area of study and then looked at their background to try and ascertain if they would succeed in our program. So for example, does the person have a strong background in the kind of social science that our institution is known for? Or are they interested in a different school of thought? If someone wants to study theory from a Marxist perspective, but they apply to a school that rejects Marx (I am clearly not a theorist, but go with it) then I would consider that a bad fit, even though they want to study theory. Many people didn't delineate exactly WHY they thought they were a good fit. I usually was looking for a sentence to highlight to remember why I thought someone was a good fit. The best ones were really straightforward, something like "I would be an excellent graduate student at X College because of my strengths in x, y, z." International applicants: Here is an area where I'm not sure our department is the norm among other institutions. Because we've recently had international students leave the program, I thought certain people on the committee were more gun shy about admitting them than perhaps they were in the past. That's an impression, because I wasn't on the committee in other years. I personally weighted them the same way I did applicants from the U.S. One complication is that some streams of funding aren't available to international candidates, so I think that putting together a financial package for them is sometimes more difficult. (Again, an impression, since I had very little to do with the financial part.) I was probably looking at their English writing skills more closely when English wasn't the first language, but I definitely took off points if an English only student had a crappy writing sample too.

When you get to your dissertation stage, everyone will say stuff like "make sure you're telling a story" and give very little feedback about how to do that. I found fit to be a similar concept. So I'll just say what I think fit consists of. 1. Can I think of at least 5 potential members for your dissertation/thesis committee? 2. Do your mentioned research interests line up with the whole trajectory of our department? Now faculty members on the committee had different opinions. Many of them thought that people's research interests were flexible and might change. I went back to my statement of purpose and read it again, looked at my dissertation topic, and decided that I was going to stick with my definition of fit. We definitely took into account the department as whole when admitting students. For example, if we had several advanced students graduating in a sub-area like gender, we looked for more admits with strong interests in gender. We also have several grants that provide funding that we have to consider and try to identify students who will match up with these interests. I'm not sure if that fully answers your question, but feel free to follow-up either on this board or through PM.

Weakest application: We had many from people that had almost no English skills from abroad. Those were without a doubt the weakest. They generally had no background in social science and rarely provided a clear reason for wanting to study sociology. What stood out: I remembered the personal statements the most. So when we discussed people we'd say stuff like "oh was that the guy who did research in India?" or "didn't she speak Farsi?". Sometimes that was a bad thing, because people had written about... memorable but inappropriate topics in their personal statements. GREs: Unfortunately... it matters. There was an overall cutoff provided to us by the graduate school. We couldn't accept people below that cutoff. Overall, I got the sense that there was pressure to admit people with higher GRE scores. When people had lower GRE scores, their personal statements/GPAs/etc. became MUCH more important. This is one of the things I was most frustrated by, because there were several people we couldn't consider because of their GREs, but I thought they would be outstanding in our program. The overall score matters, but the parts mattered too. Almost no one brought up the writing score unless the person's native language wasn't in English. The quantitative score was discussed more frequently because we have a very heavy required stats sequence. When someone had a low quant score, that was often raised as a warning flag. I will add a caveat about the GREs. I don't know if other top 20 programs are as strict in admitting people below a cutoff score. I can only judge by my own admissions and the experiences of other friends in top 20 programs and on adcomms. The sense that I get is that cutoffs are still pretty common. So if you have a dream program, try to find out what that cutoff is (they usually have statistics about the average GRE score). How are the writing samples judged, like what are people looking for? So there are three kinds of personal statements. 1. The super vague: These almost always mention C. Wright Mills and a moment where someone realized they wanted to study sociology. I love CWM, but it's also something that SO many people mention that it instantly makes you forgettable. That isn't to say that if you mention him that you won't get in, but it's definitely a cliche. 2. The wildly personal: I tried to come up with a rule like "would you tell this story to a stranger on a bus", but people have different levels of sharing. If it's something you might talk about in therapy, you probably shouldn't write about it in your personal statement. You might be incredulous, but I assure you, these were COMMON. They are memorable, but also risky. Sometimes the risk pays off (you lived in a yurt in Mongolia for 4 years) and sometimes they aren't (stories about suicide, sexual abuse, etc.). 3. The just-right: A memorable anecdote that helped me remember them and a strong command of grammar, English language, etc. This might be contentious, because I'm sure some people will say "oh I'd tell a stranger that!" but you have to remember that this is your one impression on a group of people. Higher education can be slightly snobbish and some topics are just NOT discussed. None of these rules are 100% right all of the time. I'm sure we admitted someone with a vague statement and a stellar GRE score and didn't admit someone with a bad fit but an outstanding personal statement. Things I looked for in the personal statement: identification of faculty members they wanted to work with, clear definition of research interests (you don't need to state your intention to study fertility preferences among American Indians in South Dakota, but you should mention that you're interested in domestic fertility or something like that), and why they wanted to attend THIS school. Things I looked for in the writing sample: indicators of ability to do research, correctly interpreted statistics, interesting research problem

I frequently do this to get more bang for my buck out of each paper. I find it especially helpful when submitting to a large conference such as ASA and then to a smaller specialty conference like SSSR. SSSR is a great conference by the way, I went to one a few years back as a co-author and was extremely impressed with the feedback I received. I can't think of any potential pitfalls, but maybe other students have a different insight.

Finally! I hit a big milestone at the end of February; now I can sit down, take the time to write this post, and quickly respond to comments. I was originally going to set this up as an “AMA” a la Reddit, but there are a few things that I can’t/won’t answer to maintain my anonymity and to comply with the rules of my adcomm. I am a graduate student at a top 20 ranked university (top 20 ranking overall and in a sub-area). I am advanced in my program and have many friends at other top schools that I've met at conferences or know from my undergraduate institution. If there is something that I don't know the answer to, I will say that, and if I can, I will consult with other graduate students who I know on adcomms. Here is an outline of my service on the admissions committee. Back in the fall, I was selected as a student representative to be on the committee. There is a 2:1 faculty/student ratio in addition to the DGS. We began reviewing applications shortly after the final deadline passed and met weekly until we had looked over all the applications. The committee was given rough outlines of how to grade the applicants, but some of us created additional criteria we thought important. For example, one person on the committee was really looking at transcripts for certain classes taken in undergraduate. I personally valued “fit”, which I weighted more heavily in my final score. At the meetings, we would look at the average of the committee’s score of each applicant. The DGS directed the proceedings and we used general cutoffs to admit students. When there was strong disagreement (i.e. 50/50 split) we would discuss candidates further. I felt like I had a strong voice to argue for and against any candidate, although we were sometimes constrained by arbitrary cutoffs put in place by the university’s graduate school. Ask me (almost) anything you like!

Do a cost estimate one month where you see how much food costs you. If $350 covers your food, then that package might work for you. If it doesn't, take that into account. Grad school can be grueling and there have been long periods of time where I was eating what was convenient even if it was more expensive. I also buy myself "incentives" to help motivate myself. You're the only person that will know how you budget and what you spend things on, but I recommend leaving room in there for something a little extra. A nice dinner once a week or a new CD once a month or whatever.

Way to go! That's probably the most or one of the most competitive program in the country (in terms of percent admitted).

Try not to let it happen again? Man, I'm so glad that the calling thing didn't happen when I was applying. Back then it was more about emails, which were awkward enough to write. Then, now, and probably forever. Re: Wisconsin, I got admission letter yesterday. FYI, it says that starting this year they are admitting far fewer students because they're only admitting as many as they can guarantee full funding for five years.

Out of curiosity, what's the difference between CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center? Also, congrats to everyone on your admits! Enjoy this feeling!

I'd echo this thought. However, current grad students are (almost) always good resources for this kind of info. Either email them now (I've received these emails in the past and this year) or ask to talk to them over the weekend one on one. I don't have any problem answering very direct questions from prospects. My view is that being up front with people is going to reduce attrition later and lead to happy, productive colleagues.

I can second this. I know people at UT Austin that have been told that they no longer want people to comp in religion as one of their major areas. This is echoed by Ellison's move to UTSA and someone else that I'm blanking on at the moment.

Thank you jacib, that means a lot to me. I try to be the same anonymously as I am in real life: respectful, honest, and straight-forward. I will say that our DGS told me that she looks at the forum sometimes. While on adcomm it didn't play a role at all, but as I said, during recruiting we use it as a tool to figure out how we can make more competitive offers.

You might find this blog post helpful: http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/sociology-faculty-in-leading-departments-analysis-by-daniel-schneider/ He also cites Val Burris's article, which is quite dated now, but found that prestige mattered in hiring. My personal understanding is that rankings do matter somewhat in hiring (I've been a student representative on a hiring committee) and that YMMV when it comes to subfield rankings.

It varies by department. I was a member of the admissions committee, which included reviewing applications, etc. I spend so much time trying to make my dissertation clear that I'm sure that my online posts aren't always clear either. No big deal. I always tried to be up front with that because sometimes people post things and when I was recruiting, I used that information to my advantage where I could. For example, if I knew that someone visited another school and they talked about it on the boards and then they came to my school and wouldn't share that information, I knew which tidbits to drop about our school to make it look more attractive. I think the other reason I hammer this home is because I'm about to go on the job market and I'm super paranoid these days.