Ladril

Questions you must ask yourself: are they people who publish routinely with students? (some sacred cows never do). Are they people who have a reputation for being difficult to deal/work with? Don't be afraid to do research on this. If the answer is no to the first question and yes for the second, you should definitely reconsider your choice of program. 
 
The above may sound obvious, but way too many people make decisions based only on name and prestige. That is a mistake.

Questions you must ask yourself: are they people who publish routinely with students? (some sacred cows never do). Are they people who have a reputation for being difficult to deal/work with? Don't be afraid to do research on this. If the answer is no to the first question and yes for the second, you should definitely reconsider your choice of program. 
 
The above may sound obvious, but way too many people make decisions based only on name and prestige. That is a mistake.

Any department with a lots of sociologists interested in "culture" would be a good fit.

PhD in Network Science at Northeastern University can probably be useful to some people here:
 
http://www.northeastern.edu/networkscience/

This is an old thread, but I could not find any that are more suitable, so here it goes.
 
Northeastern University has a new PhD program in Network Science (http://www.northeastern.edu/networkscience/). The program is interdisciplinary, and there are a lot of scholars participating who are into the study of social networks (Albert-László Barabási, Alessandro Vespignani, David Lazer, and Alan Mislove). I am not affiliated with the program or the university in any way, but I think I'd drop this here. It may be a good option instead of a Sociology program if you are into social networks analysis.
 
http://www.northeastern.edu/networkscience/

Geological Society of America

Well...AGU, AAG, GSA...and now my mind is drawing a blank.  This website has a pretty good list: http://www.geosociety.org/links/
The three I listed are generally considered the "top" in the US. 

For those of you who like Prof. Stephen Castles: 
 
The Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology Vienna: "Migration and Inequality"

Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies
 
http://www.sv.uio.no/english/research/doctoral-degree/summer-school/
 
Also, Max Planck Research School in Demography (it's a winter, not a summer program, and requires strong quantitative skills, but posted here as there is no Demography sub-forum).
 
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/education_career/european_doctoral_school_of_demography_1913/default.htm
 
Also Migration Summer School at the EUI
 
http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/summer-school/

http://www.biostatepi.org/

2013 Summer School on Modern Methods in Biostatistics and Epidemiology (with teachers from Harvard, Karolinska, etc)

This is also a new one:
 
The Luxembourg Income Survey Summer Workshop!
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/news-and-events/lis-introductory-summer-workshop/

I actually went to Peking University-University of Michigan Joint Institute, a summer program in Beijing.

I had courses in statistics for social research, which were simply great ( I think quantitative people have heard of Xie and Houser? They taught at this program). http://www.oir.pku.edu.cn/umich/english/teaching/teaching_program_2.html

Now they also seem to have summer program on Chinese studies and social theory: http://www.oir.pku.edu.cn/umich/english/teaching/teaching_program_1.html

Besides, the prices were very affordable when I attended three years ago.

Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research at Syracuse. It is organized by political scientists and mainly draws on them, but would be a good experience for someone doing comparative-historical work. Instructors include sociologists, such as Jim Mahoney. It is not easy to attend if your department is not a member of their consortium, but they do have a limited number of spots for applicants in unaffiliated institutions.

More info here:
http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/cqrm/The_Institute_for_Qualitative_and_Multi-Method_Research/

So application times for these things are coming up soon as well. Is anyone applying? Got any fun pointers for new unknown summer schools/seminars that are useful within sociology? (yes I do understand that it might be an outsider-situation for many prior to starting grad school)

I'll post the classics (quant-heavy) just to get started;

Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences - http://www.berlinsummerschool.de/welcome-to-the-berlin-summer-school-in-social-sciences/

The Summer Institute in Survey Research Technique at Mich - http://si.isr.umich.edu/

ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research - http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/sumprog/2013/application.html

Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis - http://www.essex.ac.uk/summerschool/about/main.html

And then the new one;
GESIS summer school on Survey Methodology - http://www.gesis.org/veranstaltungen/gesis-summer-school/

I've gone to Essex and it was excellent!

I think putting people who post messages to an Internet board and people who turn to more invasive tactics (such as emailing accepted candidates) under the same measure is probably being a little too harsh. I also don't mean to say that making these kind of posts to Internet boards is a very sensible thing to do. That being said, however, I think some of the people who are so strongly against it may understand it better once they go through the stress of being on a waitlist. It really isn't easy on the waitlisted people, either.

For the record, I'm not blaming universities for this. Waitlists are a necessary evil.

I want to make a caveat/clarification to my statement: "Anyone who studies 'the grad cafe' message boards in some detail is likely to get a pretty good idea of his/herapproximate competitiveness in the applicant pool."
I do think that there is a general consensus that immediately quantifiable attributes (GRE, GPA) tend to be vastly overemphasized on 'the grad cafe'. Of course these metrics are important. But, as many have pointed out in the past, it's easy to get caught up obsessing over them since they're such an easy short-hand basis for comparison. Far more important are the many elements of your application that are not easily compared in on online forum. There are many other ways to get a far better picture of the type of student admitted to a certain program. These include: talking to current students, talking to your undergraduate advisor, talking to the DGS at the program of interest, etc. These are going to be your most valuable resources. Take it from a current student who has recently been around the block in the 2012 application cycle!

i'm not a big fan to people's urging others to decline offers just because they are waitlisted. however, for those who already got some offers, here's something i'd like to say. when you have secured some offers which are more appealing to you, declining those you are less interested in would be a good thing to do. this is not really for those who are on wait list. it's for the sack of being nice to those departments. they may need time to send a couple more offers, rearrange the funding packages and so forth. sometimes you might be nominated for a university fellowship, and if you don't want to attend their program, declining before the university fellowship deadline will allow the department to nominate someone else, and it's a big help for their recruitment.

and unless you don't like any faculty member in that department, or you will never work together with any of them, or you will never try to find a job there, it's always nice to be nice.

and yes i know now it's too early to talk about this...

All of that is true.

That being said, I still think it is poor practice. Gradcafe sees quite a bit of user turnover every year. This is why I think participating in such an old thread by arguing directly with a poster or group of posters who are most likely not forum participants anymore does not do any favours either to the old participants nor to the new ones. It might be a better idea to start a new thread on the same topic saying: "I know previous discussions in this forum have arrived at conclusions X and Y, but *still* I would like to make point Z", then carrying on discussion from there.

Of course, feel free to ignore my suggestion if it contradicts any forum policies.

All of that is true.

That being said, I still think it is poor practice. Gradcafe sees quite a bit of user turnover every year. This is why I think participating in such an old thread by arguing directly with a poster or group of posters who are most likely not forum participants anymore does not do any favours either to the old participants nor to the new ones. It might be a better idea to start a new thread on the same topic saying: "I know previous discussions in this forum have arrived at conclusions X and Y, but *still* I would like to make point Z", then carrying on discussion from there.

Of course, feel free to ignore my suggestion if it contradicts any forum policies.

This thread is seven months old.

Your talk about this makes me first of all want to suggest by the economist Dierdre McClusky's book The Secret Sins of Economics. I widely recommend it to people interested in both quantitative and qualitative work; it's about economics but many of the things apply equally to sociology. It's also put out by my favorite press: Prickly Paradigm. Best of all, PDFs are available FREE and it's like 60 pages. Summary here (I know one doesn't normally say this about an academic book, but warning: that review contains spoilers).

Regardless, I'm no expert, and I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but let me answer as best I can.

Most quantitative sociology uses variable-based statistics. "Mathematical sociology" is often, as far as I can tell, just a catch-all term for sociology that uses numbers and computation but doesn't use variable-based statistics. To put it another way, you need a computer to do mathematical sociology but you can't do (most of) it on STATA. It's not only simulations and game-theory. Even though a lot of it doesn't use variables, I think most people still think of it as "quantitative" (in that it uses computers and not traditional "qualitative" methods) but I've gotten into debates with colleagues about whether most social network analysis is "quantitative", which inevitably leads to questions about whether we can just bracket things crudely "quantitative" and "qualitative" (for the record, my answer is yes to both). The point is, I don't think mathematical sociology necessarily has to do with assumptions going into the project. Sure, mathematical sociology uses a lot of simulations, but data mining is, as far as I understand, also an important part of mathematical sociology and it's obviously (hugely) empirical, though, I should add, most of the interesting data mining stuff I've seen doesn't really use variables, at least not like most sociology uses them. Check out the culturomics stuff for example: mathematical, empirical, but also not based on assumptions like you're worried about or using conventional variables.

We talked about induction and deduction literally years ago on the board and someone posted a link to this powerpoint. I don't think that powerpoint is 100% accurate, but it's a useful place to start (only the first few slides are relevant, and you can also just check on wikipedia). Is this what your question is really about, "Is mathematical sociology all deductive, or are there inductive mathematical sociologists?" I'd say the answer is no.

Demographers are interested in "counting things", largely, and aren't as interested necessarily in causal explanations. Almost all other quantitative sociologists are interested in causal explanations (at least the good ones) so they need, as it were, theory. As far as I can tell, lot of the important theories in stat/inequality come out of quantitative findings. It's empirical, it's theoretical, and it's mostly inductive (there are, of course, a lot of assumptions that go into any research project, but I don't think those are the ones you're talking about). Economics is similarly based on assumptions but that doesn't make it "mere theory"; in that case, though, the assumptions matter in a different way because the theory is deductive. Durkheim's Suicide is of course social theory, empirical, and inductive. Social theory can be inductive or deductive; it can be based on quantitative evidence or qualitative evidence (or, in some cases, show no evidence--DiMaggio and Powell's "the Iron Cage Revisited" is a great example of theory that included no evidence when it was published. It is a very well respected paper). All subfields of sociology (besides maybe orthodox demography) creates new and critiques existing social theory.

I might be misinterpreting you, but the difference you're talking about seem to be more the differences between "induction" and "deduction". Take social networks stuff as an example; it can rely on simulations, but it can also rely on very empirical data (either with variables or without). Similarly, I read a lot of qualitative political science which is very deductive (rational choice). I'd say there's deductive and inductive work all over. I just read a great article that covers, among other things, ethnography and rational choice (a kind of deductive thinking)--I can have read the the (excellent) Chandra article, but this whole issue is devoted to the subject. Sociology of religion also weirdly got hung up on rational choice for a while. One of the best books by a sociologist on nationalism is deductive. A lot of gender stuff is deductive (not rational choice, but I'd say equally deductive). Everything using Marxism is obviously deductive and based on assumptions, but that doesn't mean it can't also be based on empirics (my colleague just cited Erik Olin Wright as an example of a rigorously empirical Marxist). You'll see deduction even in social movements literature (everytime you see someone cite Olson 1965, for example).

If I completely missed the boat on your question, my apologies, but, yeah, I'd say, there's probably more deductive thinking in mathemtical sociology than most sociology, but no, by no means is mathemtical sociology exclusively deductive nor, I feel obliged to add, is it the only place deduction is used in sociology.

Actually, I have reasons to believe that emailing POIs was a large factor in determining my eventual admission. I wouldn't want people to miss a chance of admission because of a misguided perception that it is useless to try contacting professors first.

Like the first year of anything, the first year of grad school is really about getting your bearings and adjusting to a new life. As evidenced here in other posts, most people are living in a new place, feeling like impostors, struggling to make ends meet on a stipend, dealing with relationships and trying to make new ones with members of their cohort, and learning what graduate study in sociology is all about. People's experiences with all that vary, but don't underestimate the stress of the first year. It is hard.

Programs vary on what they have students do. Like at UT-Austin, every program will make you get many of the required courses out of the way. It can make you feel a bit like a hamster on a wheel, anxious to get somewhere but just standing in place, but it actually lightens the load course-wise, as there is often less reading/writing required for stats, prosem, etc. Some of you will have the year off from any assistantships (teaching or research), others won't. Those that have them will be busier, but will also be gaining important teaching and research experience. The value of such busyness shouldn't be overlooked or taken for granted. It's good to learn how to balance either (or both) with your other academic responsibilities.

Ultimately, it - like the rest of grad school - is what you make of it. You can coast through the classes by skimming the readings, contributing only sporadically and superficially to discussions in class, saving your paper for the end of the semester, and doing a lot of the things that undergraduates do. There are no requirements to present your work that first year (or really any year after that). However, you'll be establishing the habits (and reputation) that you'll carry with you throughout your time as an academic. Your professors will know who puts in the hours, who does the reading. When they choose who they want to work with on their next grant, it won't just be the passion you have for their field, but the work you put into those classes that influences whether or not they select you. If you work hard, do the readings, pay attention in classes, attend the workshops, job talks, and speaker series, submit to and attend conferences, you'll learn so much. It makes grad school much more difficult, but it influences where you end up. Don't do those things because you are in a top program, or not do them because you're not, because one of the main ways that programs move through the rankings is their graduate student placement. Regardless of where you are, act like you're at a top program, giving it your all and you are bound to not only help yourself, but could also improve the status of where you got your degree.

The ranking is available here:

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-humanities-schools/sociology-rankings

Liam Downey at Colorado-Boulder. In fact, CU has a number of environmental folks and would be a great place to do environmental sociology.