overlyresearched

It was a pleasure having you Turbo. You have some great options in front of you and you should be able to do solid work wherever you go. 

Don't mind at all. The faculty at Irvine get along very well it seems. I like the collaborative and supportive vibe of the department. There is a good handful of faculty that work in areas in which I am interested so it is a solid fit for me. I'm going to check out others before I finalize my decision though.

I would just like to echo @xdarthveganx's perspective. After getting some insights through this board I went ahead and initiated some negotiations and thus far - while things are not completely hammered out yet - it's gone pretty well.

The departments I contacted have been very willing to discuss negotiation with me, have been straightforward about what they can/can't do, and I've already had some small adjustments to my offers, with additional ones promised in the next few weeks. Negotiation is possible, including changing a TA obligation to perhaps an initial fellowship year, etc and/or getting summer funding, or slightly increasing a fellowship amount (albeit TA stipends seem pretty set).

I understand this is not the case with all schools, and probably requires you to have at least a few offers to use as leverage, but it is not impossible, and is probably worth trying if you are fortunate enough to be in that situation and funding would actually impact your decision (probably a waste of time if you ask a school you're not truly considering). I have not gotten the impression from any department that my asking was inappropriate.

Just my 2 cents.

As simply an observer, I only sense butt-hurtism eminating from one direction, and it's not coming from anyone else here. Maybe you are 100% right and negotiating doesn't help at all. What does one lose from trying? I think it is unfair to attack somebody for asking people to try, based on personal experience of success. 
 
I think our year on GC has come this far without much drama, completely supporting each other and I am only butting in because it pains me to watch it get hijacked for whatever unresolved bitterness lingers from 2013. If you don't have good advice to give us, please be respectful and let other people do so.

I sense a lot of butt-hurt from darth and all his bandwagon crew because I called his bs claim about negotiating. As expected.

you people and your bandwagon mentality of negative repping posts because you can't hack the truth...who said anything about davis rescinding your offer? all i said was it won't make any difference.
 
and darth, would you please elaborate how you managed to get $9,000 added to your offer in your first year? was it your amazing quant score of 149 that did it? or are you counting "summer jobs" as a "bonus" for funding? i have been in two grad programs and am yet to see someone shmooze their way to a fellowship. heck, even fellowships at ivy programs are barely $5,000 or so more than the regular funding package.
 
and no, summer jobs, "recruitment bonuses" (what??), and other types of "opportunities" that are open to every tom dick and harry are not considered "negotiating". i know the truth, just like most people in these boards, so go ahead and negative rep and call me a troll all you want.

and just like last year, we have mr. darth hijacking a thread and spreading misinformation. as others have noted MANY times in the past, negotiating with sociology programs over funding doesn't work, unless you're a top candidate with multiple acceptances at really top programs, or in extremely rare cases where other factors are involved.
 
and no, ma programs at simon fraser and other mickey mouse universities don't count. 
 
if you are absolutely sure you won't be attending a program, decline the offer asap. if you're having a tough time deciding between multiple acceptances, then feel free to take your time. in either case, forget about "negoiating," programs are not businesses. i will guarantee you that you won't get a dime more than the offer you have already received.
 
go through last year's threads where darth's posted and read about the good negotiating did for him.
 
and darth, seriously, stop giving people wrong advice. 

Reposting this from the official decision thread with some added info....

At UCI, and many other UC's, the initial funding package of a 5 year guaranteed TA'ship (with 17k stipend) and healthcare is offered to everyone that is accepted. That was my initial funding offer. Upon informing UCI of my concerns over cost of living in Irvine, and my competing offers from other programs, I was offered the deans recruitment fellowship which has actually been increased to $6000. In addition, I was given $3000 for my first summer, with no work obligations whatsoever. Some students that accepted early, got no additional funding, others got even better offers than I did (as a result of competing offers from top 10 and top 20 programs), including funding for 3 summers, or full year long fellowships with no work obligations. 

This wasn't isolated to UCI, the other program I was seriously considering was UCSD. Their funding works a little differently in that they don't guarantee TA'ships like Irvine does, their funding offers typically come with little to no work requirements, but often fall short of the full 5 year guarantees that students have come to expect. My initial offer was only for 1 year, with no work requirements whatsoever. They say they can typically fund students through TA'ships, readerships and RA'ships through 5-7 years, but they don't guarantee work related funding. Upon informing them that I had a 4 year guarantee from Oregon, they got me another year of funding with no work requirements. After I got the funding offer from UCI, they offered me a third year with no work requirements. In the end, I decided that UCI's 5 year guarantee, their constant contact throughout the recruitment process, and their job placement made them the best choice. 
 
  So I would just like to add, my personal experience with this was not limited to California schools. 

I included UCI and UCSD because I felt they were the most directly comparable to each other and were the direct result of negotiations. 

Oregon also offered me this, a few weeks after the initial offer: 

 
Less comparable but still relevant: 

The environmental justice MA program at Michigan, came back with an offer of a 10k fellowship for the first year on top of a TA'ship

University of Oklahoma offered me a 10k fellowship for 2 years on top of the standard TA'ship

Victoria and Simon Fraser both came back with better funding offers as well. 

I realize that some of these do not have the same prestige and may be comparing apples to oranges. I am simply giving my personal experience so people can understand what is possible. It doesn't hurt to negotiate in my opinion, as long as you are polite and tactful in doing so. It may not work, but really, what is there to lose? For programs with stipends in the 10-20k range, trying to secure extra funding can be really important for your financial security. For those at private schools with larger stipends, this is less important. 

Anyway, I appreciate all the input on this. Every program is different, and it's important to remember that your milage may vary. 

Look at the type of school you want to work at, then find check CV's to see the trajectories of professors there.  Alternatively, find scholars whose work you think you like and look at their career trajectories.  I noticed that a lot of the best historical sociologists (Charles Kurzman, Charles Tilly, Andy Abbott) started out at large state schools not particularly known for sociology (except Andy Abbot was at Rutgers, which has a notable program outside the top-30) though some (Theda Skocpol, Rogers Brubaker) led touched lives from the word go.  And these are probably some of the best sociological minds out there.
 
You'll find some people without top 25 degrees at top 25 programs.  I just happened to look through UT Austin because I knew Javier Auyero, who got his degree from the New School, was there.  About 10% of the tenured or tenure track faculty who got their degrees in the U.S. have non-top 25 degrees (I'd guess this is particularly high, I checked with Washington as a comparison case: between 0%-10% of the comparable faculty have non-top 25 degrees, depending on where exactly Albany, Santa Barbara, and Vanderbilt were ranked in the 80's and 90's--notice no one with a degree since 1997).  But often these people's career trajectories are unreal.  Auyero, for instance, wrote 4 books (and edited two others) before he was promoted to associate professor.  Another guy, Ken-Hou Lin who got his PhD from UMass, had two first author AJS articles, an ASR article, and then three other articles before he finished graduate school.  These are truly exceptional career trajectories in both senses of the word.

At schools like Tufts, or BU, or BC, or Brandeis, or Georgetown, or American (selective private schools without prestigious PhD programs in sociology), you see a bit more of a mix, but younger faculty is still mostly top 25-ish degree (but by no means totally).   At SUNY Buffalo, to choose a random non-flagship state school, about 20% are non-top 25ish (again, it's imperfect because some schools like Albany have dropped), but at SUNY Buffalo you certainly do see a lot of people from elite schools.  For example, of their faculty who earned their PhDs in the last ten years, you have Northwestern (x2), Wisconsin (x2), Cornell (x2), Arizona, Chicago.  I tried a couple other non-flagship state schools off the top of my head but I couldn't see any other that listed all the faculty's Ph.D.s on the same page.  The Assistant Professors at Cal State Fullerton were from UCLA, CUNY, Colorado, and Brown.  The two assistant professors (among a sea of lecturers) at Colorado - Denver were from Harvard and Riverside.  The assistant professors at UW-Milwaukee were from Northwestern, Connecticut, Madison, New Mexico, and Austin.

It's obviously not impossible to get a tenure track job with a degree outside the top-25 (and it's not like a degree from a top 10 school guarantees you a sweet job).  It does seem like people with prestigious degrees can be found teaching at a wide variety of schools.  It does seem even that some spectacular people get top-25 positions without having a top 25 degree.  Mostly, though, people from the top 25 get a lot of jobs (this probably has something to do with how big some of these cohorts are).  I don't know if there's one clear take away.

Yes, it does.  Post-docs are less common in sociology, but where you get your PhD definitely matters.  You may be interested in reading Val Burris's article "The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks" ASR 2004.  Part of it is conceptual (how should we think of prestige?) but a lot of it empirical and will give you good data on exactly how much where you get PhD from matters. Of course, there's a confounding variable that the top programs generally get the most promising students, but Burris finds that prestige is not directly connected to the number of articles published.  Here's a PDF of the article.  Here's the abstract:
 
The prestige of academic departments is commonly understood as rooted in the scholarly productivity of their faculty and graduates. I use the theories of Weber and Bourdieu to advance an alternative view of departmental prestige, which I show is an effect a department's position within networks of association and social exchange—that is, it is a form of social capital. The social network created by the exchange of PhDs among departments is the most important network of this kind. Using data on the exchange of PhDs among sociology departments, I apply network analysis to investigate this alternative conception of departmental prestige and to demonstrate its superiority over the conventional view. Within sociology, centrality within interdepartmental hiring networks explains 84 percent of the variance in departmental prestige. Similar findings are reported for history and political science. This alternative understanding of academic prestige helps clarify anomalies—e.g., the variance in prestige unconnected to scholarly productivity, the strong association between department size and prestige, and the long-term stability of prestige rankings—encountered in research that is based on the more conventional view.
 
This is only looking at hiring at the very top schools, however; there's a lot less data about how these prestige effects work further down the prestige hierarchy. 

I will be attending a few recruitment weekends in the coming month, so I have had this conversation with my current advisor.  I am finishing my MA this semester, so some of the advice may differ for someone coming straight out of undergrad. This is what he suggests: 
 
1. Try to get a SPECIFIC, DETAILED answer (in writing, if possible) on what courses you will be required to take and how this would differ from someone who went straight through the program (both MA and PhD at same school). 
 
2. If funding is offered, ask about assistantship options and how these are decided. How many RAs are offered as opposed to TAs? How do these decisions get made? Are there different types of TAs (independent instructors, graders, small session leaders, etc.) and how do these get decided?
2a. Similarly, I would ask about how summer funding works.
 
3. It may be helpful to ask about office space/lab access and how these resources are distributed. Does everyone get a space? How many people share a space? Does this space only go to TAs?
 
4. Resources in the department/university for your research is important to know. Access to statistical programs, access to department-only/graduate student-only computer labs, etc. 
 
5. I would ask about department collegiality. Does everyone get together periodically? Do faculty-grad students interact? This is a good question to ask the grad students themselves. Also ask them about student collegiality - do the students hang out together regularly? Do they help each other out with stuff, or are they more often competing with one another?
 
6. Get a sense of the timeline of the program (especially in regard to point 1 above). How much time for coursework, when are exams taken, etc. This can all come up very quick, as you often take exams right after finishing coursework (which could be as early as one year). You will want to know how quickly you will need to figure things out, get an advisor, have a plan for your dissertation, etc.
 
Hope this is helpful!

I've definitely heard of people studying food: a girl i met recently did an entire thesis on buffalo mozzarella.  But if you're going to study rice, it will help to have a specific theoretical question going in because it is otherwise such a large topic.

As recruitment visits are approaching, I thought I might start a topic on what questions senior graduate students think are valuable to ask AND who you should direct them to.

A few suggestions:
What direction is the department heading in? (to the graduate director or the person you'll be working under) If you're coming into a department wanting to do education and there is a huge new push towards health research, that's something you need to know. How do you like working with X? (to ALL of their graduate students) Don't base your opinion on only one of your potential advisor's students. Try to get all of their opinions. What is the pass rate on comps/defenses? If you fail, can you retake them? (I would ask this of the grad director AND the students. Sometimes grad directors have reasons to inflate this number.) These are just a few of the questions I came up with off the top of my head. I'm sure that other faculty and older students here have others.

Something I will add - I got a lot of different answers depending on what grad students I talked to.  A faculty member gave me some sage advice during the visits:  pay attention to who is giving the advice.  So, basically, I tried to find people who seemed to share my approach to grad school, with similar goals/interests, who could really give me an idea of what it would be like for "me" in the program (and, as FertMigMort said, be sure to talk to your advisor's students!).  Just something to keep in mind as you talk to grad students on visits because you will probably get some conflicting answers from different students.  
 
Also, just don't be afraid to ask the questions you really want answers to; after all, this is an important decision for you to be making.  I think it's especially important to bring up any concerns you have with the program, so you can have those addressed... either by your potential advisor or other students.

Congrats! I have several offers, but still slightly jealous.

Sorry, I fail to see the usefulness of this thread.  Whereas posts about admissions communicate information about when schools have started announcing, posts about offer declination say nothing more than that people are declining offers, which is a foregone conclusion.  On one side, it's an opportunity to show off (hey, I'm declining all these great schools, I'm so awesome!) and on the other side, it's a desperate and misplaced attempt to mollify people who have been wait-listed.  While I am sure you had good intentions, the implicit point of this thread seems to be to pressure people to hurry up and dump their offers.  I think that everyone who has earned multiple offers should take all the time they need to make an informed choice, as I plan on doing.

That is just such a meaningless response.  It's like saying "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion!"  A completely empty statement that totally ignores the substance of what I was arguing.  If you had thought about what I wrote, you might conclude that this thread does a disservice to everyone; I am sorry that you don't care about the collective good of the rest of the users on this forum.

I shared my acceptances with all programs I visited, five of them, and had transparent, detailed, and helpful conversations with faculty at all of these programs about the comparative advantages of each program.  It was a great opportunity to get lots of advice about planning my career.  I attempted to negotiate my finances at two of those programs, by citing higher (cost of living adjusted) offers from other programs -- neither of those attempts worked, and neither of them resulted in uncomfortable or unprofessional conversation.  

I can speak from experience that this can definitely help in negotiations. I was seriously considering offers from 3 different departments and all of them improved my initial funding package, some more than once. 

There is nothing wrong with disclosing everything, and in fact, most of my POIs specifically asked where I had been admitted and what the other schools were offering.  Also, I had visits conflict, and I straight-out told them the situation, and they were able to arrange a separate visit; honestly, I think they were glad I was putting forth the effort to still visit on my own.
 
I had some schools/POIs want me to keep them in the loop.  And, I did.  When it came to decision-making time, I was very forthcoming about my decision process with POIs and let them know what I saw as the pros/cons of each department, so they had a chance to address my concerns.  
 
Building on what mormlib said, a lot of programs cannot or will not increase your funding package, even if they want you to come.  I think this is especially true among top departments where they give everyone equal funding packages.  Though, I think it's still important for them to know what your other offers are so they can tailor their approach.

Well, in my case, the school whose visit I attended accepted me first, plus it was higher-ranked, so I think the other school completely understood.  The other school was incredibly accommodating; they had some grad students show me around all day, I met one-on-one with the grad coordinator to discuss funding/etc., plus my POI took me out to lunch, and they paid for my visit.  It was a great experience even though it wasn't the official visit.
 
Honestly, I wouldn't try to negotiate funding until you have a top few choices narrowed down.  And, just be mindful of how you approach any such negotiations.  POIs understand that you have other offers, but they also do not want to hear that your decision is coming down to who will pay you the most.  You want to really get across that your priority is receiving the best training you can and choosing the school/professor that can help you accomplish your goals - but that when confronted with two comparable choices with disparate offers, funding necessarily becomes a factor you have to really consider.  
 
I will say, in my situation, when it came down to my top two choices, neither could negotiate funding.  One was private, one was public; they were both similarly ranked.  They simply pay everyone the same, and it didn't matter what your other offers were.  

You should really read "The Academic Caste System" by Val Burris.  Ungated PDF.  It shows you what goes into academic rankings (most important things: past rankings; department size) and, though it's necessarily the entire focus of the paper, how they matter in terms of job placement (hint: there's a lot of social closure at the top).  He rethinks of "prestige" as social capital, and argues that it matters a lot in network terms.  And his argument is based only on overall prestige, not more meritocratic subfield prestige.  Worth reading and thinking about.
 
If you want, Neal Caren wrote a blog post over in Scatterplot that looks at this issue again and it's a little shorter, but it's obviously not a replacement for the real article.  The two links in the first line of Caren's post are also worth reading.  But it's really true on top: I'm at a top-ten-ish department, and I think we've hired for 3 new positions in the past four years or something, and the like dozen or so candidates have only come from like six different schools, all ranked higher than us on all the charts.
 
Again, though, this is only about placement at the top.  If two people from a cohort got jobs at in the top ten, two got jobs at community college, and four couldn't find jobs, only the first two would show up in this data and the school would look excellent.  That said, from my experience, it looks like schools that place better on top also place better for all their candidates down the line (the ones that go into the academic job market, at least--people who drop out or people who decide not to get university jobs, who knows).  The only real caveat I can give is that, from looking unsystematically, some big state schools seem to place a lot of people in regional colleges and universities; I remember especially looking at the soc departments of smaller, unprestigious Midwestern schools seeing a surprising number of Wisconsin and Michigan grads.  However, I assume this is more an effect of the preferences of individuals (and their partners) to stay in the area than anything to do with prestige and the job market more broadly.  Like, I'd wager if you looked at all the colleges in CUNY, you'd find a disproportional number of NYU and Columbia PhDs with jobs there, and in the South, I'd guess you'd find more Duke, UNC, and maybe even UT grads--this could also be explained through networks, too, but I would guess has more to do with candidate preference, especially based on the fact I've heard professor at one smaller, top-50 or so program say, "Our people could get better placement than they do, but half of them don't want to leave [our metro area]!"
 
Also look at the I wrote two comments about rankings on there, one with links to a going back to 1995 (the Burris article shows a variety of top ten rankings going back to 1925 and makes a point that the schools in the original ranking are all still more or less top ten departments).

Fun little update: in the comments to this post in Scatterplot (you guys should be checking Scatterplot and Org Theory from time to time) about dis-aggregating the 2013 and 2009 USNWR surveys [the magazine reported the 2013 score as an average of the results in the surveys of both years], Stephen Vaisy--a very smart dude from Duke--points out:
 
Something that few people have talked about (that I’ve seen) is the change in the rating (rather than the ranking) over time. Consider these lists (limited to top 30ish)…
 
Departments increasing: Irvine, Penn State, UT-Austin, Duke (obviously!), Penn, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton
 
Departments decreasing: Berkeley, U. of Washington, Maryland
 
(BTW, all of these departments moved .2 in either direction.)
 
So there's that, but how much of that is random noise, how much of that is a real trend, and if there is a real trend, how much of it will continue, is of course hard to say.  But just a fun little thing to see (though ultimately probably pretty meaningless!)  Again, someone could try to compare 2005 survey's numbers and see, with a longer window, we do actually see any schools improving noticeably and consistently.  It's an interesting observation that we tend to pay attention only to ranking here and not score. 

The overall feeling in the department is that the job placement is strong, especially relative to the ranking. Some of the less than stellar placements are a consequence of people that insist on staying in California. If you're flexible, you will be very likely to get a tenure track job out of this department. The placement statistics are also listed right on the website, a number of other "better ranked" programs do not publish their stats are only show a snapshot including their best placements. This is a very active and hungry department that regularly publishes in ASR, AJS and Social Forces. 

I agree that PPP is an issue! But at the same time US Government has a need- (or merit- in less poor countries) based program called "Opportunity Funding" in many developing (probably developed too) countries to support promising students in US Universities admission process (both to undergrad and grad levels). This funding is pretty generous and covers all expenses on application: TOEFL, GRE, sending transcripts, sending scores, application fees. It also covers all possible sort of expenses after you get admitted to a program, but before you start your study there: visa, visiting weeks, tickets, etc. And application for this funding is very similar to standard program application (CV, SOP, Transcripts, etc.), so it does not require anything special.
 
As I understand US citizens do not have such funding opportunity.