Graduate Application for Fall 2020

[DuBois]

Hello All,

I had a bad admission cycle this fall with no proper admission offers. My GREs were bad and I was a fresh graduate from LSE with MSc in Sociology. I have already begun assembling everything for the applications for next fall which starts later this year. I have changed my profile by improving my GRE to 164, 160, 5. TOEFL 105, presented my MSc thesis in two international conferences and a research paper under a review in the journal of international political sociology. Also, I am currently working as a research specialist in a fortune 100 firm to sustain myself. I am looking for some guidance and key pointers to nail the admissions this year. I come from an extremely humble background and probably putting everything in financially for this admission cycle. So though I am stressed by the uncertainty of the Ph.D. admission process, my stubborn and genuine interest to remain in academics keeps me motivated to pursue this. Any constructive advice would be really helpful!

Cheers!

[sociopolitic]

Wow, congrats on improving your GREs so much! From what I understand, GRE scores are more salient in adcomms' decisions regarding whether to admit international students, so it sounds to me like you've already strengthened your profile an awful lot. 

I guess I would also advise to cast your net wide, so to speak. If I remember correctly from the last cycle, you only applied to a handful of departments. I think I would recommend applying to at least 8 this cycle. That said, I can't offer you much advice regarding where you'd be a good fit since I'm not familiar with your research interests. Would you mind sharing a little more about what you hope to study? And out of curiosity, where did you apply last year?

With a profile like yours, I think you're very competitive. It's very much possible that your GRE scores were the biggest factor holding you back last year. I think that to make this cycle as successful as possible, you really need to concentrate on 1) applying to departments where fit is really great, and 2) taking care to explain that fit in your SOPs. 

 

[DuBois]

My research interests are primarily political sociology and social class and qualitative methods. So I am interested in a bottom-up approach of contemporary populism with a focus not on populist leaders but the followers or supporter. I applied to very few and top tier colleges which in hindsight was a mistake - Harvard, UCB, Yale UChicago.

[sociopolitic]

1 hour ago, DuBois said:

My research interests are primarily political sociology and social class and qualitative methods. So I am interested in a bottom-up approach of contemporary populism with a focus not on populist leaders but the followers or supporter. I applied to very few and top tier colleges which in hindsight was a mistake - Harvard, UCB, Yale UChicago.

Our interests have some decent overlap! I'm a little more focused on quantitative methods personally, but based on your interest in qualitative methods I think that you ought to take a really good look at UMichigan and UCLA sociology. Both departments have a lot of qualitative political sociologists, and even scholars that are specifically interested in populism. UNC might be worth looking at as well, but their department tends to be known for quantitative rather than qualitative training. 

Speaking in terms of general fit between the department and the somewhat broad interests you mention here, I think that UCLA, Michigan, Berkeley, and Chicago all have a good number of folks you could work with. Harvard too, though I think they're a bit more quantitatively focused. NYU and Wisconsin are also possibly good fits. I'm not as familiar with the work being done at Northwestern, Yale, and Arizona, but I think some of their faculty may do research that interests you as well.

I recommend reading through faculty bios for the top 20 departments (assuming that's where you're hoping to land in the rankings) and seeing whose work sounds interesting, then reading some of their work to see if it's the sort of research you'd like to produce. Hope this helps some! I'm happy to read over your SOP whenever you get around to drafting that. 

Edited June 24, 2019 by sociopolitic

[misslitty]

I'm not in your field, but are you confident about your personal statement?  I feel like that made a very big difference in my applications