Identifying POIs in SOP

[The Hoosier Oxonian]

What thoughts/advice might anyone offer on listing assistant profs among POIs in my SOP? At my first-choice school, my primary POI is a full professor, but there are several assistant profs there who are also doing work I find very compelling. The instructions for this school's SOP specifically say to mention professors you want to work with. Should I bring up the assistant profs as well as the full prof who is my main POI, or is it better to focus on full, tenured profs? Or does it not make any difference? Would hugely appreciate any advice!

[onerepublic96]

would love to know the answer to this as well... a lot of my POI are assistant profs & associate profs 

[Indecisive Poet]

15 hours ago, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

What thoughts/advice might anyone offer on listing assistant profs among POIs in my SOP? At my first-choice school, my primary POI is a full professor, but there are several assistant profs there who are also doing work I find very compelling. The instructions for this school's SOP specifically say to mention professors you want to work with. Should I bring up the assistant profs as well as the full prof who is my main POI, or is it better to focus on full, tenured profs? Or does it not make any difference? Would hugely appreciate any advice!

I've emailed an assistant professor at one of the programs I'm interested in and he told me he is very much willing and able to serve as a primary advisor on my dissertation committee. I plan to mention assistant professors in my statements. @onerepublic96 – associate professors are very much able to supervise as well and usually teach graduate courses as well.

The things I would be careful with are those sort of odd titles like "professor of the practice" or "teaching professor" which usually indicate that they don't supervise and/or teach graduate students. These people will usually be available for consultation when you're working on your dissertation, but won't be working with you in an official capacity and shouldn't be mentioned in your statements.

[Sigaba]

7 hours ago, Indecisive Poet said:

I've emailed an assistant professor at one of the programs I'm interested in and he told me he is very much willing and able to serve as a primary advisor on my dissertation committee.

Slightly off topic but hopefully useful in the long run.

Be mindful of the potential risks having professors with less experience on your committees. They may not have had enough experience to know the appropriate level of intensity to bring to a dissertation committee. Similarly, they may have not developed all of the tools they'll eventually deploy to get the best out of their graduate students. 

 

[Warelin]

43 minutes ago, Sigaba said:

Slightly off topic but hopefully useful in the long run.

Be mindful of the potential risks having professors with less experience on your committees. They may not have had enough experience to know the appropriate level of intensity to bring to a dissertation committee. Similarly, they may have not developed all of the tools they'll eventually deploy to get the best out of their graduate students. 

I'd like to bring up a counter point to this because I think this is a very important thing to consider. Some assistant professors might not be assistant professors by the time you graduate. It's possible that they don't receive tenure. It's also possible that they're associate professors by the time it's time to write your dissertation. Some might bring a lot of intensity because they know the job market well. Because they're also pushing to get published, it's also possible that they can help guide you through the publication process more smoothly.

 

23 hours ago, The Hoosier Oxonian said:

Should I bring up the assistant profs as well as the full prof who is my main POI, or is it better to focus on full, tenured profs?

Feel free to mention assistant professors if their work compels you. There are schools where I only mentioned one (assistant) professor who I was interested in working with and I was accepted by said school. I think one of the good things about focusing on assistant professors is that there isn't an overload of people hoping to work with the same individual. It allows you to form a stronger working relationship as they understand what it takes to succeed on the job market.

[punctilious]

I think it is a good idea to ideally mention 2+ professors, and ideally they would be a mix of assistant/associate or tenured professors. I say this because it seems to me that assistant/associate professors may often be serving on an admissions committee and get to look at applications. I'm theorizing, but pretty sure that the likes of Bill Brown at UChicago or Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Harvard are not reading through applications. If you're lucky enough to have one of your POIs on the admissions committee and they see that you want to work with them, then they would probably vouch for your application if they like it, especially if they're trying to get tenure. This could be wrong, but I'm 82% sure it worked that way for husband's Harvard admission.

That being said, do not put all your eggs in one basket. If you can only see yourself working with one professor, that will probably not go well for you for numerous reasons. 1) That professor may not receive tenure. 2) That professor may retire. 3) That professor may move to a different institution. 4) That professor may have a working style or method that conflicts with yours. 5) Your interests may change. Not to mention they may not be on the admissions committee in the first place or the school may be looking for students in a particular period/field, etc.

So, my advice is to identify at least two, ideally three professors who are not all assistant/associate and also not all heavy-hitters and who you could see yourself working with, then directly reference them in your SOP.

Edited October 28, 2019 by punctilious
Adding 'moving' as a possible option, since that happened at Harvard last year.

[Glasperlenspieler]

I want to throw out one alternative suggestion: I don't think it's strictly necessary to mention any names in your SOP. That's not to say you shouldn't due, I just wouldn't assume you need to (and I do know of people who have been successful without mentioning names).

I think there are some risks that are associated with naming names:

1) You might mention someone who is no longer there, is soon to be leaving, or is disengaged from the department despite technically being part of it.

2) You might misrepresent someone's work, which will probably count against you.

3) You might not mention someone who from the admissions committee's perspective (or that person's perspective) is an obvious fit. A petty professor might take this as a slight and judge your application more harshly accordingly.

4) You might mention two professors, but unbeknownst to you, those professors hate each other and refuse to serve on a committee together. 

 

There are variations on these, but you get the idea. Furthermore, if you articulate your research interests well enough, the admissions committee (which knows their department better than you do) is more than capable to seeing how you do (or do not) fit into the department. In that case, space spent naming names, is space you could have spent better articulating your project.

 

Again, I don't take any of this to be evidence that you shouldn't name names, but I wouldn't do it just for the sake of doing so, and I wouldn't assume you stand no chance of admission if you don't. There are often compelling reasons to name names, but that doesn't mean it's always necessary.

[dilby]

Others have identified the various tricky elements of this question and things to consider. Namely, people might leave for one reason or another (retirement, not getting tenure, which happens a lot at Ivies, etc.). I think one way to balance this concern is to try and get a feel for the department's reputation and current clusters of exciting faculty--in other words, what have been its historical strengths (early modern at Michigan/Virginia, Romantic poetry at Yale, Feminist theory at Berkeley, that kind of thing) and where is the department currently moving (what goals is it signaling with its recent hires?). It is a sort of laborious process to dig through illegible department websites to look for this kind of information, but making a meaningful statement about the past and current character of a department is pretty impressive to an adcomm, particularly if you can compellingly nestle your project into that narrative. This is probably something your mentors/recommenders can help you with: just ask them what kinds of scholars they associated with various departments either when they were in graduate school or just "back in the day." Odds are they have at least some kind of sense of what most top 10 departments were/are like.

[jm6394]

I've personally been told by several professors and admissions committee members at a top-20 program to list full or associate professors, but not assistant professors. I'm thinking in the SOP it would be okay, if you want to name some people beyond the primary 3, to show that there are more junior faculty in the dept to support you as well

[rhetoricus aesalon]

Remember that you are not drafting a contract when you write your SOP. Naming a POI in no way means that you will actually work with that person. Listing faculty that you want to work with in a SOP is one way to convey your fit within a department and not much else. Trying to read into who might be moving, or not getting tenure, or retiring is usually information that you will not be privy to. Just list the faculty who work in similar circles as you want to; otherwise, they might be curious as to why you didn’t list them and if you really know much about the academic community you want to engage with.

[olivetree]

On a related note, does anyone have insight about whether it's acceptable to list professors from affiliated departments as SoPs? For example, if there's a professor from the French department who's affiliated with the Comparative Literature department, is it okay to name them as a professor of interest? Or is it best to stick to naming core Comp Lit faculty?

[rhetoricus aesalon]

On 11/5/2019 at 5:22 PM, olivetree said:

On a related note, does anyone have insight about whether it's acceptable to list professors from affiliated departments as SoPs? For example, if there's a professor from the French department who's affiliated with the Comparative Literature department, is it okay to name them as a professor of interest? Or is it best to stick to naming core Comp Lit faculty?

Do you mean that you would be naming an affiliated faculty member? As in, faculty that have a formal relationship (such as a joint appointment) to French and comparative literature? If so, then there is no risk with naming this person because they are faculty in comp lit as much as they are in French.