Safe Schools for Sociology

[direshark]

Hey all! I've applied to a handful of schools for Fall 2010. I am particularly interested in political sociology/sociology of religion.

My problem was that it was pretty easy to find "good schools." I know which programs attract my interest the most and applied there (not too unrealistically, I hope.)

Some stats are as follows:

Senior at Washington State University

GPA: 3.76

GRE1: 610V, 570Q, 5AW.

GRE2: 570V, 690Q, 4.5AW.

(You can see that I retook it for the sole purpose of bringing up my quantitative score, everything else suffered as a result unfortunately. Worth it, I think.)

Some research exp, looking to be published next semester.

With these stats, I applied to the following.

UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, Washington, Wisconsin-Madison, Brandeis, UNC-Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, and Duke.

I understand that the majority of these are "good" schools and are quite selective. Trouble is that I worry, I suspect with good reason, that I may not get admitted anywhere, and have no idea how to find safe schools, when most schools do not display statistics of their recent admitted applicants or even cohort size. My professor mentor alerted me to this and I'm looking to add a couple schools, if only for mental security in the coming months.

Does anyone have any good "safe" suggestions for an applicant of my ability?

[heathenist]

Are you applying to your own school, Washington State?

[direshark]

I've not applied.

We do have a strong sociology department, but I would like to expand outside of WSU. Not sure I can mentally take being in Pullman, WA for another six or seven years haha. Great for my undergraduate years, not sure I want to be around for much longer. In addition, our department also has nothing for sociology of religion, and just a couple professors who specialize in political sociology - not exactly much. It's the main reason the professor I'm conducting research with advised against attending here.

I tried to run a search of schools by GRE scores with one of the engines on Google and used those with low quantitative scores as potential candidates for "safe" schools, pairing them with the category of strong financial support. I came up with Stony Brook, Emory, and Syracuse. Again, I have no idea if these are actually safe schools, I wouldn't know what would constitute that.

[LJK]

You might want to look at Lehigh University. I know that Ziad Munson does political sociology/sociology of religion. They only have a MA program at Lehigh but if you are looking for a safety, going for the masters then re-applying to top programs for the phd after gaining more experience can be a good option.

[Webster]

What program did you use?

I've not applied.

We do have a strong sociology department, but I would like to expand outside of WSU. Not sure I can mentally take being in Pullman, WA for another six or seven years haha. Great for my undergraduate years, not sure I want to be around for much longer. In addition, our department also has nothing for sociology of religion, and just a couple professors who specialize in political sociology - not exactly much. It's the main reason the professor I'm conducting research with advised against attending here.

I tried to run a search of schools by GRE scores with one of the engines on Google and used those with low quantitative scores as potential candidates for "safe" schools, pairing them with the category of strong financial support. I came up with Stony Brook, Emory, and Syracuse. Again, I have no idea if these are actually safe schools, I wouldn't know what would constitute that.