"Serious Applicants" and Advice for Applicants

[jacib]

I happened across this advice for prospective graduate students that seemed relevant to two recent posts ( and ). It's by a professor in the Government Department at Cornell, but I think it applies mostly to people applying in sociology as well.

What I think is most useful is where he quotes from a computational linguist's words of advice that, again, apply to prospective sociology graduate students as well:

I think every applicant should try to imagine what it’s like for the admissions committee in an active research department. Every good department will get far more applicants than they have positions available, so they will select the applicants that are most likely to succeed in doing innovative research and completing their PhD.

Putting it very crassly, there’s a huge difference between undergraduate and graduate education in the US. Undergrads pay for the privilege of attending college, and your education and edification is the main goal of the undergraduate experience. But as a graduate student … you can generally expect to be fully supported financially while you are studying, i.e., you are paid to study, and the relationship between student and institution changes accordingly. While we hope that you’ll be personally enriched and enlightened by your graduate education, this is not the reason why you’re being paid to study.

Instead, we expect that you’ll advance scientific knowledge to the benefit of all society. Of course you may have personal goals for going to graduate school and it’s fine to mention those in your application, but your primary goal in your application should be to demonstrate that as a PhD student you will contribute to and advance our scientific understanding of the field you’re studying.

(emphasis added)

The computional linguist's advice continues:

In general, faculty want graduate students that can do ground-breaking research and complete a PhD in a timely fashion in the research areas they are interested in. How do you convince the faculty that you can do this? Well, first of all you need to demonstrate that you understand the field well enough to know what you're getting into. It's a waste of everybody's time if a student decides after a year or so that they don't really want to work in the field they have been admitted to study. More than that, you need to demonstrate that you are honestly interested in the field you are applying to study. There are easier ways of making a living than as a research scientist (think of the ``1 per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration'' Edison quote) so we're looking for someone that's sufficiently inspired and motivated to actually stick at the research long enough to get something substantial done.

Second, you have to demonstrate that you have the technical ability to work in the field of your choice. Notice that I said

ability

; you don't need to demonstrate that you already have all of the skills you'll need, as you'll get training in graduate school. But again, it's a waste of everyone's time to admit a graduate student and discover a year or so later that they can't program a computer or do statistics or whatever, so if skills like those are important to your field, you definitely need to demonstrate that you have the ability to learn those skills. And a very good way to do this is to take a couple of courses in these areas and do well in them. (It doesn't hurt to have a professor from these areas write a letter of recommendation for you). So you should make clear in your application that you have the skills, or the ability to learn the skills, that you'll need to do your research.

Finally, you should have a moderately specific idea of the kind of research you want to do. It should fit in well with the research program of at least one of the faculty members in the department you're applying to (I discuss this elsewhere on this page). Your interests should be neither too vague (you should know the field well enough to know what the important issues in the field are) nor too specific (as you are coming to learn from and work with faculty).

I think most of that same advice applies to sociology. Going back to the original political scientist:

Admission to Cornell’s Government Ph.D. program is fairly competitive, especially in the subfields of Comparative Politics and International Relations (chances are that if you’re contacting me your interests fall into one of these areas). We average between 0 and 1 students per year whose research focuses on Southeast Asia. This means that you should apply broadly.

Foreign applicants, especially, should also familiarize themselves with the nature of the research done by the

comparative politics

and

international relations faculty

here, to ensure that a Ph.D. in the Government department is right for you. (It’s not right for everyone, and that’s just fine.) While interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research is often praised, in practice students in the social sciences are strongly encouraged to work within their discipline. There are some exceptions: social movement scholars frequently work across political science and sociology, formal political theorists frequently work with economists, methodologists will often work with statisticians. The point is, if you really care about history rather than political science, it’s better to apply to our (excellent)

History Department

. This point may seem obvious, but many applicants appear to miss it.

With the caveat that sociology is generally more open to interdisciplinary work (though it depends on the department), I think there are a couple of key things to take from this, which mirrors the advice that I got from professors when I was applying (and I talked to a lot of them--my father is a sociologist and made me talk to several of his peers). I was told multiple times that I needed to seem like a "serious student". Being a "serious student" included things that you would expect, such as actually knowing what the faculty at the school you're applying to study and showing an awareness of some of the relevent literature, but it also included things that I didn't necessarily expect, like not mentioning to sociology programs that I was also applying to religion programs (with the same research question)--and in fact, the one school I did mention this fact to, they specifically told me this would be in their eyes the mark of an "unserious" student. This helps to put in perspective what they're looking for across the board: admissions committees are primarily interested in your potential to finish the PhD program, which includes consideration of how you'd fit into the program, and your ability to do groundbreaking work that will make them look good.

[jacib]

Oh, also for some reason it is rarely mentioned on this forum, but Fabio Rojas (a sociology professor at Indiana) has a $3 e-book called "Grad School Rulz" that a lot of people have found worth reading (I only found out about it after applying and I showed it to one of my professors who called the parts on tenure "totally wrong"; I think he'd probably have the same assessment of the sections on grad school applications). He's also a big blogger at Org Theory, which is probably the most read blog written by sociologists, and if you look through the posts tagged "Grad School Rulz", you might find more advice. You can look at the first 10% (a lot of which doesn't actually get to applications at all) for free!

Edited October 3, 2012 by jacib