Help: How to determine FIT?

[SocGirl2013]

Okay, the question sounds silly, but hopefully not so much after I provide some details.

 

I am applying for Fall 2014, interested in studying globalization (particularly neoliberalism and world-capitalism) from a somewhat Marxist and (very much) World-Systems perspective (particularly the impact on the periphery in the core-periphery dynamic). This somehow automatically hinges on environmental sociology as well, without "environment" being the major topic of concern or study.

 

I would prefer doing qualitative research (just because my talents are way more inclined that way) but feel that my topic demands somewhat of a quantitative approach. I haven't taken the GRE yet (scheduled Oct 19, fingers crossed), and assuming I make the cut-offs for all programs (*fingers crossed* the rest of my application I am not at all worried about), how do I determine FIT? Here are my major concerns.

 

1. MOST programs have professors working within the broader categories of globalization, economic globalization, economic and political sociology. Does this mean most programs are a good fit, or should I narrow it down further? If so, how? I have tried look at professors who study "world-systems" in particular, or even Env. Soc (but like I said, I am less concerned about the environment than the status of periphery countries brought on my the World-Systems dynamic) but that then gets way too specific, excluding certain aspects of my interest (such as the critique of neoliberalism.)

 

2. Going off of that, it has been difficult to determine which programs, as a whole, are the strongest, most focused on these topic areas. Since many, many cover these areas along with various others, how do I know it's a better fit? I have gone through various websites without getting a very strong idea of the core focus of the institutions.

 

3. There are many younger, assistant and new associate professors engaged in similar studies. How do I determine POIs? Can they be too young or too old?

 

4. This one is not a question, but if any of you have any programs that matches what I described jumping out at you that I should look into (particularly in the North East ranging from MA - PA), I'd be eternally grateful.

 

 

 

[mybattleship]

It sounds like you're generally very open to the type of research you're looking to do which I would say is mutually liberating and constraining. You are correct in that a lot of schools are doing the research you are interested in doing, which makes things difficult to some degree. I would start looking into schools based on nonacademic factors and then narrow down your choices based on that. So, for example, if you just REALLY want to live in the mid west, the University of Kansas might be a good option. You can also help narrow your choices down to places where you might reasonably be accepted based on the strength of your application. If you've got a GPA under 3.5 and your GREs are in the fiftieth percentile, chances are you're not going to get into Berkeley. You're probably reasonably acquainted with schools in the northeast; Google the department website and browse the faculty research interests. Binghamton might be a good place to start. The department specializes in historical sociology and world systems. It's also not TOO competitive (at least compared to other schools in the region).

Many people apply to 10-15 programs. I think the rule of thumb is to only apply to programs that you really want to go to. Do what you're comfortable with.

Once you pick out a few schools you can start to develop an interest based on the programs that you find most interesting. I think there is no shame in contacting a POI, asking for some background literature and a few publications of their's to start off with. Read up on that and then develop a research project that's in line with what the department is doing. Senior faculty are probably going to have more sway in the admissions process, but there is also nothing wrong with junior faculty as POIs. It's more important that you find someone you would want to work with.

I would also consider applying to a few MA programs as well. If you're not accepted to a PhD then an MA will help you define your interests a bit better.

[jacib]

So professor ranks go like this in North America:  Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, [Full] Professor.  Assistants are generally untenured, associates and up are generally tenured.  Anyway listed as a "Lecturer" or "Visiting [X] Professor" is not tenured and cannot be your adviser (and may not even be there when you start). You generally need at least one person to work with you who is tenured, preferably someone who is a Full Professor (if you program has <12 faculty, just associates professors are fine).  The best way to find out if people are taking students is to email them.  Not all professors like this and not all will respond, but it certainly won't lose you points.  Do this especially with more senior people.  If they say they are not talking on more students, write them back and ask, given X, Y, and Z, who would they work with (I did this when I was applying.  Professor A said there wasn't a good PhD program for me at his school, but I should consider Professor B.  Professor B said he was retiring in three years and I should work with Professor A.  So it goes).  But feel free to email professors, be like, Hey, I graduated in X from school Y  in year Z, I'm apply to PhD programs in the Fall.  I'm really interested in topic A (I can't quite figure out what topic A is though from your summary).  I really liked your article B.  Is topic A something that you have advised on?

 

If you're interested in World Systems, you probably don't say you're interested in World Systems (except at a very few schools, like Stony Brook or Cornell), though you can say you're interest interested in the relationship between the core and periphery.  Say you're interested in Historical Sociology (at a place like Yale if you want to work with Phil Groski, Peter Stamatov, Julia Adams), Neoliberalism and Globalization (at a place like Columbia if you want to work with Saskia Sassen and maybe David Stark or NYU with the obvious crew there), or Environmental Sociology at a place like Madison (if you want to work with any of a number of people there).  Maybe the historical-comparative box is wrong for you because, again, I can't quite tell what you're into, but you get the idea.  In your SOP, you fit into a clear subdiscipline: the one your potential adviser fits into (or at least indicate a strong interest in the subdiscipline that your adviser is in, plus one that another professor works in, plus maybe one more where no one explicitly works--the one you'll have to teach yourself).  Since you have wide interests that can fit into a lot of sub-disciplinary boxes, you should make sure that you customize the "fit" paragraph (and preferably more than that) for each school.  How Marxist/World Systems-y you want to be in you statement depends on how Marxist the people you're applying to work with are (If you're apply at Berkeley, overt Marxism is fine, for example).

 

Most institutions will be able to advise people who work outside of their "core focii" as long as there are a couple of faculty members (at least one of them tenured) who can advise on the project.  My school on our website lists a number of focus areas, but that's just on paper.  I do mainly sociology of religion, but the mere fact that I don't study the U.S. also puts me squarely in "Historical-Comparative".  My adviser is historical-comparative, and I've worked with other historical-comparative and cultural people in my department, but I don't fit into a clear "core focus area" and no one really does sociology of religion.  That's fine.  This means I've had to (try to) form a work group across multiple departments, including kids from history, political science, area studies, etc.  Other students in my department, who work in more popular subfields, can form peer groups with people just in our department, but we have a real diversity of people with probably only two real core "focus areas" in the department (again, I'm in neither of them).  Harvard and Yale, on the other hand, have very clear bi-weekly work groups where senior faculty members run a workshop devoted to a clearly focused area. If you can't fit into one of their clearly defined areas, as far as I understand it, you're much less likely to be accepted.  What I'm saying, though, is don't worry if you can't find a place where there's world systems + environmental soc + a critique of neoliberalism, you don't need all of that from the faculty.  You can easily teach yourself the missing one (as I am doing with sociology of religion, even though in large part that's my primary interest)--just make it clear that you fit in very well with the other two, and here are the names of two to four faculty members who are awesome and work in those fields (at least one of whom is tenured). 

[Maleficent999]

I am also applying for the Fall 2014 admissions season in sociology and I'm taking my GRE on the 19th of October!! Good luck!

 

I've had a bit of both good and bad luck finding fit. I've emailed most professors I'm interested in working with. Some responded very well (one practically wrote me a book about projects she is working on) and others have hardly answered my questions or let me know they won't be working with grad students next year. One thing I've noticed is that in sociology (as compared to social psychology, which I'm also familiar with) is that professors don't seem to be AS connected to the admissions decisions. A lot of POIs have emailed me back saying they don't have a hand in the admissions decision but that they would like to work with me should I get admitted by the committee.

 

My background is in sexuality, gender, criminology, and deviance/social control. It's been a bit of a struggle to find people to say the least. I think I'll be applying to about 6-8 schools.

[jmu]

There is great advice already above, but to add another voice to the mix:

 

Folks who do critical studies of neoliberalism and World-Systems Analysis tend to work within the realm of development. Figuring out if you are interested in development as well is, I think, key to determining your fit.

 

Not knowing your exact interests, I can only help in letting you know how I figured out my fit and why I ended up choosing the department I did. My research interests fall along similar lines but with a heavy focus on the environment. I determined that the field of political ecology (particularly feminist political ecology) was the best route for me to pursue the research I wanted to do. From this I made a list of programs with strong political ecology foci. I was looking primarily at Geography departments but to give you an idea this included UW-Madison, Clark, Berkeley, Arizona, Rutgers, UNC (anthropology), Washington, Kentucky, UIUC, Georgia, Syracuse and FIU. From here I looked for people who had allied interests based on my topical area. So I excluded programs that didn't have a strong agricultural focus or didn't have anyone working on critical issues of sea level rise. Since, aside from FIU, I was unable to narrow my list based on geographical location (no one really works in the country I do) I looked for people who were interested more broadly in the Caribbean. Similarly if I were interested in, say, Western Sahara, I might consider people who work in North or West Africa. Similarly, if I were interested in Lithuania (actually my second regional interest...) I would look for people who did work in eastern Europe and the former Russian (pre-Soviet) territories. After doing this I had narrowed my list a bit further to the schools I applied to. Once I got my acceptances sorted out, I weighted the programs based on my interests and went with the one with the strongest ties. I ended up choosing FIU, based on what I wanted to research. I name people here just so you can see my thought process: Roderick Neumann is one of the original Berkeley school political ecologists and a great theorist. His work is on national parks and thus he has good knowledge of development literature as well. Gail Hollander has done significant work on agriculture -- most especially sugar which has been and continues to be an important crop in my country -- and is currently working on an NSF project looking at sea level rise. The department has other political ecologists as well so I have other sources of information, but they were less of a factor in my deciding. Since I'm interested in gender, it was important that there be a strong area in that as well. While Neumann and Hollander are both interested in identity in general and gender in particular, Caroline Faria is a fantastic up-and-coming feminist geographer who has a lot of contacts in that field. She is also a former student of Lucy Jarosz and so knows the PE and development literature well. Being an interdisciplinary department I could also tap into the sociologists who study gender, even if I don't work directly with them. Regionally and topically Percy Hintzen is a fantastic development scholar and has written extensively on my country of interest. He is a sociologist and was formerly in an African Studies program so I got lucky that he decided to leave a cushy tenure position at Berkeley to go to FIU. You might not be that lucky but in many cases departments work together or you are allowed to have committee members from other departments. You can mention these as well. So, if you want to apply to Madison but there is an anthropologist or geographer that you really want to work with, I would not hesitate to mention them. It shows that you are serious about the university.

 

This is considered fantastic fit. I have all of my interests covered by one or more people and these people are established in the field. Through them I can make connections and have the resources to write a strong dissertation. You might not find a place that has this to offer, but try and find places where you can make all of your connections work and outline this in your statement. If a person used to work in that area but no longer is, make sure you note that you are aware that they no longer work in _______ area but that you still feel they may be able to help and guide your research. What you don't need to do is find programs that have one person who is really great but no one else is even close. If you contact that person you might find out that they don't consider you a good fit because of that and you might not be accepted. (Though, I would still contact them.)

 

TL;DR

 

Fit is finding the program that will allow you to complete your research in a timely manner and make the contacts you need to get a position when you graduate.

[gilbertrollins]

I got the impression from the one comparative-historical ish panel I went to at ASA that it is a very self-referential and aging field, from the ages of both the audience and the panel.  I'm talking about the Big Theory stuff that compares entire national trajectories to one another.  

 

I don't know jack really about world systems theory, but there's a pretty strong consensus among a lot of people even in lefty political theory, sociology, etc. that it's main theoretical claim of core-periphery dependence has been destroyed by developing economy growth.  I don't know what's gone on since, as such a situation usually results in people scrambling to amend the edges of a theory in order to salvage the theory while its bottom is falling out.  Like others have said though, there is still great interest in the process of globalization and modern development.

[gilbertrollins]

Oh, and I don't know who at Cornell is working on this kind of stuff, but my impression of the place is that you have quant people doing political soc, quant people doing inequality and gender, quant people doing simulations and networks, and quant people doing economic sociology that looks a lot like heterodox (but non-Marxian) economics.  Dunno if that's going to be a good spot for your concerns.

[jmu]

I don't know jack really about world systems theory, but there's a pretty strong consensus among a lot of people even in lefty political theory, sociology, etc. that it's main theoretical claim of core-periphery dependence has been destroyed by developing economy growth.  I don't know what's gone on since, as such a situation usually results in people scrambling to amend the edges of a theory in order to salvage the theory while its bottom is falling out.  Like others have said though, there is still great interest in the process of globalization and modern development.

 

The people who say that, like you, don't really know anything about World-Systems theory, which is an economic rather than political theory. Many focus on one aspect of World-Systems Analysis by Immanuel Wallerstein where he says capitalism is approaching the asymptote and a new World-System is in the works. I think this is a generally unclear statement and a bit too orthodox Marxist but in general I think the idea is right. Capitalism as we know it is going through a power shift just as it did around WWII. This doesn't change the ways in which production occurs globally, and doesn't really affect the theoretical standpoint either. Especially since these processes are fluid in W-SA. Where Wallerstein gets in to politics it is in the realm of political economy, he talks about how the State, in its various forms, supports the World-System by acting simultaneously as a protector and a scapegoat for capitalist economic interests.

[gilbertrollins]

Will read more world systems theory and get back to you.

[SocGirl2013]

Thank you so much everyone. This has been remarkably helpful to read. I very much appreciate it! :)

[ohgoodness]

Another tool to determine some fit would be surf the course selection pages of your schools and how they are structured, what they include and who is teaching it (especially the reading courses).

 

I slightly ignored the fit-part of my application (although I am perfect fit at my school) so it was a slight shock to notice how much of the teaching and seminars are strictly on the key strengths of the program.  if you spend 12-14 hours a day reading, talking, writing and thinking about something then it's pretty good if it is develops you towards what you are interested in.   I have no idea whether it will help you get into the program but fit will definitely help you motivate yourself and keep going. 

[Ambigiousbuthopeful]

From what I remember Johns Hopkins Soc is strong on World Systems. I was in a similar situation last year in terms of academic interests. Feel free to PM, I may be of some help...