God whoever you are, you are amazing. Wish my dept told me those years ago
Reapplying after waitlisted to top school
-
4) Talk to faculty. Do not try to impress them. They don't care what half baked ideas you have now, they don't care how s**tty your initial drafts are. They want to see constant development, improvement, consistency, commitment, etc. Also, they have been doing this for years, they are the most successful people in the whole discipline, they will save you weeks and months of wrong turns and will come up with ideas you would never have dreamed of, because they are likely the ideas the faculty already had but never had a chance to pursue. This will also help you build relationships.
Great tips, thanks. What were #1 and #5? They both got auto-deleted. You can post them in one sentence chunks if you have a moment and saved them. Or just a neutral-language summary?
-
I was on the admissions committee and know who you are. Your application made you come across as a faqgot which raised some red flags. Try to sound less like you engage in emotional and s/e/x/u/a/l relationships with men the next time you apply.
This is good advice. If someone writes a statement that makes it sound like they be fruity in tha b00ty I vote to reject them.
-
Can't remember what 1 and 5 were, but the only other things I'd add are:
1) your main job in grad school is to figure out what major / minor debates you want to spend the next 10-12 years (grad school + pre-tenure) tackling. this means absolutely mastering all the directly relevant literatures -- knowing what the debates are, what the major concepts are, how different school of thought approach the same topic, what the settled issues are, where this is still uncertainty, etc.
5) related to #1 above (in this post), if you have to choose between the 'marketable' approach to a topic and the approach that you find most interesting, go for "interesting" because you are going to need a buttload of motviation, and doing something marketable provides none of that. save the marketing part for the framing part of your research.
And yes, auto-delete ate the wall of text multiple times.
-
I�d rather be at UCLA than Stanford for most sub areas of soc. You�re in a top program. Be happy.
Yeah, honestly I'm not sure in what sub area Stanford would be better, maybe social psych. Even if UCLA is more expensive, ranking matters a lot, and UCLA > Stanford on the job market.
-
7) This is a phenomenal time to get laid. Try to avoid other students in your department, if undergrads make sure they are seniors (ideally spring semester). Being in west LA is certainly not going to reduce the supply of contenders here. Have fun!
This is completely off base. Grad school is your best and last opportunity to take down undergrads in great quantity. Don�t waste this golden time of your life by restricting yourself to seniors.And certainly don't waste it on rapidly aging feminist gradmeat.
-
Stanford is a good place to go if you want to do experimental work. Beyond those few people and a handful of go-getters, it is a mystery to me that so many smart people go to work with so many famous faculty and wind up doing nothing at all for 6 years before entering consulting or taking on one postdoc after another.
I?d rather be at UCLA than Stanford for most sub areas of soc. You?re in a top program. Be happy.
Yeah, honestly I'm not sure in what sub area Stanford would be better, maybe social psych. Even if UCLA is more expensive, ranking matters a lot, and UCLA > Stanford on the job market.