An undergraduate's dilemma

[poisongirlxv]

I'm a undergrad student majoring in sociology, going into my second semester. Sociology is my passion and it has opened up avenues of intellectual thought in my life, as I'm sure it has for most of you. It has compelled me to change and critique my own life. As much as I love the subject, I am worried about graduating in this field and heading to

Comments

[lostreality]

if you don't want to go the grad school route, I would focus on your quantitative skills- take as many applied stats classes as they have in your program and if you can take a grad level stats class or 3, that would put you an even better position to get a job. There are tons of jobs out there at places like the census, the CDC, etc., for statistical analysts who analyze and run the surveys that those organizations run.

If you ARE planning on getting a phd, there are also several options. First of all, if your ultimate goal is to get a PhD, I would apply to MA/PHD programs rather than going to just MA programs at first. Any MA/PHD program worth going to will pay YOU to go to school. Now they won't pay you a whole lot, but it's enough to live on in most places- I went to Penn (in philly, a fairly expensive place to live) and the stipend there was tuition + health insurance + $21,000 a year. In most good programs it will probably enough to live off of while you are working on your degree- it took me 6 years to finish my phd and I didn't take out a single loan the entire time (I did however supplement that stipend with teaching + RAing).

As for the skills you need both to get into grad school and get a job after grad school- what type of job are you going for? Industry or academia?

If you're going into industry (which for sociologists is the same thing I talked about above- the Census, CDC, think thanks, RAND, marketing firms) the best thing to do is build up your quantitative skills, especially those related to survey writing and data cleaning.

As for academia, the #1 thing they look for is publications. And you'll prolly want some teaching experience of some kind.

What you can be doing now (Which will improve your chances of getting into grad school, plus teach you marketable skills if you don't go to grad school) is get involved with research that your profs are doing that will lead to research experience and co-authored papers. Hopefully you go to a school where some research is going on, and you can get involved in it. If not, check out sociology departments in local colleges and see if there are research opportunities there. Do it for course credit at this point, cause there's very little chance you'll get paid until you're at the grad level.

I just went through the job market for PhDs, and I'm the only one in my cohort who got a tenure track job. The thing that I think really made a difference for me is my # of publications- I have 3 peer reviewed articles published and a book review, while my colleagues had like 1 article published at the most. 2 out of 3 of my publications are based on research I started as an undergrad...just sayin. :)

Anyways my advice would be if you LOVE sociology but want something more practical, then minor in something more practical- like statistics or something like that.

[lostreality]

oh and if you are planning on going the academic route the dirty secret of academia is that school rank counts a LOT more than you think it does- my friend just did a study that found that 80% of people with tenure track jobs in sociology got their degrees from the top 20 schools in sociology or something like that...so aim high if you are planning on being a professor.

[uberconfused]

has this been published?

[lostreality]

no he's still writing up the results as far as I know.

[winweiquaker]

this is great advice.