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Post by Callitlikeitis on Feb 24, 2011 12:58:55 GMT -5
In my experience, grad students in top 10 programs are bigger douche bags on average. And they also tend to inflate their skills, on average, more than other grad students. Oh, and on average most grad students in top 10 programs wouldnt know what a theory was if it crapper on their face. But aside from that, grad students from top 10 programs, on average, are better than all others.
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Post by crap on Feb 24, 2011 13:11:56 GMT -5
In my experience, grad students in top 10 programs are bigger douche bags on average. And they also tend to inflate their skills, on average, more than other grad students. Oh, and on average most grad students in top 10 programs wouldnt know what a theory was if it crapper on their face. But aside from that, grad students from top 10 programs, on average, are better than all others. I think you perhaps have some anger issues... I'm not saying it's true across the board. I came out of a program that was ranked around 10 somewhere, and I really don't think I'm all that. I'm not really sure how I got into that program or out of it, frankly. I now work at a program ranked at around 50, and I'm telling you, on AVERAGE the quality of the students is not nearly as good. There are some amazing students here who could have been at much more highly ranked institutions and are much smarter than I am. But there are some that can barely string two sentences together. The admissions standards are much, much lower here. So the range is greater. I think it's really a shame for those stellar students who are here, because they are really fighting an uphill battle. There is so much stacked again them having this institutional affiliation attached to their name. There is most definitely a bias about students coming from certain institutions. Some of it is warranted, some of it is not. I will say though, you get a solo authored AJS/ASR/SF then your insitution matters a whole lot less. And perhaps that ought to be our real concern - because seriously - how much cool/innovative stuff actually gets published in those journals? (and I say this as someone with a solo authored piece in one of those journals)
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Post by crap on Feb 24, 2011 13:29:09 GMT -5
By the way, I should add that what you say, at least about there being more douche bags at top 10 programs, is probably also true. At least on average.
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Post by jini on Feb 24, 2011 13:46:48 GMT -5
I'm at a top 10 program, but I had the opportunity to take a class at a top 50 program a few years ago (something that wasn't offered at my own dept) and audit some others.
I was amazed at how much more congenial the top 50 program was compared to my own. I hadn't before realized how elitist people were in my own department, how much we tooted our own horns, etc. It was an appalling and frustrating realization.
But, I was also appalled with how easy the classes were at this particular top 50 school compared to my own department, how little faculty expected of their students, and how poorly prepared the students were to make major contributions to the field. I eventually stopped auditing any classes because I knew they wouldn't help me make it through my own program.
Now, that's not to say there were no brilliant students in the department (and there were definitely top-notch internationally-known faculty) but on average the quality of the debates and work being done was far lower than I expected. So to sum up, I agree with "crap" on both the quality and the douche bag arguments.
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Post by lolwut on Feb 25, 2011 7:01:11 GMT -5
In my experience, grad students in top 10 programs are bigger douche bags on average. And they also tend to inflate their skills, on average, more than other grad students. Oh, and on average most grad students in top 10 programs wouldnt know what a theory was if it crapper on their face. But aside from that, grad students from top 10 programs, on average, are better than all others. I'd rather be a prestigious douchebag than a mediocre one.
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Post by duh on Feb 25, 2011 8:35:57 GMT -5
Agreed crap. And lolwut, prestige and mediocrity are not on a continuum. I suppose I should have noted, in my experience at conferences, roundtables, and symposiums, the top-10 prestigious grad students often have the least to offer. Great at reproducing the status hierarchy, and reproducing the drivel that gets published in the best of the best journals...but, hey being a mediocre prestigious douche bag sounds great!
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Post by anon on Feb 25, 2011 8:40:06 GMT -5
If many of you spent half the time working/writing as you do bitching and complaining on these boards then you might just get a freaking job. But I'm glad you do, because while you sit around deconstructing "the top 10", I'm publishing papers, writing grant proposals and having a career.
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Post by soupy on Feb 25, 2011 14:32:47 GMT -5
anon, you sure are doing a lot of pompous posturing for someone who is upset about how others inflate their skills.
besides, virtually everything i hear at conferences is crap. doesn't matter where you're from. that's partly why conference presentations don't count for much on the market. they don't take much effort, and most folks put very little into them.
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Post by soupy on Feb 25, 2011 14:34:10 GMT -5
that last comment was for duh, not anon.
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Post by late on Apr 10, 2011 19:13:30 GMT -5
So this is the thread where we drag out our idealistic novitiate insistence that sociology (as a vocation) should operate differently than the rest world?
Good to know.
And like all utopian ideals, it would be nice, wouldn't it?
I don't come from a top 10 program, but I know people in them. In my opinion the bashing of grad students in top 10 programs has a lot more to do with the people bashing them than with the top 10 folks themselves. Just my opinion. Agreed, however, that the top 10 halo does make life easier for them, regardless of it is justified or not any individual case (there are plenty of "duds" from the top 10 as well).
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yep
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by yep on Apr 11, 2011 9:43:33 GMT -5
Actually, being at a top program doesn't necessarily make your life easier - you might have more resources, but you might not. Libraries are probably better, classes will probably be harder, but you almost certainly have an advisor who has very little time for you. Or if they do have time for you, they might be utterly clueless about, for example, the relative job chances of a theorist and push you to do great but non-marketable work. (Actually, you can make a general prediction about the higher the prestige of the advisor, the more clueless they are about market conditions. This isn't true across the board, but I think this holds in general.) In other words, if you aren't in a research group or publishing-minded RAship, there can be the problem where there is no guarantee that you'll just get told the way the job market works, and you might (wrongly) assume you'll be able to get a job without a lot of additional work on top of writing a really great dissertation. (Because of course, why would they talk about such unseemly details in a top program?) Thus you get the situation where a lot of people from my program are going into the private sector, because guess what, there's no overall training in how to become a marketable academic sociologist, and many people ended up choosing their own paths, following interesting questions, but ultimately working on topics that will make it very difficult for them to get hired without doing at least a few years of postdoc training or (often demoralizing) VAPs. But since those positions might not have the best pay and we might not even be competitive for them, well, the odds are easier and the pay is higher in the private sector. -- er, on rereading, please forgive my run-on sentence. However, I do think that the advantage of being in a higher program is that you have a strong set of peers to draw from in talking about research, and then the name brand, if you will, can make it easier to get looked if you jump to something like consulting or other private sector work that cares about status. (A great study of this name brand effect was done by... yep- a sociologist in a business school: www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera_lauren.aspx#research)
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Post by sssssssss on Apr 11, 2011 11:39:26 GMT -5
Actually, being at a top program doesn't necessarily make your life easier - you might have more resources, but you might not. Libraries are probably better, classes will probably be harder, but you almost certainly have an advisor who has very little time for you. Or if they do have time for you, they might be utterly clueless about, for example, the relative job chances of a theorist and push you to do great but non-marketable work. (Actually, you can make a general prediction about the higher the prestige of the advisor, the more clueless they are about market conditions. This isn't true across the board, but I think this holds in general.) In other words, if you aren't in a research group or publishing-minded RAship, there can be the problem where there is no guarantee that you'll just get told the way the job market works, and you might (wrongly) assume you'll be able to get a job without a lot of additional work on top of writing a really great dissertation. (Because of course, why would they talk about such unseemly details in a top program?) Thus you get the situation where a lot of people from my program are going into the private sector, because guess what, there's no overall training in how to become a marketable academic sociologist, and many people ended up choosing their own paths, following interesting questions, but ultimately working on topics that will make it very difficult for them to get hired without doing at least a few years of postdoc training or (often demoralizing) VAPs. But since those positions might not have the best pay and we might not even be competitive for them, well, the odds are easier and the pay is higher in the private sector. -- er, on rereading, please forgive my run-on sentence. However, I do think that the advantage of being in a higher program is that you have a strong set of peers to draw from in talking about research, and then the name brand, if you will, can make it easier to get looked if you jump to something like consulting or other private sector work that cares about status. (A great study of this name brand effect was done by... yep- a sociologist in a business school: www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera_lauren.aspx#research)Well, prestige has an impact that goes beyond the concrete benefits the students receive. Val Burris and others have published on how prestige networks trump essentially anything a grad student can do in terms of getting better jobs. And research in economics goes even further to say that the impact of prestige on academic careers start even earlier, as the prestige of undergraduate institutions end up playing a huge role on grad school selection, and so on. Of course, whether doing it that way is efficient is hard to discuss (though, once again, research in economics argues that initial employment matters more for publications than grad school). So before we even get to the discussion of the distribution of resources and social capital as influenced by school selection, there is already a huge prestige advantage to the top programs that trumps any individual production metric. And that is without even getting into issues like individual social networks and the like. While my experience might be a bit limited, one of the surprising things I've found out as my career has advanced is just how much knowing the editor, or having the editor know your research, matters in getting things published. The amount of weight given to the "jerk reviewer" (you know, the reviewer who is unusually harsh because your paper is stepping on their toes) in editorial decisions varies greatly depending on whether you know the editor or not, for example. Of course, none of this is to unfairly single out people in top programs as the beneficiaries of some unfair advantage. As I said, the fact that prestige matters a lot doesn't mean that prestige isn't a good, efficient indicator to base hiring decisions on. It might or might not be. But if there is one thing that I think people picking grad schools are often unaware of is just how big an impact prestige has (and I say this as a beneficiary of this sort of prestige).
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Post by ffffffff on Apr 11, 2011 11:43:24 GMT -5
So this is the thread where we drag out our idealistic novitiate insistence that sociology (as a vocation) should operate differently than the rest world? Good to know. And like all utopian ideals, it would be nice, wouldn't it? I don't come from a top 10 program, but I know people in them. In my opinion the bashing of grad students in top 10 programs has a lot more to do with the people bashing them than with the top 10 folks themselves. Just my opinion. Agreed, however, that the top 10 halo does make life easier for them, regardless of it is justified or not any individual case (there are plenty of "duds" from the top 10 as well). While I agree that a lot of these threads come from the hopelessly naive notion that sociology academic job markets should operate differently from the real world, there is also the flip side. That is, if on one hand it is naive to imagine that prestige and power relations that happen on the outside world would not also apply to sociology, on the other hand admitting that that is the case certainly makes the sort of outward activism so many sociologists participate in seem a bit hypocritical.
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Post by RightOn on Apr 11, 2011 14:40:53 GMT -5
Social activists usually are nonegalitarian in their organization relations while espousing equality and equity for the broader society. Most of us have read studies of protest, civil rights, and terrorist groups in which power and prestige are important dynamics. Terrorist groups compete for prestige by claiming that a bombing was their doing even when it was not. Campus radicals in the 1960s-70s had mostly men as strategy leaders while women did the office work and leafleting. Male civil rights leaders would fight for racial justice in daytime but womanize at night.
At macro-level the communist and national socialist governments dedicated to economic equality were among history's most repressive regimes for citizens in general. These may not be hypocritical so much as a realization that an for an organization to be effective in its attainment of goals, power and prestige dynamics must be exercised.
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