gradcafe关于社会学套瓷回复一条

muldenrUID: 3472364

早前听说过社会学申请由committee决定，套瓷于申请无直接作用的说法。今天在gradcafe社会学版看到关于套瓷一条很新的回复，署名faculty（真假未知）

内容如下：
The fields students (and faculty) are in are very important here. In lab or site-based fields (hard sciences, psychology, anthropology, etc.), you often need to be accepted into a research group. This is almost unheard of in sociology, where students are accepted by a department and not a particular faculty member, yet I have gotten at least one email from a prospective student every day this week (and a couple phone calls).
 
As I think is evidenced by my contributions here, I try to be helpful and want to do what I can to help students who are applying, but I see these emails as an intrusion on my time and have grown increasingly terse in responding to them over the years. This is, in part, because I have also realized that they don't make a difference. The years that I'm on the committee, no one brings up these emails or these students in conversation. The years that I'm not, I don't share a list of these students with anyone. I guarantee that the utility of these emails for sociology students are grossly overstated on this forum.  
 
That said, as I lay out in the post linked above and as is highlighted above, there are specific reasons to email faculty and more effective ways to do it. If you are concerned someone might retire or if you would like to know if someone is going to continue working in the area, it's easy enough to shoot off a brief email saying that you're thinking of applying and that you're interested in the work that they did in a particular publication and wondered if they planned to continue working in the area and/or what their current or future projects are. That is entirely different than the emails that most students send, though, which tend to ask what the chances of getting in are or provide a long introduction with no apparent rationale or ask me to review a selection of materials or end with the vague and impossible to answer, particularly briefly, "Is there anything else I should know about the department?" question. If these are the emails that you're sending, please think twice. They're wasting your time and the faculty members'.
 
Finally, don't underestimate the utility of contacting students. Students are busy, too, but they have a sense of the pulse of the department. They can't tell you your chances and it's not fair to ask them to read your materials - and please don't send out a batch email to every student, as they'll know and be annoyed - but students can tell you lots of things about which faculty seem to be taking students or what it's like to work with X or on Y in a particular department. 

faculty Posted 30 October 2014 - 12:13 PM
http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/58966-emailing-professors/

synchronizationUID: 3217937

多谢信息，和我导师建议的一样，如果怀疑对方的兴趣是不是已经发生转移或者是不是行将退休，这时候不妨问一问。