Results tagged “careers” from Photoethnography.com Blog

In the last few months, I've now gotten letters from prospective graduate students with CVs  that suffer from what I would call "Areas of Interest" bloat.   One had twenty-five (25!) areas of interest and the other was also well over a dozen.

This is just too much. Yes, you are young and the whole world looks like a giant oyster -- but too many raw oyster can give you really bad indigestion.

As a general rule, try to keep your areas of interest to less than six or so.   Since I (rarely) try to practice what I preach, here are my "Areas of Interest:"

• Region 1 (general world region): East Asia
• Sub-region (country or local area): Japan
• Topic 1: Disability Studies
• Topic 2: Politics of Identity and social movements
• Sub-discipline: Sociocultural and Visual Anthropology

OK, I cheated on the last two bullet points...... anyway, you get my point.

Try to go through your areas of interest with a very fine tooth comb and make sure it's as concise and focused as possible.  Use it as a way to find out which departments might be interested in what you study and vice versa.

I also tell my graduate students to perfect their elevator speech, but that's a topic for an entirely new blog entry.

I was reading the latest Anthropology News when I came across a reference to the National Doctoral Program Survey from Arizona State University. I wasn't aware of this. I wanted to put in a link on my blog for people who might be interested in it:

Anthropology programs ranked by best practices: http://cresmet.asu.edu/nagps...

The NDPS ranks all doctoral programs across all divisions (social sciences, humanities, arts, etc.) and a variety of schools. It's hardly scientific as the sample size of respondents per school is small and self-selected; but it does give a little bit of insight into various programs for people thinking about graduate school -- and an area of possible conversation when chatting with grad schools peers.

Be sure to wander around, you can rank programs on more than just best practices, including areas such as climate and professional development.

MIT has released a new streaming series on Doing Anthropology at: http://techtv.mit.edu/file/663/

I've recently gotten several e-mails from people interested in graduate programs in Deaf Studies or Disability Studies within Anthropology. I've come up with the following list to help people narrow down their choice of schools. It's still very tentative and I would greatly appreciate feedback from people who know of other programs.

Note that for the most part I have only listed places where there are faculty active in Deaf Studies or Disability Studies. However, most of us are first generation scholars -- we received our PhDs at programs where there was nobody who focused in Deaf culture or disability. I do not think we are yet at the second generation of scholarship yet -- where people will be studying more or less in specialized programs. Thus, you should not narrow your focus to only the programs listed, but also look for programs that are strong either in your areal speciality (geographic region) or topical speciality (such as language ideology; biomedicine and social institutions; etc.). You can always ask one of the people listed below to serve as an external committee member or dissertation reader.