Graduate Program Information

Apply to our program online!

An Invitation:

Thank you for considering the Graduate Program in Sociology. If you have looked at other graduate programs, you know that they all claim to offer superior training and preparation for professional careers in sociology. So why should you consider applying to the program at the University of Colorado? What’s in it for you?

Quite simply, you will not find another program with our unique combination of tradition and innovation. The Ph.D. program in Sociology at the University of Colorado offers you solid training in the foundational theories and methods of the discipline, while allowing you the flexibility to pursue interests in a range of specialty areas.

• The concentration in Environmental Sociology offers you interdisciplinary experience through its campus-wide Graduate Certificate Program in Environmental Policy.
• The Sex and Gender concentration engages you with faculty whose expertise includes criminology, ethnography, stratification, social psychology, religion, and ethnicity. The core courses introduce you to the innovative research and methodology that characterizes gender studies.
• In the Criminology and Deviance concentration, you will find an array of approaches to the sociology of crime, deviance, and justice. Unique to the program is the critical mass of scholars with interests in sentencing and the death penalty.
• If you are excited about the idea of doing research right on the scene, our Qualitative and Interpretive Methods concentration offers solid training with internationally recognized researchers. The two-year Qualitative Research Methods and Analysis sequence will take you from entering a setting to writing a paper for publication.
• In the Population Studies: concentration, you will examine social, cultural, and economic trends through an interdisciplinary perspective, often using demographic research methods.

The Ph.D. program prepares you for career possibilities that include teaching and research in colleges and universities; research in government, business, and non-profit organizations; administrative, applied, and social planning positions; and activist work in social change organizations. You will find our Ph.D.s on the faculty at large research universities and small liberal arts colleges, from Colorado State University to Fort Lewis College, to various branches of the California and Vermont university systems.

GRADUATE STUDY AT CU BOULDER

Your application must include: 1) university application; 2) statement of purpose; 3) Graduate Record Examination scores; 4) letters of recommendation; and 5) transcripts of all previous academic study. You must apply online by going to the Application Information link. We do not accept papaer applications (but note that we still require paper transcripts.

How will you pay for it?

Most students receive financial support by working as Teaching Assistants. Your duties as a Teaching Assistant vary considerably from one course to another. Your work can include grading papers and exams, helping to design assignments, holding office hours, working with students to improve their writing, reading, and critical thinking skills, and leading discussion sections. Some graduate students work as Research Assistants. Later, as an advanced student, you may teach your own courses as a Graduate Part-Time Instructor (GPTI). If you would like more information about financial aid, visit the Office of Financial Aid website, or contact them at (303) 492-5091.

An overview of the program

When you begin the program you’ll be in a class, or cohort, of approximately twelve students. You’ll get to know these students well, and they’ll be lifelong friends and colleagues. During your first two years, you’ll take required seminars in Methods and Theory. You will take a theory exam at the end of your first semester, and the methods exam at the end of your first year. Then, you’ll work with faculty mentors to develop your specialty area (or areas). Your specialty comprehensive exam comes during your fourth year. After the exam, you will write your dissertation proposal. Before you know it, you’re doing your dissertation research. Our students have examined a wide range of topics. Just a few recent examples include:

• College women's se of controlled substances for weight management
• Home recording of music
• Bluegrass music festivals
• The voluntary simplicity movement
• Campus riots
• Gender pay equity among university faculty
• Women’s relationships with horses
• Intimate partner battering
• Women’s empowerment in Bangladesh
• A social history of bikers
• Religion’s role after the World Trade Center disaster
• Determinants of healthful behavior

IN STUDENTS’ INTERESTS

In our program, you won’t get lost in the crowd. From the moment you arrive on campus, you will have a faculty mentor and an advanced graduate student mentor. These mentors give informal advice for making the transition to graduate studies, finding housing, choosing courses, and other issues. As you move through the program, you may select new mentors based on your emerging interests, but your initial mentors assure that no questions go unanswered.

As a graduate student, you will be encouraged to participate in the Graduate Student Association (GSA), which represents your interests in the department and the broader university community. The GSA is your voice in department policy and procedural decisions for graduate and undergraduate study. GSA representatives also assist in the development of graduate student and professional colloquia and organize social events. Go to the GSA Website.

Through the Graduate Teacher Program, you can receive extensive preparation for teaching. The GTP offers a wide variety of seminars and workshops throughout the year. Through the GTP’s certificate program, you can obtain the Graduate Teacher Certificate and the Professional Development Certificate. The GTP also sponsors the Lead Graduate Teacher Network, which supports discipline-specific teacher training activities in over 45 graduate programs on the Boulder campus. In addition, the GTP offers both introductory and continuing sessions to help graduate instructors plan and complete their teaching portfolios.

RECRUITMENT OF A DIVERSE STUDENT BODY

The Department views the recruitment and retention of an inclusive and diverse student body as an essential component of a successful graduate program. Inclusive diversity includes personality, learning styles, life experiences, ethnicity, race, gender, age, class, sexual orientation, religion, disability, political viewpoints, veteran status, gender identity/expression, and other qualities that can be engaged in the service of learning. Besides enhancing the quality of our program by bringing a larger diversity of experience to it, recruitment and retention of students from many different backgrounds and experiences will increase the diversity in the profession of sociology overall. Our department is committed to improving the diversity of the student body and experience in the graduate program.

If you are a student of color who would like to pursue graduate training in sociology, we strongly encourage you to apply to CU Boulder. Currently, 14 percent of our graduate students identify themselves as persons of color.

We encourage all students to apply for outside funding. Sources of particular interest to students of color include the following:

Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship

The Javits Fellowship

American Indian Graduate Center - (Fellowships for American Indian and Alaskan Native students from federally recognized tribes)

LIVING IN BOULDER

You will love living in beautiful Boulder, the eighth largest city in Colorado. You will enjoy extraordinary natural beauty combined with rich cultural resources, an active music scene, and a public transportation system that lets you leave your car at home. Boulder has 4 distinct seasons and over 300 sunny days a year. The average snowfall is 83.1 inches a year.

At Boulder’s official city government website, you can find more information about transportation, housing, demographics, Boulder history, and more. You will also find links to other related sites:

The Chamber of Commerce website offers information about living in Boulder.

For information concerning housing on campus, visit the University Housing Office website, or call them at (303) 492-6871.

LIBRARY AND COMPUTING SERVICES

In your graduate study at CU Boulder, you will spend time in the Norlin Library, just a few steps from the Department of Sociology in Ketchum Hall. Norlin is the flagship of the seven University Libraries in Boulder. You will have access to more than eleven million books, periodicals, government publications, audio-visual materials, microforms, maps, manuscripts, papers, and electronic sources. You may use Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to request material that is not available in the libraries, including books, theses and dissertations, musical scores, some microforms, and periodical articles.

The Media Library offers you a variety of media formats, including microforms, audio and videocassettes, DVDs, laserdiscs, compact disks, computer disks, and slides for both educational and recreational use. Media staff can make you a DVD or CD containing just the clips or tracks you need for class assignments or instruction and reformat old tapes to a digital format. Norlin also houses the Center for Asian Studies, Faculty Teaching Excellence Program, and Honors Offices. Students can also take advantage of the Computer Labs housed in Norlin. All visitors can use Norlin Underground -- a coffee shop -- located on the southwest corner of the first floor.

You will find Computing Labs throughout campus, and two labs are in Ketchum Hall. The labs feature Mac or PC machines, as well as other hardware such as scanners and printers. You will have access to the Microsoft Office suite, Photoshop and Illustrator, and page layout programs such as Quark, statistical computing packages, foreign language programs, and other discipline-specific software programs. You might find yourself teaching in one of CU’s “smart” classrooms or lecture halls. Each of these contains at minimum a VCR, overhead projector, video projection unit, and Internet connection. Classroom sizes range from 12 to 375 seats. The smaller rooms are self-serve, while the large lecture halls provide operator assistance. A handful of the smaller classrooms offer Internet connections at each student seat, ideal for laptops. ITS also offers online training and seminars in various technological tools, such as web design, Power Point, Excel, and more.

Are you convinced yet?

If you are ready to take the next step, we invite you to visit our campus. You’ll find that our office doors are open.

For more information, .

View or download a current University of Colorado Catalog!