Sociology and Graduate School

StrangeLight
Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:18:22 +0000

contact departments directly and ask the director of graduate studies which languages they expect you to have.

as i said, if you have specific regional interests (i.e. china) then whatever relevant language you would need replaces french/german. but a lot of important work has been written in both french and german, and many of the top programs will expect you to be able to read this stuff in the native language.

the two language proficiencies for a PhD (usually just one for the MA) are required by virtually every humanities and social science discipline, including sociology. this requirement is not listed along with average GPAs or GRE scores of admitted students, but if you read the graduate handbooks for admitted students, you’ll see that demonstrating language proficiency is ALWAYS in there.

they don’t need to be french and german. but those two are the most useful to sociologists whose own research interests would have them working primarily in english.