SOCIOLOGY NEWS
Department of Sociology
University at Albany
State University of New York
Spring 2016Volume 16
1
From the Chair
1
It amazes me that another year has passed. I am just finishing my fourth year as Department Chair and I am happy to report I am still having fun with the job. As you will remember from your days here, the department has always had an ability to laugh and to tease, which helps greatly to relieve tension. Of course, there are also challenges of leading this great department. Even after 20+ years on the faculty, the University at Albany still has procedures that I am learning and it still surprises (or more often annoys) me with some of its policies.
Nancy Denton
The department continues to change. Trevor Hoppe, who joined us in September after a post-doc at UC Irvine, is settled now and putting us on the map with his research on HIV and the criminalization of disease and sex. As I write this, our THREE new faculty colleagues are in Albany looking for housing in preparation to start September 1, 2016. Stacy Torres, NYU, is an ethnographer who studies aging, families, and medical sociology. She was hired last year but delayed to do one year at UC Berkeley as a post-doc. Kate Averett, UT Austin, was the successful gender recruitment this past year. Kate’s dissertation is on home schooling and she has interests in gender, sexuality and qualitative methods. The last new hire is Brandon Gorman from UNC-Chapel Hill. Brandon has done extensive field work in Tunisia and is interested in culture, politics, qualitative text analysis and the Middle East. More information about them can be found below. A warm welcome to all of them!
We finally have a full office staff for the first time in a couple of years. We hired Ashley Turski in March 2016. Ashley is quickly learning the job of undergraduate secretary and is the first person you see in the main office. Jaime Galusha is enjoying being Administrative Manager and helping us get better organized, and Lisa Klein, who is now the graduate secretary, is doing very well and loving that job, even though it is tough to fill Cathy Rose’s shoes. And the most exciting news is that we have received permission to hire a full-time undergraduate advisor, something we have been requesting for many years. The search committee is meeting and we hope to have someone in the position starting August 2016.
Amid all the excitement of the arrival of new people, we also have very sad news. We lost two of our senior colleagues this year: Dick Hall passed away on September 23, 2015 and Al Higgins on May 5, 2016. Both Dick and Al made wonderful contributions to the department and the university. We miss them.
It is also Steve Seidman’s last year on the faculty—it is hard to imagine the place without him as his research on sexualities attracted so many of our graduate students to us. We still see some of the earlier retirees quite regularly, especially Glenna Spitze, Russ Ward and Larry Raffalovich, so we don’t have to miss them quite so much.
As usual we had our Annual Theodore G. Standing Lecture—the 46th—on April 27, 2016. This is a wonderful event where we honor our “founders” with awards to our current students. Professor Naomi Gerstel from the University of Massachusetts Amherst gave a wonderful talk about “Unpredictable and Unequal Time.” Her research studied four occupations in the health field: professional doctors and nurses and working class EMTs and nursing assistants to reveal how gender and class shape these workers abilities to control their schedules while at the same time reinforcing or challenging conventional gender roles.
Along with publishing journal articles and teaching, members of our department received accolades and honors during the year. The biggest news was that Scott South was named a Distinguished University Professor by the Board of Trustees on May 12, 2016 based on his national and international research reputation. This is the highest level in the SUNY system and not only represents a superb achievement for Scott, but for the department as well. Congratulations Scott!!!
Angie Chung was the Dr. Thomas Tam Visiting Professor in Asian American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center this spring. TC Yang won a best poster award at the Population Association of America meetings for the third time. Two graduate students, Josh McCabe and Qian (Jasmine) Song, won university distinguished doctoral dissertation awards. Apologies if I have missed anyone.
Since I am a demographer, I must tell you that along with everything else, we are doing our part to keep the population growing. Joanna Dreby gave birth to Nikolai in October, Kate Strully to Elena and Antoinetta in March, and Aaron Major became the proud father of Emile in April. Congratulations to all!
In closing, I want to thank Jim Zetka for his three years of service as Undergraduate Director. This job is a lot of work and he not only did it well, but also entertained us with his sense of humor. Of particular note is that he
re-established the undergraduate international sociology honor society for us – more about that below. Aaron Major will be assuming this position in the fall. He is currently shepherding our first two concentrations through the university bureaucracy and chairing the search committee for a new advisor.
Let me also say to the alums that though the department may have changed since you were here, we still have wonderful faculty, graduate students, staff, and adjunct lecturers. We are eager to stay in touch with our alums and learn what you are doing. So let us hear from you! And by all means, if you are in the area come by to visit the department!
From the Graduate Director
Elizabeth PoppBerman
It has been another active and exciting year for the graduate program. We began it last August by welcoming a strong cohort of 12 new students to the program. Summer and Fall 2015 saw an unusually large number of PhD students graduate, including Rak-Koo Chung, Colin Gruner, Andrew Horvitz, Lina Rincon, Anibal Gauna Peralta, Jing Li, Qian (Jasmine) Song and Dan Xu, and also Nicole Daegele with her MA degree, and head to a variety of academic and other positions, including program research specialist at the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, a postdoc in the Center for Population Dynamics at Arizona State, and tenure track positions at Framingham State University and Fudan University in China, among others. Several others have or will join their ranks shortly, including at the PhD level Salvatore Labaro and Sylwia Piatkowska, Sam Applin, Dan Farr, Zhen Li, Jiejin Li and at the MA level, Melissa Labossiere, Arianne Watson, and Ertugrul (Arthur) Akyol. While we will miss them all, we wish them well in their future sociological endeavors and hope they keep in touch.
Our students continue to achieve recognition at the university level and beyond. Two 2015 PhD’s, Qian (Jasmine) Song and Joshua McCabe, were recently awarded UAlbany’s Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award, bringing the department’s streak to ten years that one (or more) of its’ graduates has won this prize. Emily Pain and Gowoon Jung also received competitive Benevolent Association Research Grants.
At the national level, Sylwia Piatkowska, who will be starting a tenure-track position at Old Dominion University this fall, was awarded first place in the American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology Student Paper Competition. And students have been published in academic journals—among others—ranging from Social Forces and Sociological Forum to Violence and Victims, Demographic Research, Biodemography and Social Biology, and Food, Culture & Society.
At the departmental level, we continue to recognize exceptional graduate student work with the Paul Meadows Paper Award, given this year to Kiwoong Park for his paper (currently R&R at the Journal of Health and Social Behavior) “Does Higher Family Income Assure Children’s Better Mental Health in Adulthood? The Different Roles of Family Support and Higher Education,” and the Allen Liska Dissertation Award, presented jointly this year to Kristen Hourigan and Lei Lei. As is department tradition, the awards were presented at the annual Standing Lecture in April.
As Graduate Director, one of my goals has been to strengthen students’ opportunities for professional socialization, beginning in the first year and continuing throughout the program. While like most graduate departments we have long had a proseminar to introduce new students to the discipline, we have increasingly been using this to give students a taste of what the professional pathway to becoming a sociologist—either inside or outside of academia—is like. This year, we have held panels on how to get the most out of your TA or RA experience, what to do in the summers, time management for graduate students, and how to build a professional network, among other topics. I think we all learned from hearing faculty and students talk about their strategies for combatting procrastination.
We have also worked to collect data about the program and graduates that had not previously been pulled together in one place. Graduate student Rachel Sullivan helped track down the current employment of our PhD alums from the last ten years, an exercise that turned out to be fairly gratifying given the ongoing tightness of the academic job market.
The majority are in tenure-track academic positions; there are also a fair sprinkling of alums in government offices (the Census Bureau, the Government Accountability Office, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Department of Veterans Affairs), and a surprising number in administrative positions within higher education (director of Institutional Research, director of Office of Pluralism and Leadership, director of Accreditation, Assessment & Strategy, and so on). As our graduate student body has become more international in the last decade, we are also starting to place more students in academic jobs outside the U.S., including in China, Colombia, Germany, Australia, and Korea. The number of graduates more than a year out who are in jobs not related to their PhD or in temporary academic positions is fairly small, about 10%.
Finally, another major project this year has been managing the transition associated with staff changes. Cathy Rose retired at the end of the last academic year, after years of dedicated service to the department and to graduate students. We were sad to see her go, though happy she now has more time to devote to her grandchildren. But we were lucky enough to welcome Lisa Klein into her position a few months later. Lisa had been doing such an excellent job managing the front desk that the department was delighted to be able to promote her. She has spent the year getting up to speed on the seemingly endless array of rules and regulations that govern the graduate program as well as getting to know the eighty or so students who make it up. She is doing a great job, and we are very lucky to have someone so dedicated and enthusiastic in the position.
As usual, I have to thank everyone who put in so much work to keep the graduate program running smoothly this year: in addition to Lisa, Jaime Galusha as Administrative Manager; Katie Meck as President of Students of Sociology; Richard Lachmann, Zai Liang, Steve Messner, and Kathy Trent as members of the Graduate Committee; and last but certainly not least, Nancy Denton as Chair. Another nine PhD students—representing China, Korea, Malaysia and Spain, as well as the U.S.—will be joining us in a few months, and we will start the cycle again.
From the Undergraduate Director
Jim Zetka
This is my last report as Undergraduate Director, since I will be replaced next year by a younger model. So, let’s make it short and sweet. First, we received interesting survey data from the university regarding the fields in which our undergraduates find jobs. The top for sociology graduates were social work (9.9%), health care administration (5.3%), law enforcement (5.3%), and finance and banking (4.6%). When we cluster them into something like industries or sectors, we get 23.2% in business, 15.2% in human services, 12.8% in education, 11.4% in crime, law, public safety, and 9.3% in the health care fields. So, our undergraduates find work in a variety of occupations and industries. Sociological insight has practical and market value. Recognizing this, the department is in the planning stages of introducing specialized concentrations into the sociology major. We have permission to create a concentration in crime and deviance and one in family and community. We have proposed a third. These concentrations will enable our undergraduates to specialize in particular areas of sociology. This is a positive development, and will certainly be an administrative headache. But, we will do it for our students.
Second, we have received results from our recent graduates regarding their opinions about their undergraduate experiences. The results were quite good, although the sample size was small. The one area that has troubled us for a long time is undergraduate advising, which up until now was the responsibility of each faculty member, juggling this with their core duties of research and teaching. With many ever changing rules, and seemingly with dozens of exceptions to every rule, this task was always quite difficult and a major stressor to all of us. The Dean’s Office has kindly given us permission to hire a professional advisor, and this should help us to improve significantly. This is a win-win for both our faculty and our students.
Third, because of the persistence of our better undergraduates we have reinstated the Albany chapter of Alpha Kappa Delta, the international sociology honor society. I am now the faculty representative of our chapter. Student response has been tremendous. We signed 24 initiates toward the end of the spring semester. Our initiation ceremony was on May 5th. What can I say? Our better students want recognition for their achievements, love and respect their major, and want community with the like-minded. They deserve an active chapter and will have one from now on.
Finally, I will return to normal faculty duties in the fall both relieved of a substantial workload and somewhat sad. We tackled an exhaustive external self-assessment, changed our curriculum to embed general education competencies in the major, and revised our self-assessment process during my stint as director. All of this on top of the usual semester-to-semester duties, responsibilities, challenges and headaches. I thank the staff for all of their help and good cheer in all of this: Stacey and Jaime as Administrative Manager, Melanie, Lisa, and now Ashley in the staff position responsible for the undergraduate program. Everyone was a pleasure to work with and made my experience transitioning in and transitioning out much smoother. I also thank our Chair, Nancy Denton, for being easy to work with generally, and for allowing me autonomy to do the job my way. I thank all the members serving on the Undergraduate Committee over the last three years. And, I thank all of the students I have met and served during my stint as well. All good, all positive. Have a wonderful summer.
From the President of Students of Sociology (SOS)
Kaitlin Meck
This year, Students of Sociology collaborated with faculty, students, and other organizations to develop skills and explore opportunities for professional development in graduate school as well as in our future careers. We began the year with several events focused around welcoming the first year cohort into the department. We had an informal dinner before the beginning of the semester, as well as the welcome reception hosted by the department. Continuing the tradition from last year, SOS sponsored a departmental mentorship program between the first and second year cohorts to help students transition into their first year in the program. We plan to continue to foster these relationships in the future to create a sense of connectedness in the department.
During the fall semester, SOS held an apple picking social, organized the Thanksgiving potluck, and sponsored the holiday lunch. Throughout the year, we hosted brown bag panels on professional networking and combating procrastination, as well as several other brown bag seminars in conjunction with other organizations. With the teaching committee, we hosted brown bags on being a successful TA and what instructors wish they had known when they began teaching. We also worked with GODS to host seminars on preparing for conference presentations and addressing a “revise and resubmit.” We found these collaborations to be extremely effective and hope to continue working together in the future.