Graduate Program

Through assistant instructor, teaching assistant, and research assistant appointments, as well as a myriad of University, government, and private fellowships, the Department is typically successful in funding 100% of its graduate students during the academic year.

Graduate students have also been extremely competitive for prestigious dissertation fellowships, internships, postdoctoral fellowships, and on academic and non-academic job markets. Students have received the William Powers Jr. Fellowship, the Harry E. and Bernice M. Moore Fellowship, the Donald D. Harrington Fellowship, the Lora Romero Memorial Award, the ASA Minority Fellowship, the ASA Medical Sociology Award, the Academic Keys Future Faculty Grant Award, and numerous article and presentation awards. In 2011 the Department established The Norval Glenn Prize, in honor of Professor Emeritus Norval Glenn and his many contributions to the field of family sociology, to award a financial prize to The University of Texas at Austin graduate student with the best paper in the area of family sociology. Please visit the funding section of the website for a more detailed description of these opportunities.

The Sociology Department at UT Austin offers an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Sociology. It places tremendous value on core training in sociological theory, methods, and statistics at the graduate level. It builds on that core with a variety of course offerings in areas such as criminology and deviance, demography, education, family, gender, health, politics and development, race and ethnicity, and social stratification.

The Department's faculty members are extremely research-active, placing great value on not only disseminating social scientific knowledge but also producing such knowledge - typically working alongside students. Faculty and students regularly publish articles in the leading general and specialty journals of the discipline, and books in leading scholarly presses; many also have their work funded by grants from the federal government and private foundations. Faculty and students regularly present at conferences throughout the country and in international settings, and are actively sought out by policymakers for advice and by the press for the public's better understanding of social trends and issues. While faculty provide strong academic instruction in the classroom, they work very closely with students in the research arena, with many co-authored publications and presentations resulting from faculty-student collaborations in outlets such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Forces, and the Latin American Research Review, and in conferences at the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America, and many others.

The Department's faculty have won numerous awards, including the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, the SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecturership, the American Society of Criminology Fellowship, the Warren E. Miller Award, the Liberal Arts Pro Bene Meritis Award, PAA and SSHD Early Career Achievement Awards, ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Awards, the Tech Innovation Special Achievement Award, and many more. In addition, the Department has hosted editorships to many internationally renowned journals, including Qualitative Sociology, Gender & Society, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. The Sociology Department and the Population Research Center also house the Urban Ethnography Lab, which aims to forge strong ties between the fields of demography and ethnography. The faculty and research sections on this website provide a more in-depth look at the areas of specialization and research activity of a productive and diverse group of scholars.

The Department of Sociology is committed to placing its Ph.D. graduates in influential academic, government, and nonprofit organizations. A number of professional development resources and workshops are available throughout the year offering guidance in the preparation of CVs, research and teaching statements, writing samples, and job talks.

In recent years, Ph.D. graduates from the program have won postdoctoral fellowships at Brown University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard University, Princeton University, and more. Ph.D. graduates also now serve on the faculty at many prestigious universities around the country, including Princeton University, Duke University, UCLA, Penn State University, Rice University, and many more. Many others hold important research positions in federal government, state government, and private settings, such as the United Nations, the US Bureau of the Census, the Urban Institute, and the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Visitors are encouraged to explore the webpages of faculty and students to look at their research and teaching interests, to visit the admissions section if interested in applying, and to contact the graduate program administrator with any questions.