Category: Sociology FAQs

This list describes the post-graduate activities of some of our majors and should give you a clearer idea of the career opportunities open to a Sociology major. As you can see from the variety of careers, majoring in Sociology does not so much impart a narrow set of professional skills as educate majors to see…

As a sociology student at CMU, you will gain knowledge in areas including research design and data analysis, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social theory, and applied quantitative data analysis. You will focus on social problems, pop culture, social psychology, criminology, and much more.

This question is important for our majors, and sometimes for their parents, who may greet our students’ enthusiasm for Sociology with a blank stare and expressions of concern about how their children are going to make a living. It is true that there is no single route into the world of employment with a Sociology…

One way to think about writing an analytical paper is to imagine you are a lawyer making a case. A lawyer begins by making an opening argument in which she makes a clear claim (e.g., “the defendant did not commit the crime”) with reference to specific evidence (e.g., “I will show the jury that my…

Most sociology papers ask you to evaluate (critique) arguments.  Rarely is it sufficient to simply summarize an argument or describe a phenomenon.  Instead, we want you to critically consider the explanatory value and real-world relevance of different theoretical arguments or perspectives.  Sociology as a discipline seeks to explain social phenomena, such as social trends or…

Our graduates go onto a wide range of sectors and many different types of jobs:

Consider a Sociology major if you are especially interested in exploring different ways to look at and talk about social, political, and economic issues, and in reconsidering things that are taken for granted. The ethos of this discipline is that rigorous research and empirical knowledge of the world can contribute to solving its problems. No…

Sociology is the study of social relations, how they are formed and what their consequences are. Sociologists observe how people relate to one another, why they behave in similar or different ways, and how individual actions are linked to collective actions. We look at how cultures develop, how organizations function or don’t, how states and…