College Life

Private Schools That Are Well Known for This Major

• Northwestern University
• University of Chicago
• Harvard University
• Stanford University

State Schools That Are Well Known for This Major

• University of California—Los Angeles
• University of California—Berkeley
• University of Wisconsin—Madison
• University of Michigan—Ann Arbor

Classes in the Major

Psychology. It's kind of hard to fully understand how people will act in social organizations if you don't know how they respond in smaller social groups, or what their deepest, darkest personal desires are. (You know, Freud and all that.) Psychology and sociology are interrelated, just as individuals and the society around them are interrelated. Like how a crowd is just a bunch of people chilling out together. And a forest is just a bunch of trees, chilling out, being trees together. Or however that saying goes, with the whole seeing the forest and the trees thing.

Statistics. Go do humanities, they said. You won't have to do math, they said. Well, surprise. Statistics are actually an integral (ba-dum-tsh) part of Sociology. Stats are simply the easiest way of making sense of all the data that ends up getting collected during an ethnography (that's the fancy name for the kinds of studies that sociologists do—you'll pick up the lingo in no time if you sign up for the major, don't worry).

As a sociologist, you'll get to learn all about different forms of statistical analysis, from the z-test to the chi-squared test. You'll even learn how turn the data you collect in your ethnographies into statistical tests to make inferences about what the data mean. And those inferences have to be a more in-depth than an "It's over 9,000" reference, Shmoopers.

Research Methodology of Sociology. Believe it or not, Sociology is actually a science. Which means there's a scientific method involved. And observations. Lots of observations (what sociologists call "fieldwork"). You'll have to learn about how to create hypotheses for sociological studies, and what types of studies the field uses to test these hypotheses—for example, cross-sectional vs. longitudinal vs. cross-sequential.

Sociological Theory and Social Structures. Sociology got its theoretical kick-start from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. That means you'll be learning about these dudes and how they went about creating their first sociological theories. Things like antipositivism, which is surprisingly less pessimistic than it sounds. You'll also be studying the relationships between individuals, between individuals and organizations, and so on. The effects of globalization on today's companies, governments, etc. will probably get covered at some point, too. It's a hot topic, you might say.

Social Inequality. While you're learning all about how society works, you will probably stumble upon a lot of the ways it doesn't work. This is where social inequality comes in: how class stratification arises in an organization or a society, and what happens next. (Bloody revolution? Peaceful resolution? Only history will tell.) Also, there are a whole ton of different types of social inequality—it's not all about class, folks. Inequality can be based on socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexuality, education, age…just about anything, sadly.