What alternatives have you considered? Have you thought about what you will do if you are not accepted for Ph.D. study at a program appropriate for your interests? Are there other professional possibilities that might appeal to you equally?

For instance, do you know how much college professors make? Current starting salaries for assistant professors in liberal arts environments are are as low as the mid-$50Ks a year, although some research universities pay as much as $75,000 a year, usually plus health benefits, retirement contributions, and varying amounts of research support (including use of a computer). Compared to a graduate stipend of about $20,000, this may sound like a lot, but compared to salaries in many fields requiring comparable (or sometimes even less) preparation, like medicine, law, business, engineering, it's not. Some offer more generous benefits, including subsidized child-care, assistance with college tuition, and so forth: others offer substantially less.

We have an excellent placement record: our former Ph.D. students are teaching at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), Emory University, Marquettte University, Holy Cross, as well as Haverford, Oberlin, Brooklyn and Colorado Colleges. Still, the academic market is highly competitive. Every year there are far more applicants for entry-level teaching positions in Religious Studies than there are positions. Many of these positions are in large public universities and colleges with heavy teaching loads and little support for research. Others are in small colleges, or small departments. where faculty are routinely expected to teach broad undergraduate courses, and have little opportunity to teach the research specialties they acquired in graduate school.

Admission is based not simply on the academic potential of the applicant but also on the match between the applicant's interests and the areas of expertise of Department faculty.  Every year, we receive applications from prospective students who do not demonstrate much awareness of the areas of expertise of our faculty, and whose own interests would not be well-served at Brown.  All applicants should read our website carefully, and take time to learn something about the specific research and teaching interest of our faculty, available on our research profiles.  Don't just crib a line or two off our website and insert it into a generic application statement.  Show us how our interests and yours intersect.  Applicants who have read at least some of our work should have a better sense of whether and why Brown might be a good fit.  (This will obviously be true for applications you make elsewhere as well).  

Are your interests centrally located in academic work in religious studies, including explanatory accounts of religion? Have you read work in the study and theory of religion? Are you familiar with some of the classic theories of religion (e.g. Durkheim, Eliade, Freud, Hume, James, Weber) as well as more recent theorists (e.g. Asad, Bell, Bourdieu, Boyer, Douglas, Horton, Mahmood, McCutcheon, Pyysaïnen, J.Z. Smith)? While we don't require applicants to have studied these theorists previously, all students take a required seminar that considers theory of religion at a professional level. Applicants who have read some of this work often have a better understanding of the academic study of religion.

While we do occasionally accept students who have only a B.A. degree, we only do so when those students have majored in Religious Studies, or in a closely related field (such as classics, or philosophy, or Asian studies), or have done considerable coursework in Religious Studies, and have studied some of the languages they will need in graduate work. Students who lack such preparation should first do a master's program, or a post-baccalaureate language program elsewhere, since Brown does not offer such study.