Why I may become a Sociologist...

Its only the first week of school here at the University of Cincinnati but I am pretty damn excited about my Sociology courses!
I have been searching for a discipline to pursue in grad school for a few years, since the more time goes by the more I realize my interest in a career as a historian is seriously waning. I am getting really tired of it actually. I love studying the past, old shit, analyzing societies' responses to historical events, and reading really really heavy books, but I just can't get into the political theory and the philosophical propensity. I find the ideological positing exhausting. I also find too many History people to be somewhat elitist, conservative, and vaguely pretentious. Historians seem to often come from relatively privileged backgrounds and usually totally disregard all other social scientists' research.
Hey hey I know, Social Historians and radicals like Howard Zinn and Mike Davis offer kickass analysis that challenges the dominant accepted narratives of our collective past - but they only represent a fraction of the pie. Remember - Newt Gingrich is also a History Ph.D. He has a book out about Gettysburg right now. Gag me.
So then I got into Geography after Dr. McTague accosted me and told me I needed to take her Urban Development class when I had no idea who she was or how she could know such a thing. (I was later very grateful.) Urban Geography seemed really cool. I love studying urban blight, looking at maps, and trying to figure out why we have huge urban ghettos. Urban Geographers tell the same story as Urban Historians, but they do it much more concisely and rely more on understanding economic trends. Geography is still way cool in my book, I just don't really want to take any more Physical Geography or GIS classes. I am also realizing that I am not interested in Economic Geography or Political Geography. I would really be most into Cultural, Social, and Urban.
I have always been interested in poverty and inequality. I got into History because I loved the stories of deprivation, hardship, and struggle that people had to overcome. My favorite movie as a kid was the 1940 film version of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (starring Henry Fonda). My favorite books were the "Foxfire" series about the hardcore old-school survivalist hill folk of Rayburn Gap, Georgia.
When I was a naive teenager running away from small town Southern Ohio I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to scour trashcans, dumpsters, vacant lots, and scrapyards for the detritus of our society and collect those objects and make them into sculptures and installations. I wanted to do all this as a way of commenting on my family (which hoards scavenged items for decades hoping to find utility for them), my childhood (which was noteworthy in its accumulation of other people's garbage), the incredible waste of consumer capitalism, the legacy of rural poverty I saw growing up, and the incredibly massive blight and destruction I saw around me in the inner city. I wanted to make a statement about the ugly truth of American society's glaring flaws and fault lines and put that commentary on display for all to see. Needless to say, that agenda cost me my scholarship at the expensive private art school I was confused enough to enroll in. I felt like not many people there understood my artistic vision - I primarily wanted to explore the aesthetic of poverty - and fewer understood my motivation. (My art heroes have always been crazed weirdo outsider artists.) Unfortunately I was too young, insecure, and confused to articulate what I was trying to do. I pretty much ended up weirding everyone out, something I am completely used to, but I also ended up feeling like a failure.
The more time goes on the more interested I get in studying and fighting racism. Cincinnati is just such an ugly test case in racial iniquity and tension, I can't help getting into it. I know in the marrow of my bones that I grew up in an often deeply racist and bigoted environment and that I need to work to redress the sins of my people. And I can't find a direct way to do that in Geography or History.
Oh yeah, and Historians are screwed on jobs and money! There are something like 300 Ph.D. applicants for every teaching job out there to be filled. A History proffessor of mine, who recently graduated from Harvard and teaches at UC, reports having colleagues who can't find gainful employment. Imagine being a Harvard Ph.D. and working at a gas station?
Screw that!
Geography is way cool for jobs - the ratio is about 1:1 for new Ph.D.s and open teaching positions (so I'm told).
Sociology seems to be somewhere between the two. I think it's about 30:1, but there are jobs outside of academia as researchers, working in public programs, etc.
Sociology seems to deal most directly with the issues that I want to research. Sociologists care about social issues and want to see them addressed. Historians and Geographers may be concerned about social issues too, but the most they really do is write about them - unless they are really radical and get into activism, Noam Chomsky style. Sociologists can practice in various capacities working in social service agencies and they actually get out there and try to change the world. Many choose to do so in addition to, or rather than, having teaching careers. A combination of the two sounds incredibly fulfilling.
I have always wanted to teach and do research, but I need to feel like I am working to make the world a better place.Being an academic alone would make me depressed. Academia is too isolated and can be really inbred and elite. I have been craving real-world volunteer type experiences. I want to do real shit for real people, not just publish journal articles that only 5% of the population will read.
The other thing I really dig about sociologists is that the discipline has always attracted people who are most familiar with social iniquity on a personal level - namely blue-collar intellectuals and people of color. Those are the minds I most treasure learning from and interacting with. I may be whiter than Lawrence Welk, but I know that intellectually those are my people. Heck, W.E.B. Du Bois helped establish the discipline in the US and if he wasn't a great black thinker then I don't know who was.
The few Sociologists I have met seem passionate about injustice and they want to facilitate real-world results. The closest historians usually do is political debating, and possibly protesting - none of which I find especially interesting or effective at redressing social ills. I don't know about Geographers. Half of them study earth science and the rest seem to be interested in a sundry mix of politics, economics, and assorted cultural issues. And GIS for its own sake sucks a big one.So I think next fall I will apply to some good geography programs and some good Sociology programs too and see what happens.
It feels good to be embarking on a project into the great unknown.