Another grad student in sociology once said this to me (not quite verbatim but this is the essence of it):
"I think there’s something you need to understand about yourself. Most of us come here and we have to deal with sociological theory and so we read it and we study it, make a lot of notes about how such-and-such is a claim made by this theory or one outgrowth of this claim that’s made within this theory is such-and-such.
“You have this ability, I’ve watched you do it in discussions in classes we’ve had together, you can hold an entire theory in your head like it’s a noun and someone talks about some other kind of theory and you hold that one in your head at the same time and you talk about how this first theory bends in this place over here if you accept the ideas of this second theory, and how that lets the modified first theory reshape the second theory’s analyses and do these other things to it. Or how if you remove or deny some critical piece of a theory it means this part of it over here doesn’t say this any more and the way it looks at this other thing gets reshaped like this, and so on. And two thirds of the time I can’t follow what you’re talking about but one third of the time I can see what you’re saying, just often enough that it’s obvious that you don’t just throw out any old crap trying to make yourself sound smart. And when people get it, it’s like you just wrote a publishable analysis paper, except you did it all in your head the way other people would say ‘If you take the LIE instead of the Northern State you have to get off at this exit instead of that exit’.”