randoperson

So, what's the deal here? They've already admitted people, and none of them have posted to the Results page? Or your POI in particular knows that you weren't accepted to work with them?

Oh gosh, didn't someone say they were going to notify people in a couple days? I'm dyinggg.

significance test

I am too, ugh. It's good to know that the decisions will be available soon, though (I guess Monday or Tuesday?).

Thank you so much! This is incredibly useful. I'm nonbinary, so the Facebook group isn't for me, but this resource is exactly what I needed.

I imagine a lot of people are calling them? What happened?

Obsessively checking GATS and the results page every couple hours until they release decisions. They admit people and then send out rejections a couple days later, so that adds to the tension of the whole thing. Realistically though, I know I'm not going to get in, I just want it confirmed.

The snark is strong with this one.

According to the results page, Northwestern admitted people on this day last year, and over the next week in the two years before that. *hyperventilates*

This is your first round, right? I sincerely doubt your mentor will be embarrassed by you, the reality is that graduate programs are very competitive and everyone knows that. Don't think of yourself as the reject, think of yourself as the (continually) aspiring researcher. I mean, you are getting to go to SPSP. That's amazing! I wish I could go so badly.

That sounds great. Thank you so much for your advice.

I am familiar with moral psychology, and I was actually surprised that the Stanford Philosophy page mentioned mental disorders as an example of a moral psychology question. In my experience, researchers studying the empirical piece of mental illness concepts are primarily psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and other mental health professionals. I don't think they typically think of themselves as "moral psychologists," even though one could argue that they are, in a way. So you get into a strange situation where the people who primarily think in terms of moral questions are the philosophers attempting to understand the evaluative elements of the concept of mental disorder, or those who are attempting to argue that evaluative elements can or should play a limited role. One area where philosophers of psychiatry/mental health have taken up empirical approaches is in the study of the way different people -- experts and non-experts -- define and reason about mental illness. Which is something I'm interested in, but it's not the main thrust of my approach. My work up until this point has focused primarily on good ol' fashioned conceptual analysis -- analyzing influential definitions of mental disorder and the values underlying them, piecing apart the complex relationship between facts and values in previous debates over the definition of disorder, often focusing on the language and argumentation I find in primary historical sources. To put it another way: I'm more interested in value theory than I am in the philosophy of mind, though I imagine those things are connected in some ways. I haven't considered anthropology, because I'm not really interested in ethnographic approaches. Also, I acknowledge Foucault is important but I don't want to have to worship him, if that makes sense (and anthropologists sure do love their abstruse theorists these days). I'm not very worried about spending time across disciplinary boundaries from psychology to philosophy -- to be honest, even my empirical studies have always been influenced by my strong interest in conceptual rigor. I'm constantly examining the way psychologists build their arguments and define their terms, as well as the implicit assumptions underlying their empirical approaches. So, I'm not worried about stepping out of the wheelhouse of empiricism. Also, thank you everyone for your responses, I really appreciate you taking the time.

I plan on going on to get a PhD, probably in another field -- psychology or sociology, or some sort of interdisciplinary science studies program (like UChicago's "Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science" program). Basically, my approach is very interdisciplinary, but I have no training in philosophy -- I have literally never even taken a philosophy course. All of my experience with philosophical scholarship has come out of or been motivated by my independent research into the conceptual debates over mental illness. I started expanding my reading to philosophers whose work was more broadly related to my interests. For example, I found Hilary Putnam's book "The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays" very stimulating for my thinking on the concept of disorder. My eventual goal is to become a professor. I believe solid interdisciplinary work requires (or at least is greatly helped by) rigorous training in multiple fields, which is what makes me interested in a Master's in Philosophy. Yes, King's College is definitely one of the places I am looking at. Sadly, they used to have a specific Master's in the Philosophy of Mental Disorder, but the program is being discontinued starting in the 2015 application season. (Just my luck ) I don't know exactly what the loss of that program signals -- presumably they still have a lot of support for people interested in that direction, but I can't tell.

One of my main areas of interest is the concept of mental disorder, how it is defined, the role of values, etc. Though my undergraduate degree was in psychology, I have dipped a fair amount into scholarship from the philosophical study of psychiatry/mental health. I am considering applying to some sort of master's program in philosophy to give myself a more solid foundation in that scholarship. I want to take courses where I read the important texts on topics like the fact/value distinction, with the goal of refining my approach philosophically. Part of the problem is that a lot of the people in the field of philosophy of psychiatry were originally trained as psychiatrists themselves, and therefore are embedded in MD programs (which I have no interest in). I'm wondering, first off, your opinion on bioethics programs. I'm somewhat worried that a lot of bioethics programs seem very focused on the practical questions that arise in medical practice and that this focus wouldn't be relevant to me at all. Do you see a bioethics master's as valuable to someone who is not looking to become a doctor? Another possibility I've looked at is a master's in Philosophy of Science. Do you think that would align more closely with my interests? Do you think there is any point for me to get a master's at all? (Honestly, part of my willingness to get a master's has to do with the fact that I have very very few loans from undergrad, so I'm less worried about taking out loans for a master's.)

In applying to schools, I pretty much valued fit over all else, only applying to programs that very closely matched my interests and/or overarching approach. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't been so strict about fit because I ended up applying to a narrow range of programs as a result.