dgswaim

My experience at LSU was great, though my primary adviser is now elsewhere. Can answer questions if anyone is interested.

Start establishing good habits of self care. Get yourself in a strong routine of exercising, sleeping well, and eating right. It will be easy to slip into bad habits with this sort of thing once you're under way, and then it becomes a lot harder to bring yourself back into good habits. Get that stuff drilled down now and your mental health will thank you later.

It's worth noting that whatever you think of a department's current composition of fellow students, it's going to change a lot over 5+ years. You'll have new people coming in every year as they're admitted, and people leaving every year as they finish. So don't get to caught up on how you feel in a department right now.

All initial offers of admission and wait listings have gone out.

Who do you want to work with at SFU?

I'm a current student at Penn. This is a tough question to answer. The simplest answer is that PhD admissions in philosophy is competitive everywhere. Penn is roughly in the top 25 programs in the US (I think), so it's going to be pretty competitive, but less so than the top 10, I suppose. I was admitted off the waitlist the year I applied. There were about 110 applicants, with 5 students initially admitted, and a waiting list of 7 or so. This seems about typical. Sometimes the waitlist is bigger, sometimes a few more offers. I can try to answer more specific questions, if you want to DM me.

Just wanted to note: I'm happy to talk to folks about the dept at UPenn, should anyone have any questions!

I did a terminal MA. None of this was the case. Everyone just tries to do good work and hopes for the best for themselves and everyone else. That's it.

My Q score was 149 and I got in at a bunch of good places. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it.

Apply to Penn. Our department isn't using GREs in admissions anymore, given they're objectively useless.

Definitely not. At least not here at Penn. It's a really supportive community. Students like to talk about what they're interested in and working on, and others are happy to listen and give feedback. I have lots of friends in other departments, and I think their experiences are, in general, quite similar.

Just a clarificatory note: You said (per the link to Leiter's blog) that Michigan is only placing 20% of their grads. The figure from Leiter is actually that Michigan is placing 20% of their students into PhD-granting institutions. I feel quite confident that the percentage of students placed into full-time jobs at colleges of all kinds is quite a bit higher.

It might be worth considering getting one of your letters from an undergrad prof, if you have one that will write an especially strong letter. When I applied to PhD programs, I got two letters from MA profs, and one from my undergraduate advisor.

With good letters and a strong sample I'd bet you can get into a good MA program, and then springboard to a pretty good PhD program. I know a lot of people in good PhD programs (including myself) with backgrounds similar to this.

It might be a problem if you want to do philosophy of mind, and your paper for that course received a B+, and you wanted to use that paper as your writing sample. Other than that, doesn't matter.

I spent three years in community college, where I posted something like a 2.1 GPA. I transferred to a non-well-known LAC, spend 2.5 years there, and earned a 3.75 overall GPA. I did a philosophy MA at a not-well-known program, and posted (I think) a 3.85 GPA. I was admitted to a bunch of places. I don't think you need to worry too much about your grades. They look pretty good. Focus on writing a good sample, and finding letter writers that will be strong advocates.

I had an A- and a B+ during my MA. I did fine. They're not scrutinizing grad transcripts that hard.

Philly is really not that intense.

Don't stress over it too much. They do this every year.

Also, just in case it makes anyone feel better, I got a 149 on my quant section, and I did fine. And this for someone that does philosophy of science and logic!

I've been on team Trash The GRE In General for a while.

My understanding of the process here at Penn is that the admissions committee reads the packets for the first round of cuts, and then applications that make it past the first or second cut will then be sent to faculty members with expertise in the applicant's AOI.

Although we just lost Andrew Chignell, Penn is definitely still worth considering. Gary Hatfield is a great on Kant (the most widely used translation of the Prolegomena is his, for instance), and Rolf Horstmann is here every fall.

Hey guys. Just wanted to let y'all know I'd be happy to answer questions about the department at Penn via PM. Good luck to all!

I know a phil PhD student who's in his mid 50s. He came back to philosophy after a successful career in finance. People have done it.