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dogman1212

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  • Application Season
    2018 Fall
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    Philosophy

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  1. My experience this application cycle is very similar to that of ThePeon's, especially regarding the openness towards other career paths, awareness of the high level of competition in academic philosophy, and interest in reading philosophy while working. I recently read this APA interview with Bill Miller, the person who donated $75 million to JHU's philosophy department. I find his response to the question "Do you ever wish you had stayed in academia" to be funny, as he claims that he saved the world from having one more mediocre philosopher.
  2. I can’t say that I am officially shut out, as I have been accepted to NIU and am still waiting to hear back from a number of programs. I’m surprisingly tranquil about the process right now. I’ve learned that it takes an excellent application in all respects to compete for the few spots that are available, and I understand that my application had a few weak areas. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can probably live a fairly happy and fulfilling life inside or outside of academia, so I’m not very worried about whether or not I get in this year. In hindsight, I think spending more time fine-tuning my writing sample and getting feedback from more philosophers would have helped the most. I don't think I completely grasped how much philosophers value clarity in their writing and thinking, which may have hurt me in this cycle. If I receive a funded offer from an MA or PhD program this year, I will likely accept it. If not, I will try to get a job, probably by sending applications to a number of entry-level business jobs and networking. I think it’s unlikely that I reapply in future cycles, but I haven’t decided on that yet.
  3. Ok, I apologize if this is overly forward, but your comment is a bit concerning to me. I think there are many ways that people make something out of their lives outside of academic philosophy, and I think overvaluing the work of academic philosophers may be dangerous. There are many other fields where people engage in fulfilling and meaningful work. I understand that this thread is for ranting and venting, but it's likely that you still have plenty of opportunities to make something out of your life, whether or not they have to do with philosophy.
  4. Thanks for the thoughtful reply RoughAnatomy. I agree with your suggestion: I think sending an email to a faculty member at this stage may send off the wrong message.
  5. No, although that may have been a good idea. Judith Lichtenberg and Henry Richardson have very close interests to me. Do you think it would be too late to send a friendly email notifying one of them of my application?
  6. Some may find this information encouraging. I just did a quick search on the gradcafe survey, and as of 2:45pm CT on Feb. 20, 2018, nobody has reported any sort of contact (acceptance, waitlist, interview, rejection, etc.) with the following schools: North Carolina, Georgetown, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Arizona, Harvard, UCSD, Rutgers, Virginia, or Virginia Tech.
  7. Thanks for the update on Georgetown. That was a good idea to email them. And it would make sense that UCLA has sent out all their acceptances. I've seen many intermittent UCLA acceptances by now and it's possible that more have been unreported. I haven't seen anyone post being waitlisted to UCLA, but I suppose we shouldn't rule out a secret waitlist (or, as I prefer to call it, a ghost waitlist). I am still a bit stumped about Madison's strategy; someone did just report a rejection from there though. If they have already accepted 4 students, and maybe a few more which may have gone unreported, they may be reaching capacity as well.
  8. I am in a very similar situation to you philoguy, I applied to 3 out of the 4 programs you mentioned and have seen very little posts/announcements/emails from a whole slew of additional programs I applied to. Madison's strategy strikes me as interesting in that they seem to have notified many more waitlisters than admits. I think Yale has selected many of their admitted students and has a number of waitlisters by now as well. UCLA seems to be intermittently admitting students. My knowledge is limited by what people report on the survey though, so it's difficult to tell for sure.
  9. I just sent you the notes I made. And yes, I may have been too hasty when I suggested that time has nothing to do with political philosophy; thanks for pointing that out. A society's perception of time certainly may have an impact on political thought. One potential (although difficult) way of explaining this connection may be to show that a group of people's perception of time entails certain beliefs or doctrine, which may be a part of a society's "philosophical, religious, and moral doctrine," if we wanted to use Rawlsian terminology. The main difficulty is that you would somehow have to make the argument that the way people experience something (in this case, the passage of time) impacts their beliefs or doctrine, or else explain how people's subjective experience of time can impact political thought in some other way. I think it's common knowledge, however, that certain religious doctrines have a close connection with political thought. For example, historically, we know of many examples of societies where people believed that their political leaders had a divine right to rule. The Zhou Dynasty convinced their subjects that they had a Mandate from Heaven, which entailed that they could only be one legitimate ruler of China at the time. This religious belief justified their rule and was closely connected with their political thought. I think one could give similar examples for the connection between philosophical and moral doctrines with political thought as well. However, this is different from connecting people's experience to political thought though. In the end, it's still unclear to me how our subjective experience impacts political life. I will grant that this connection may be possible, the difficulty for me comes in seeing the connection. Again, this probably is related to my difficulty working with phenomenological ideas. Maybe there are other people on this forum who would be better suited to take a crack at the question of whether or not there is such a relation between phenomenology of time and political thought.
  10. I have a number of questions for those of you with experience taking graduate level philosophy classes. I am currently taking a gap year and working as an academic tutor with the intention of beginning graduate study next year (so far: in at NIU, out of Michigan). I find being in the dark someone annoying, and I think planning ahead and improving some of my weaknesses may be a good way of dealing with uncertainty (even though there is a possibility that grad school won’t work out next year). Because I understand that many other hopeful first-year students may have similar questions, I used the pronouns 'we' in the questions listed below. Thanks in advance to anyone who provides helpful answers to these questions: 1. What expectations do professors generally have of graduate students in their courses? 2. What challenges should we expect to face in our courses during our first semester? 3. What mental skills do we need to develop in order to excel (get A’s) in grad school courses (possibly making careful distinctions, reading quickly, etc.)? 4. What practices and study strategies should we employ to succeed (maybe note-taking tips, whether or not to record classes, group study, etc.)?
  11. I haven't read any Byung-Chul Han. I actually haven't heard of him before, but his reflections on time sound interesting. His work sounds fairly phenomenological, although I have to confess that I have difficulty speaking intelligently about phenomenological sorts of things. As an undergraduate, I did a presentation on the differences between the A and B theories of time, the former being tensed and the latter being tenseless. So, for example, the sentence "Yesterday, I was rejected from Michigan" is tensed, while the sentence "February 14th, 2018 is Valentine's Day" is tenseless. If anyone would like to see the handout I used I can send it to them, as I remember it was a fairly interesting topic to think about. These are interesting ideas, even though they have nothing to do with political philosophy. It's alright though, I'll think about anything to get my mind off of graduate admissions at this point. Additionally, I like to venture out of the world of political and moral philosophy every once in a while: I'm sure I'll have to take a number of courses outside of my AOI in graduate school anyways.
  12. Same for me with NIU. No word on funding yet but my levels of anxiety are down now that I know I've been accepted somewhere. Also, what have you guys been reading lately? I've been plowing through Rawls's Political Liberalism and Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other this month. I'm very excited because Dworkin's Justice For Hedgehogs just came in the mail yesterday as well (I've been using Amazon Prime a lot for books)!
  13. My main area of interest is also political philosophy. For my writing sample, I discussed problems of international justice and inequality. I argued that philosophers need to take certain facts into account about the international realm before we can make the sort of progress that Rawls did on the domestic level. I applied to a wide variety of programs, the ones you would expect for someone interested in political philosophy: Arizona, Virginia, Michigan, Princeton, Brown, as well as a number of others. I never did consider political theory very seriously. While I certainly am interested in the recent classical liberal developments in political philosophy, I actually haven't had the chance to read much of the work of the philosophers you listed, although I have encountered most of their names by now. I am most familiar with the literature on international justice, and I specifically find Pogge's World Poverty and Human Rights, Rawls's Law of Peoples, Mathis Risse's On Global Justice, and Singer's One World to be interesting contributions. I also think Larry Temkin's Inequality, John Simmon's Boundaries of Authority and Philip Pettit's Group Agency probably shed light on problems related to international justice (and justice broadly construed as well), but I haven't been able to get my hands on those books yet. Thomas Christiano's done good work as well. Additionally, there have been some intriguing developments related to democracy that I am drawn to. I have read a number of articles by Elizabeth Anderson, David Estlund, and Joshua Cohen on democracy that are very interesting. Those are some of my interests related to political philosophy... Anyways, it's funny how we can both be interested in the same subfield but be reading completely different philosophers for the most part.
  14. I think both of the inferences you make are fair: Depending on how admissions teams process their applications, they may indeed be bogged down. I imagine most programs have processes, schemes, metrics, and cutoffs that they use to minimize applicants and eventually select students. Those programs that don't employ these sorts of methods may need to start, and those that already do may need to make their methods more sophisticated to prepare for potentially up to 300+ applications. Also, yes, if it's the case that applying to more schools is to a student's advantage and the student can't afford to apply to an optimally high number of schools--which, I think many on this forum would argue isn't much higher than 15 or 20--then this student would be at a disadvantage. Personally, I have only applied to around a dozen programs because beyond that number it becomes difficult to find desirable schools with solid faculty working in my area of interest. In the end, it's to the advantage of graduate programs to make offers to the most promising students, and it's to their advantage to use whatever metrics or vetting processes accomplish that goal. Maybe it would be simpler if philosophers hired economists to simplify the entire process like NYC did for their public school system.
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