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Philhopeful

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  • Application Season
    2014 Fall

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  1. The advertisement brochure they gave out for the 2016 competition did say "March" instead of "April" as it had previous years. I will hold out hope.
  2. I'm not sure this means anything, but the other day I could still log in to the portal that showed me the information that i had submitted with my application and now when i try to log in it doesn't show any of that anymore and says "competition status closed: no further action can be taken at this time."
  3. Hi--wanted to confirm that the Yale post is legit. Its from a good friend of mine who never made an account here. They do not want to release details to reveal who they are which is why the post is sparce.
  4. ^ Really top notch advice right there. It inspires me to add a little bit of my own that I usually don't see mentioned here. As always, take with a grain of salt. Letter Writers: The most unpredictable part of the application. So much can go wrong. You might have one that says they only need papers from the class you took with them, and then they might represent your interests different than another professor does. They might say something tone deaf with realizing it (especially a risk if you have international writers). Heck, they might just keep procrastinating turning your letters in even after they have them written (one of my professors didn't do it until a month and a half after my last deadlines.) But they can also sometimes go the extra mile and even email professors you want to work with at other institutions and tell them to be on the look out for your application. In either case, they are kind of a wild card, and you want to do what you can to reduce the possibility of something going wrong. You should do whatever you can to get your letter writers to take a cheat sheet listing your past courses, interests, and accomplishments, or even better yet to give them a copy of your personal statement when you ask for the letter. Additionally, if you have an international writer, you should check if they have written US letters of recommendation before and offer to direct them to people at your department if they have questions about conventions. The Super Advisor: If you are in a position where you still don't have a single adviser picked out, you should be on the lookout for people who you think are really ready in invest in you. Here are some examples of things that a super adviser might do for you (usually spontaneously): probe other professors you've taken courses with and then email you saying that they will write you strong additional recommendation letters if you send them your materials, offer to read every single one of your school specific personal statements, send you random encouraging emails as the process drags on, introduce you to faculty at other departments at conferences so you can get different reactions to your work, will tell you you got in or didn't get in somewhere before the emails go out because they ran into someone and asked. Writing Samples: There are a lot of different ways of being original that don't always involve supporting or attacking someone else's argument. For instance, you could write a paper observing interesting unrecognized structural similarities between a few different arguments, you could write a paper looking for ways that a particular debate is unclear and asking an original question, or you could argue that there are connections between two different debates that haven't been appreciated. Papers doing any of those things will probably stand out some just by virtue of trying to be original in a different way. Departmental Fit: It doesn't always just mean that your interests mesh well with people who are already at the department. Different departments can also have different values. At one department I visited, I was told that, all else being equal, they especially looked for people who showed promise in constructing creative arguments. At another, I was told that they especially valued applicants whose personalities were conducive to a cooperative and accessible learning environment. There's no advice here really, but its something that I never thought of at all until after I started visiting.
  5. Just want to take a moment to endorse departures from the structure outlined in the first post. Listen to your advisers first, of course, but you can also make your own argument for a particular point, argue that another account needs an added part to make it more plausible, or just raise a question. I did the last one and was relatively successful with my applications this year. If you do stick to the standard form, you need to be sensitive to its weaknesses. You want to put as much argument as you can in, and as little summary as possible and you want to get some of the argument in towards the very beginning. Critical exposition is fine too. I read quite a few writing samples whose primary weakness was that they didn't actually argue until after 15 pages of summary. Additionally, you want to make sure you are arguing against an important, broad, and plausible enough point. I feel as though the last part should be particularly stressed this early in the process. You should ask your adviser about it specifically if you don't think that they are the type of person who would already tell you.
  6. Turned down Cornell, Pitt, and UT. Good luck.
  7. Now that admissions season is nearing the end, I thought it might be helpful to have a thread for people to announce when they are leaving the forum for the year.
  8. Well admissions season over for me. Whew.
  9. I can't find my copy. But I'm pretty sure he says it in the "with what must science begin" section
  10. Oh, ok. I thought we were going to do that thing where analytic and continental people argue condescendingly towards each other. Maybe next time.
  11. Having spent eight weeks once exclusively reading the greater logic, I'd be very curious to hear how exactly its about logic. Also.. doesn't Hegel actually say you have to basically accept the phenomenology to even have the framework in place to read greater logic? I definitely feel like that shouldn't be required to get logic...
  12. I have never heard this before. I generally just don't hear about a lack of ideas being a problem though. Most people I know though have huge plates of undeveloped ideas they never get to. As for publishing. I have heard that it is tremendously important for top jobs. However, what's important isn't how many articles, but how good of a journal you get into. Of course, many articles in top journals is best.
  13. I've read in other places that book reviews are a great place to get one's feet wet publishing. I've only seen big names in NDPR though. Try somewhere else perhaps.
  14. Yep, Austin was one. The readers must have been very forgiving.
  15. It's okay. My abstract had a sentence that just stopped for the first four schools I applied to.
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