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redigloos

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About redigloos

  • Birthday 04/22/1993

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    United States
  • Interests
    Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Freud
  • Application Season
    2015 Fall
  • Program
    Philosophy

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  1. Ah. Well I know there are a few professors who managed to run intense courses that taught me a lot, and I hope to be one of them. Sorry if my judgment came off as more categorical than that for rhetorical reasons. Plus, I still have the very selfish motivation of wanting to learn everything I can in my field. That's definitely the real incentive for grad school, although I would enjoy teaching as well.
  2. For the record, I've only taken one class with a grad student. It was one of the best classes I've taken, probably because I was in high school at the time. I have no reason to think the grad students would teach more superficially than the professors. If anything, the grad students I know seem to remember being undergrads and realize we're not all idiots.
  3. I guess the only reason I disagree personally is that, no matter what school you're at or what your major, undergraduate studies are almost always BS. Chances are, if you're actually interested in the subject, you already know everything you're going to learn in the classroom. I will keep an eye out for the study I mentioned (can't remember where I heard about it, but now I'm interested!), since that would be pretty difficult to disagree with. Of course, my personal opinion doesn't make a difference in admissions, and there I would defer to the two professors I spoke with. Neither said, by the way, that low GPA is irrelevant, unimportant, or even forgivable. They just said it's not the end of the world. And I'll add that, even if I don't get into any schools this round of admissions, I plan on applying again repeatedly.... which the OP should also consider. Hopefully, once 20 years or so separate us from our GPAs, they'll reconsider.
  4. I haven't taken the GRE yet (scheduled for August), or even begun any of my applications, so maybe this is a stupid question. If I am applying to both MA and PhD programs in the same department, then do I need to give them any sort of notice so they know they will need to use my GRE scores and letters twice? I'm guessing (hoping) I don't need to send 2 copies of the GRE score.
  5. For what it's worth, my GPA is also very low. However, I was told by two professors I talked to that high GRE scores, good recommendations, and an awesome writing sample would do a lot to make up for this. I remember hearing that, according to some study, your undergraduate GPA is one of the worst indicators of your success in a graduate program. This seems intuitively accurate, given the amount of undergrad work that is basically bullshit (showing up to learn what you already probably know, busy work that serves no real purpose, and ridiculous general education requirements, half of which serve no purpose other than propagating bourgeois ideology). I can only assume graduate admissions committees would take such a study into account and look mostly at indicators other than GPA.
  6. I remember as a high school senior, there were many books on "how to get into college" that contained successful admissions essays. Is there any way to find examples of others' writing samples for graduate programs, in order to get an idea of the competition and expectations? I'm trying to apply to Philosophy MA and PhD programs, mostly to study Hegel and Marx, and I just have no idea what would be appropriate for a writing sample. And I mean that very literally-- no idea at all, no frame of reference whatsoever. People say that it should be your best work, that it should demonstrate writing and reasoning abilities, blah blah blah. None of that means anything without some sort of context. :/ I know most of the students in my undergrad department write pretty bad essays, but I'm not competing with people from my department alone. The problem is that I feel like I can probably write a very good essay, if I only knew what "very good" meant! It's not that I don't want to try my hardest or whatever; it's that I find the very idea of "trying my hardest" per se rather incoherent, or at least pragmatically.... impossible!
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