TakeMyCoffeeBlack

Dear grad schools:
 
I get it you. You have a lot of applications to read. But if you could just, you know, skip a few and read mine and fall in love with me for some reason and contact me ASAP, I'd really appreciate it.
 
Best,
 
TMCB

I guess it'll happen when it happens. I can't force it, I tried and met some guys I probably shouldn't have.
I'm in a non-stressed mood today next week I could be in panic mode again but today is a good day

Speaking as a husband, we're overrated. You'd be better off finding a wife. That's what I did!

Why are you doing this to yourself? Unless there is an incredibly serious red flag on your application, the only thing anyone can say is that you have a shot and that you need to wait and see. It is not like you are asking about what schools you need to consider, or what part of your application you can improve - you have already applied. The application season is over. There is nothing you can do anymore. You just have to wait and see. Obviously your numbers look fine enough to get you considered everywhere you apply. Other than that, maybe (hopefully) you will get into all of these schools, maybe none.
 
Please don't get me wrong, I mean no offense whatsoever. Having gone through this process more than once, I understand - probably more than most - the need for even a tiny bit of security and certainty. However, it is nowhere to be found. Bear with us and join the gradcafe community. We will help each other out in soothing and controlling our anxiety. We will also share your good and bad news. However asking for your chances on January 9th, when you have no control over the process anymore, will not help you.
 
Best of luck to you!

Congrats!
 
I have a linkedin, and I keep my profile updated, but I'm not active on it otherwise. It's a nice way to control the message about you if people google you, but otherwise it's just an online resume.

There were no questions in the email, but we're going to chat on the phone in the next couple of days.
 
Re: linkedin, I don't have an account. Do most of you use it?

I never thought to ask directly, "Are you taking students?" Which seems silly, since it's so obvious... But considering the professors whom I did contact responded with several lines explaining why I'd be a good fit for the programs, I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that means they're taking students. I'll ask directly, of course, should I receive any acceptances.

I'm a good wife and mother.

My qualities as a wife: I am a whole person without him. I love him and I have trouble sleeping without him there (seriously, it's a pain), but I do not need him to be happy and fulfilled. I am also smart, funny, loyal, cute, cook and back, and have a great rack. I am also mean, sadistic, spiteful, and love to wallow in a good bout of schadenfreude. I don't do laundry and I have been known to throw all of the dishes out rather than wash them.

There is nothing worse than being in a relationship with someone who cannot be whole by themselves. There's a difference between being lonely and being so desperate for a relationship that the other person has to be the source of a person's self-worth, sense of value, and reason for living. (Before you protest, Pinkseter/Corrupted Innocence, print off your statements on this thread and show them to your therapist.) Lonely people are not so desperate for a relationship that they'll do anything to be in one (your words, not mine); lonely people want a relationship, but they don't need one. Desperate people want a relationship and they really, really don't need one because a relationship based on emotional dependency is toxic.

My qualities as a mother: He made to legal adulthood in good health, no trouble with the law, with prospects for the future, and isn't (currently) a burden on society. He can balance his checkbook and find the DMV by himself. He also drives like a little old lady and can do his own laundry. He has no idea where the barber is, though. Can't win 'em all.

I popped that slime-coated ur-human out by myself. He was a bit early, but the placenta was tres cool looking. It was like a purplish, deflated basketball with veins. I could totally see the horror movie thing going on, just give it eyes and teeth. Vagina Dentata for realsies!

But. He wasn't mine, completely and totally mine. He was his own person. Sure, I taught him that there's no such thing as bad sci-fi, but he won't watch Star Trek TOS; he prefers Godzilla (good gravy, where did I go wrong?!) and he doesn't know who Surak is. I kid you not. He's got my eyes, my intelligence, and my ADHD, but he did not find Fight Club amusing and he hates math (yeah, I'd think he was switched at birth, too, but he was the only boy on the ward). I love him dearly and he loves me dearly, but he's still not mine. He's living in another state, now, and it hurts, but it's right for him.

Kids grow up. Husbands have their own lives to lead, their own work, their own friends, and their hobbies. What do desperate people do when their spouse wants to go watch the game with friends (try to tag along or, worse, provide a curfew)?

Pinkster/Corrupted Innocence (this new name is very Twilight Fan Girl), you might have great qualities that make you great (as Loric put it) husband-bait. But you have one singular quality that makes you husband-bane: desperation. You've consistently shown desperation and you've said you're desperate. Not using hyperbole to talk about being lonely and looking to change that situation, but actually desperate. If anything, your use of the word desperate is an understatement.

You are not speaking of your future man in terms of a real relationship. You're speaking of your future man in terms of an Edward and Bella and Jacob relationship. Which you probably think is romantic and wonderful and cried at the end. Edward and Bella have a horrific relationship of manipulation, co-dependency, and a mutual inability to be healthy. Jacob is even worse. Men are not stupid people and the kind of man you want for a husband (a good man who is caring, loving, and will provide for the family) is the kind of man that runs screaming, the other way, when a desperate woman starts making cow eyes at him.

Seriously. Print off this thread and your other I-want-a-relationship threads and take it to your therapist. Or send him/her a link.

I would like to amend this statement. Single-spaced 9-point Arial Narrow with half-inch margins is a bit much.

The part where you said now that your "best friend" is pregnant you don't want to continue your friendship - at a time when she could probably seriously benefit from having a good friend around - is where I stopped caring about what you want for yourself. You have a lot of maturing to do, and you need to stop making yourself the center of the universe. It's beyond unattractive.

Full disclosure: I'm not a philosopher (but I enjoy reading what you all have to say - you have the most interesting trolls!)
 
However, I took two philosophy courses in German recently, and having access both to English and German versions of the text proved invaluable. Even the best English translations cannot provide, without extensive footnotes, explanations about the specific uses of words in the original language. When we read Hannah Arendt, for example, we spent a lot of time considering the critiques of Arendt in the English speaking world (and German speaking) against her diction. That is, although her English translations may have used the appropriate English word, the English word's roots and history (i.e. etymology) does not always carry the same connotations as that of the German, complicating issues at a very deep level (especially for Arendt). 
 
Or, a bit simpler, I'm reading War and Peace right now, and the edition I'm using has extensive endnotes, almost all of which elaborate on Russian or French words used in the original text that don't translate perfectly - which could be avoided if I read Russian. Were I a scholar of Tolstoy and War and Peace, I'd be rather mediocre if I had to rely on other scholars' footnotes to understand the variations.
 
It may be worth considering, too, that there's evidence to suggest that learning another language (or more) improves the cognitive capabilities of the mind. I'd imagine that's as important to philosophers as it is to political scientists.
 
...
 
And what about untranslated letters, essays, or lesser writings of prominent philosophers (when discovered or made available by kin)? Without that language, you're almost certainly not going to be the scholar invited to analyze the collection.

Philosophers in the past were able to read and write Greek, Latin, German, and then some without any complaints about how they could have better spent their time.

I'm not in a philosophy department, but many departments at my university, including philosophy and my own (religious studies), are moving to an "as needed" model where students decide in conjunction with advisers and sometimes the DGS what languages the student should be competent in. There are students in my department studying American religions who won't have to do any language at all, and that seems right. I do theology and philosophy of religion in early 20th century Germany, so I'm doing German and French. The latter isn't going to have a ton of relevance in my work right, but for my field, having two languages just looks better. With regard to German, however, I've needed more than just reading competency. I think most people who are doing work on German figures attempt to spend an academic year in Germany at some point during their PhD to work with scholars there, which requires more than simply being able to read and translate with a dictionary. It seems like most folks posting here are doing analytic philosophy, and it may be in that particular discipline, foreign languages aren't necessary. But from what I've experienced thus far in working with faculty in my department, philosophy, and German, I think if one were studying, say, Kant, fluency in German--not just reading proficiency--would be essential for writing a first rate dissertation. Point is, it's kind of tough to talk about whether or not the language requirement as a whole is antiquated since some people are just going to have to learn one or more languages regardless of the availability of English translations.

I was actually going to make a post about that until I decided against it... but I suppose I'll give it a shot. So, maybe I'm just ignorant of the other branches of analytic philosophy, but knowing foreign languages in logic is actually pretty useful. There is, or at least there was, a solid production of logic done in German as well as in Russian in journals which won't ever see the light of day in translation because there just isn't any large scale demand. Heck, there are even some fairly significant German articles that still haven't ever been translated.
 
 
I agree, I think language ability is something important one should learn.
 
 
I really gotta disagree. I have loads of professors who spend a good part of their time translating/reading works in foreign languages, on both sides of the analytic and continental divide. It's an important thing to be able to do and to be able to do well to such an extent that sitting at a computer using Google Translate to help you would just slow you down. I also think humanistically, it's an important skill to cultivate.

I have been brewing pour-over on a Chemex, and I highly recommend it. 

It's not that I don't sympathize with the opinion, but if all else is truly equal, why not make a decision in the pursuit of overcoming institutional oppression? It's not as though a less qualified woman is being chosen over a more qualified man in the scenario you propose.

The part where you said now that your "best friend" is pregnant you don't want to continue your friendship - at a time when she could probably seriously benefit from having a good friend around - is where I stopped caring about what you want for yourself. You have a lot of maturing to do, and you need to stop making yourself the center of the universe. It's beyond unattractive.

The part where you said now that your "best friend" is pregnant you don't want to continue your friendship - at a time when she could probably seriously benefit from having a good friend around - is where I stopped caring about what you want for yourself. You have a lot of maturing to do, and you need to stop making yourself the center of the universe. It's beyond unattractive.

The part where you said now that your "best friend" is pregnant you don't want to continue your friendship - at a time when she could probably seriously benefit from having a good friend around - is where I stopped caring about what you want for yourself. You have a lot of maturing to do, and you need to stop making yourself the center of the universe. It's beyond unattractive.

Ah Pinkster Pinkster Pinkster, I'm finally compelled to reply to your posts. Let me say a few things about me first so hopefully what I'm gonna say will resonate with you better. I'm about the same age as you (about half a year older in fact); I'm an international student from Asia; I came to the U.S for college when I was 18 and I've been home twice ever since. I graduated about one and a half year ago; I worked for about 9 months before I decided to apply to grad schools. I'm an only child and my parents were super protective - I had never spent a night apart from my family before I left the country. I have cousins here whom I've been staying with; they helped me a lot to settle in when I first arrived but I got to figure a lot of things out on my own and now they're more like roomates for whom I pay super cheap rent.
 
Alright, so there are 2 things I want to tell you.
 
First, your actual question: How hard is it to move to a new place? Pretty hard, I'd say. I had an extreme case of homesickness and culture shock for the first 6 months, but then again I was only 18, away from home for the very first time in a very foreign culture. It did take a while but I made it through, and so you definitely can. People have been giving you a lot of great practical advice, and I still have a lot to learn from those suggestions, so I'm not gonna add anything. I just want to say that it's worth it, and hopefully I can encourage you a bit. Looking back, going abroad was the best thing that I've ever done. The experience was immense, and to go into details would take forever. There's the basic stuff (which I'm still very proud of) like learning how to do laundry, cook a full meal, keep and house, manage your own schedule and finance, etc. But more than that, I have changed dramatically, from the way I see myself to the way I see and treat other people, including (most importantly) realizing how stupid I was and still am at times and how diverse others' life experiences can be. I figure part of this was just me growing up, which can be done pretty much anywhere, but since I had been coddled (and it looks like you're in the same boat), getting away from home was much more effective in this regard. I remember the moment I realized how alike my high school friends and I were, like cookies cut from the same mold. Not that there was anything wrong with the mold, and it still shapes a big part of me right now, but it's like seeing the ocean for the first time and realizing how small your pond was.
 
Second, what I infer from your many posts is how you think there's a magic point somewhere in the future and when you get there, all your problems will melt away. There is no such magic point. Believe me, I used to be so sure that I would finish college here, go back home, get a good job, work for a few years, meet a guy and then get married and start a family. My magic timeline was set to be at 28. It is later than yours and may seem more reasonable, but in fact it is no less fictional. People have been telling you time and time again that you can't plan your life out on a calendar like that, so I won't waste time repeating the reasons why. What I want to emphasize is even when you do get there (and it will rarely be the way you want at the exact time you want), you will still have problems and worries and heartbreaks. Life doesn't just stop when you get married and have babies. What if your kids got sick? What if your husband got into an accident? What if your family lost your house like a lot of people did in 08? What if your husband cheats on you or your kids abuse drugs? There are all sorts of things that can happen, some less serious than others, but so is life. It took me the longest time to realize that (1) life is unpredictable and (2) there won't be ever a time in life when the struggle stops. It sounds silly to me now how I could possibly think that after finishing school and getting a job, things will just stabilize and I will coast on this defined, unchanging trajectory. How could I think that stresses during school will stop when I start working, or that just because I get to that point, be it a specific age or a life event like graduation or marriage, I will magically figure everything out? But I get it. We've been on the school route for at least 16 years straight; everything's been planned out and on schedule; we've done everything right, everything we were supposed to do, so our plan should just fall in to places right? Everything should just work out because we planned it to be so, and because we put work into it, we're guaranteed to get what we want and be all happy and fulfilled by the end of our plan, because that's what it has always been like at school, in class, in projects, literally our whole life! But life is more complicated than that. Just because you did A doesn't guarantee you B. You don't have as much control as you think. There's no hypothetical best time of your life. It's tough to accept - and I don't think anyone can help you realize it but yourself - but it can also be very liberating. The best time of your life can be right now, next month, or always. Life can happen in so many ways for which you can't possibly plan, but it also means that happiness and success and fulfillment have that many ways to come to you. You can't plan for them, but you can prepare yourself mentally for this unpredictability and trust yourself to handle them, or swing it as they say.
 
When I was 19, my friend's mother said that we don't have that much control in life, and I didn't believe her, even when she said she used to think like I did. So now you probably won't believe me either, but I hope you will.
 
For a point of reference, you can watch this mind-opening video by John Green about what to do with your life. It's intially more about how to pick what to study in college but then becomes life decisions and adulthood in general. It has stopped me from freaking out many times when I think my life is not how or where it's "supposed" to be or when I, like you, feel like nothing is happening to me:

There's nothing wrong with knowledge for knowledge's sake, folks. 

This is great. If I weren't out of my quota, I'd up vote this. 
 
p.s. Because I checked out that baby thread... Holy crap, I can't believe that I wasted any energy responding to Pinkster (in private messages, too!). What a jackass (and a troll, whether intentionally or not).

This is great. If I weren't out of my quota, I'd up vote this. 
 
p.s. Because I checked out that baby thread... Holy crap, I can't believe that I wasted any energy responding to Pinkster (in private messages, too!). What a jackass (and a troll, whether intentionally or not).

I'm not rehashing this... If you don't like what I said too bad. I said it, it was harsh I feel bad about that part but too late. Don't care. Moving on... And THAT is the truth. Having a baby with anyone unplanned is irresponsible.

A few things:

1. Some really horrible anti-trans and anti-sex worker things have been said here, and I just would ask that those of you making such comments be more considerate and thoughtful before you put hateful words into the world, whether on this forum or elsewhere. It's repugnant to talk, even hypothetically, about ways to confirm whether someone's perceived gender is their birth sex. Also, talking about all sex workers with generalizations and expressions of disgust is both hateful and ignorant. Besides the fact that your feelings about prostitutes have nothing AT ALL to do with grad school. It is off topic even for this thread.

2. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if admin committees search these forums. One of my POIs googled my name and found my linkedin before I even applied. He didn't have my grades or test scores or any information about me, just an introductory email I'd sent. If POIs will search for people at that point in time, before even reading applications, I imagine they'll continue to do it afterwards. This whole forum is searchable also, so if someone searches your program, it will likely come up. For instance, if you repeatedly discuss going into, say, Social Work, and list all the schools you are applying to, that is VERY easy to find and could be a top hit on google, given the right search commands. Additionally, while it may not be common, keep in mind that professors sometimes get bored and curious, and if I were a bored professor, I would totally lurk this site anonymously. Besides, this is all public. Even if you don't care if a professor sees it, do you really want to make a terrible first impression on your peers before you even begin grad school? It would be smart to realize the networking potential of this site. I've already made a number of helpful connections with friendly, intelligent people in my field.