incontradiction

Thanks, man (or woman, really shouldn't assume)! Only applied to UCSB in the UC system, but I'd love to go there! Really want to work with Nathan Salmon.

Now UC Berkeley has started accepting. Looks like the UC schools are trickling in. My fingers are perpetually crossed at this point.

Well, looks like UC Irvine and UCSD have started sending offers! Good luck to anybody who's waiting to hear from them. Hoping this means UCSB contacts me soon!

Notre Dame rejected people with 4.0 GPAs and great GRE scores. Guess that shows how difficult grad school is to get into or the importance of letters and a great writing sample.

Thanks for the reply. Hoping to hear from them soon, though this probably isn't a good sign for my application.

I saw that Duke has started notifying people of making the waitlist. On the off chance that one of the people who have heard from Duke has posted here/reads this thread, I'll ask some questions. Did you get an email to check the website? Did 'Waitlisted' appear where it used to just say 'Submitted'?

Thanks for the input. The book in question is an anthology specifically designed for use in graduate classes in communications and some areas of linguistics. The odds of a philosophy professor knowing (or caring about) the editors or my co-author is relatively small. My co-author is a communications scholar (tenured at my university, which has a nationally-recognized communications college, and widely-published). Cool stuff, and I'm glad I worked on the project with him, but not my primary interest (which is by and large philosophy).

Here's a different questions for everyone. So I have two forthcoming publications in a book. Both are coauthored; I am primary on one and secondary on another. The book is reputable (published by Routledge, peer-reviewed) but it isn't in philosophy. Instead it's in discourse analysis. It really is going to be a top-notch book (some really big names in discourse analysis are involved), but it isn't philosophy. I'm not sure they'll have any effect on my application chances. It really isn't philosophy, though arguably what I wrote on could be classified within pragmatics. It's very much about doing case studies and showing applications of theories, not doing conceptual analysis or something like that. Thoughts? (And yes, I realize how ridiculous this question might sound. After all publications can't really be a detriment, right?)

I've had a similar experience: I ordered my transcript to be sent to a school (School Y, I suppose) two weeks before their deadline. It didn't arrive on time. School Y's grad director called me to ask if I was still interested in the program. I said yes, and she then told me that she hadn't received my transcript. Turns out my university lost my order. I had to call them and pay for rush shipping. When I contacted School Y's grad director about it, she said it was totally fine and that, as long as my self-reported GPA was pretty accurate, it wouldn't be a big deal if the transcript was late. She wished me luck, and now I'm just waiting! I would like to think that most admissions committees will be understanding of a minor error; after all, mistakes happen on both sides at least a few times a season.

And about applications: the one thing I've noticed that every department cares about is the writing sample. Unfortunately, that's the hardest part of the application to quantify.

Should have been more clear (we're all philosophers, after all!), but I was referring to the priority deadline.

I guess I had a few schools in mind when I made the obscene comment. For example, USC has a deadline of Dec 1, but it looks like they send out acceptances in mid-February. That's over two months of waiting. Then again, I'll be the first to admit that this is my first round of applications (and hopefully last!) and maybe I'm just underestimating the amount of time it takes to consider people for admissions. Another thing about GREs: I think that, if you want to hope some departments will make an exception for you, the GRE has to be an outlier. Same with GPA. I don't think you can have a low GPA and low GREs and reasonably expect a lot of acceptances (at least from major universities). It's too big of a risk for a department.

Checking GradCafe is the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do before bed, with plenty of times in between. The waiting is obscene. From professors I've talked to, GRE emphasis is mixed. Some think it's a fairly reliable indicator of performance, while others see absolutely no value in it at all. Really depends on the school and this year's committees.

And now there are two OSU acceptances posted. I know acceptance/rejection season is just beginning, but I'm getting very anxious.

Well congratulations!

Are you saying you come from a school without a grad program, and so is not ranked, or that it has a grad program and still isn't ranked? I'm in a, relatively, similar position. I come from a large state university. While I'm in the honors college there, which has a history of sending people to major grad schools, I'm not expecting that to boost my pedigree. One (possible) advantage is that my school has a Leiter-mentioned MA program (no PhD) and I've been taking grad classes for three years now alongside our MA students.

To mimic another question, it wasn't Duke, was it?

Didn't even think to check the actual deadlines for schools (guess I assumed there wouldn't be trolls here). Thanks for the heads up.

Looks like someone just got accepted to Rutgers, so that makes at least two schools. Forgot to mention in my previous post that my research interests are metaphysics and philosophy of language.

Schools: MIT, Cornell, UMass Amherst, Toronto, Ohio University, Brandeis University, CUNY, Maryland, Duke, University of Miami, USC, UCSB, Boston University. GRE: 164 V, 154 Q, 5 AW GPA: 3.6 Two undergraduate conference presentations (not expecting these to be a factor). Two forthcoming book chapters in a communications/discourse analysis book to be published by Routledge. Sample is a on some unpublished Kripke work. I've gotten to read one of my letters, and it was excellent. I'm assuming the rest are at least good.