maxhgns

Pretty much all of the funded PhD programs are very competitive--more competitive than medical school (because there are far fewer slots available). So even though some are more competitive than others, they're all hard to get into. That said, if it doesn't even show up on the PGR, it's probably not worth your time to attend it. You'll probably get a fine education, but the prestige hierarchy in philosophy is pretty unforgiving, and the job market is awful enough without prestige counting against you. As for how you do it outside academia... Well, it depends on what you mean. Publishing will be extremely difficult without the training and support networks. So that's not a realistic goal. But you can certainly keep reading. And you can attend local colloquia, or even conferences once you've got the disposable money. You can keep abreast of stuff in the online philosophy world, too. You can make friends with philosophers. And so on.

There's certainly no rush for you to get either an MA or a PhD. If you want to pursue stuff right away, then yes, a Master's degree seems like the safer bet, given your situation. The PhD will see you living away from home for the first time, maybe far away, and that is a life experience that comes with its own challenges. Combining that with a PhD is a recipe for unneeded stress. The same is true for the MA, of course, but it's a question of a couple years versus five to ten. And, frankly, it's better to have some life experience before committing to the PhD. You'll come out of it somewhat bruised, only to find a job market that won't hire you, or that dangles short-term options far away from friends and family. It's also worth pointing out that your age will put you in a very different social situation from the rest of your cohort. And that, unfortunately, is a recipe for serious loneliness and isolation. They'll be hanging out, often in spaces where the alcohol flows freely, and doing any number of other things which aren't available to a 17 year-old, or which interest them but not you, etc. And that will make it hard for you to make friends and develop an adequate support network. The PhD is alienating enough on its own. It's better to be able to share the experience with others. Take the time to enjoy life and being young. Graduate degrees will wait for you. I doubt I would have taken my own advice at that age, but I do think it's right.

Vancouver is the most expensive place to live of the three. It's the second least affordable city in the world, after Hong Kong. So talk to current students about the funding and their living situation, and make sure you're okay with that. That said, Vancouver is also the prettiest of the three cities. So there is that! But also, with a Canadian degree, you will qualify for a three-year work permit, which you can parlay into permanent residency, if that's what you want. I don't think you can make a bad choice here, fwiw.

The PhD rankings are not undergraduate degree rankings. They don't necessarily match up (in fact, I'd be surprised if most top PhD programs really were the best places for an UG education). There's old evidence of prestige bias in tip-top program admissions, but it's not known how or whether things have changed. But this isn't something you can control. Just apply and see what happens.

It's fine. Don't worry about it. Don't ask this other guy for a letter. He sounds vindictive, controlling, and petty, and I would worry about any letter he wrote, including one he characterized as 'strong'.

A Canadian with an honours UG will usually have completed round twice as many philosophy courses as an American honours UG. So that's part of the competition. International funding for the MA may also be more limited.

As the others have said, this is totally normal. But I'd like to add that you will get better at it over time, too, if you continue on a while. You're an undergrad. You're not supposed to have skills at the same level as a professional philosopher, or even a graduate student. Despite what some people (still) think, philosophical competence is learned, not innate. It's something you develop through practice, and you've only just started. It'll get a lot easier. And it will keep getting a lot easier as you get more practice, and more practice with specific goals in mind (e.g. reading because you've got to teach the thing to undergrads who didn't read it). (Also, most philosophers are just not very good prose stylists, so that doesn't help.)

On the aesthetics front, have a look at the American Society for Aesthetics' Guide to Graduate Education in North America. It's essentially a list of MA and PhD programs with some kind of focus in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. It's not a curated list, so some departments are not necessarily as great as they look on paper, but it's a great place to start. You can then cross-compare with department pages and the Philosophical Gourmet Report (and Leiter's law school report) to find programs strong in several of your areas of interest. If you want to combine a JD with a PhD (or an MA or an MPhil), of course, that's going to narrow your list of options significantly. But that's not a bad thing.

Not at all. People decide to pursue something else all the time! (Ideally, your sample paper will reflect what you currently think your interests are. But you aren't locked in to those interests at all--except insofar as you might get stuck in a program that can't adequately support your new interest, anyway.)

Don't worry about it. Just don't get Cs.

Semesters. I don't think any Canadian university operates on a quarter system (except maybe Quest, or maybe their thing is even more unusual. I don't remember.)

20 or so is normal for Canadians who majored in philosophy. IIRC I had 24, a thesis, 6 MA courses, and an MA thesis. 10 courses at my undergrad institution would get you a minor.

You didn't apply very widely, and that's the trouble with doing that. I think it's wise to target a few programs for which you're an excellent fit, but when you do that, you have to remember you're rolling fewer dice. Ask the philosophers who've written you letters if they'd be willing to give some feedback on your cover letter and writing sample. Your cover letter needs to make a solid case for your attending that particular program. And, in your case, it should also do some work to show that philosophy is the right fit for you (rather than, say, history of ideas or something similar). As far as your list of programs goes, however, Western sticks out as a weird choice. They're not a very continental department at all--Fielding is pretty much on her own in that department!--and their history coverage is a little dicey, too.

NSSR has never fully funded its grad students, so avoid them. Also: do take the time to talk to grad students who are pretty far into a program. They will have a better idea of the funding challenges than those who are still in the first four years. The funding picture at many institutions sounds a lot better than it in fact is.

Your chances look just fine. But remember that you don't only get one shot at this, and also remember that if you're shut out this year, it's not such a bad thing--it buys you at least one extra year for the job market to get better, to the extent that it ever will (it never recovered from 2008-09, but it did get better after years). Besides, the in-person experience of the first few years of the PhD program is pretty important. This is the part that has me more concerned, although there's obviously no way I can tell to what extent I should be, given the information you've given us. But if you strike out or don't perform as well as you'd like, I'd suggest paying closer attention to this. You don't need to apply to a PhD program with very definite plans (except outside the US and Canada, anyway), but you do need to have some good ideas about what you want to do. You should narrow it down to two or three areas of specialization, tops. You can always change your mind and work on something completely different, but you should give departments some idea of what you want to do and who you might work with. This helps establish fit, and can also make a difference where supervisors are concerned, since departments tend to try to balance out incoming classes and overall supervisory burdens.

Just be careful: not all of those schools fully fund all of their PhD students (most do, but a few don't). Also, you should probably avoid Villanova, which has had problems with racism for years, and I don't think they've worked them out yet.

I'm inferring it based on my own experience, my experience securing grants, applicants I've known, and paying attention to application cycles (here and elsewhere) for the last eleven years. Nothing more. I'm not on an admissions committee, never have been, and am unlikely to ever be. But look, my point is this: 10% over-under is a good rule of thumb. 100%+ is not. If the page limit is 10, you really can't hand in 20. You have to pay attention to the formatting requirements. There's plenty of room to disagree about what counts as a reasonable percentage over-under, but I really don't think 40% is the number, either. One thing I know for a fact is that if you're applying for external funding (e.g. SSHRC, FRQSC, Fulbright, etc.) and your application doesn't meet the formatting requirements, it will be binned immediately. Philosophy admissions is obviously more flexible than external funding agencies are. And exceptions can and do sneak through the cracks. But you absolutely shouldn't make it your policy to flagrantly disregard the application instructions. It's inconsiderate, rude, and if accepted it would put the other applicants--who followed the instructions--at a comparative disadvantage. You're not special, you're one of dozens--hundreds, even--of excellent candidates. If I were on a committee (which, again, I'm not and am unlikely to ever be), I'd disregard applications which flagrantly flouted the instructions. In my teaching, when I assign a 1000-word essay, I'm happy to accept submissions at 800-1200 words, although franky that's pushing it a bit. But 500 or 2000 words? No way. When I send a paper to a conference, the word limit is usually 3000. I've sometimes snuck in papers which were 3200-3400 words (counting references), although that's a bit dicey; much better to hit the 3000 mark. But as someone who's organized a lot of conferences in philosophy, I can tell you that anyone who sends, say, 4000-5000 words gets binned immediately, sight unseen, no questions asked. Journal submissions, too: you can sometimes get away with going a little over the hard limit, especially if that's due to your list of works cited, but you can't count on it. Better to hit the limit for the first-round submission, then exceed it at the R&R stage (which is OK, although even there commonsense considerations apply). The page limit is not a hard limit, but it's not a suggestion, either. You can definitely exceed it. But you need to exercise some caution and common sense when you do so. You need to remember that you aren't the only applicant, and you're not some special exception to all of the normal rules and procedures. You're just one among dozens or even hundreds of applicants who are all really good.

If the length is 10-15 pages, and you submit 21-22, then you have exceeded the required length by 40%-120%. That's way too much. If it's 15-20, then you're exceeding it by 5%-47%. That's fine at the low end, too much at the high end. You can give yourself room to manoeuvre of about 10%. More than that is excessive. Enlist someone's help to help you cut. There are also good tips here.

Admissions committees do often seem to try to balance the distribution of areas of interest across the program, and within cohorts. So if a program has a smaller number of specialists in a popular subfield, it will often be harder to get a spot there than if you were applying to the same program but in a subfield with more faculty in it, or in a less popular subfield. Some subfields have very poor representation in North American doctoral programs, however, and that can make gaining admission to those programs in those subfields harder. Aesthetics is like that, for example: there are fewer applicants, but many, many fewer viable programs and supervisors (several of which attract students from multiple subfields). You can always, of course, change your AOS once you've been admitted somewhere. Having said all that, I don't think it's worth trying to game the system. It's pretty complicated, you're probably not a good judge of the state of things yet, and different programs follow different admissions procedures. Just apply to the programs that interest you, for the work that interests you. Do bear in mind that it's better for you if your intended programs have multiple faculty working in your area of interest, however (although that may not be possible for smaller or lower-status subfields).

FWIW, I think it's worth making a note of the programs that do this (with the explicit reasoning that they want to better support their current grad students). Those are programs you want to attend, when you can.

It happens all the time, but your writing sample should be in philosophy, and so should some of your references. As thursday observes, the path is much easier with a philosophy MA first.

The best resource for graduate education in aesthetics is the ASA's Graduate Guide to Aesthetics in North America. There's no harm in getting a funded MA, apart from opportunity costs. Where PhDs are concerned, yes, be aware that there are 0-2 jobs in aesthetics every year. And be aware that it's a low-status subfield, so other philosophers tend to look down on people who specialize in it. Experimental philosophy/cog-sci oriented approaches are much higher-status, and could be a good primary direction from which you could then branch out into aesthetics. I should add, however, that your interests are pretty outdated. I don't mean to be mean about it, I just want to make sure that you understand that scholarship has moved on a lot since then--indeed, since 1968. Aesthetics is a large, complex subfield now, and any program, continental or otherwise, that sticks to Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, interpretation, etc. is one that is not really going to give you an adequate education to participate in the subfield on an equal footing. Frankly, I don't think that you can do aesthetics and stick strictly to the "continental" side of things (nor, indeed, the "historical" side). You have to be wide-ranging in your interests and competencies. The good news is that aestheticians are generally friendly to continental approaches, and the departments which are good in aesthetics are mostly pretty pluralistic.

I know several people who've done this, and it seems to have worked out fine. Remember, however, that the law market is also saturated. It's not as bad as the TT market is for philosophy, but still! It's worth bearing in mind as you choose courses and internships.

Yeah, that's what I mean. I would think those are programs where those kinds of interests could be supported. It's not because they're analytic, though; it's because they have a strong historical contingent which includes those periods/movements. Otherwise, as far as I know, those interests (apart from Kant) are mostly only alive at straight-up SPEP programs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that historically-oriented and continentally-oriented departments will be friendlier to those interests than analytically-oriented departments. Pragmatism and logical positivism aren't super lively in "analytic" departments, and Kant, well. The historical distinctions aren't really a good guide to what counts as "analytic" these days. Don't let that discourage you. Lots of top-notch departments have a strong historical bent which I'm sure will be perfectly friendly to your application. I'm just not sure that, given your interests, you're quite talking about shifting from a continental MA to an analytic PhD. Seems like it's more along the lines of pursuing historical/continental work in a top PGR department. And that's just fine and doable.