maxhgns

With the caveat that I'm not in comparative literature: Conferences are useful and important, though not necessarily in the ways we're told they are. We're often told they're good for workshopping papers and getting feedback, but that's pretty much false. Most of the feedback I've gotten at conferences (nearly 40 now) has been garbage. What they are, though, is an opportunity to polish one's presentation skills, to get onto everyone's radar, to learn about stuff (especially outside your specialization), and to meet people. The most important things conferencing does for you are to get your name out there, and to get you plugged into a scholarly network. By the time you're on the job market, you want everyone in your field to know that you're looking for a job, and that you're a go-to person for X. And you do that by meeting people, and seeing them regularly (it's fun going to one-off conferences in cool places, but it's a lot harder to build your network that way. It's a lot easier if you're a staple at the same conferences year after year. Conferencing regularly got me invitations to review books, editorial opportunities, an external letter of recommendation, and a postdoc supervisor. That said, looking back, I overdid it. Conferences are expensive, and they take time away from research. If I'd only gone to half the conferences I did but got another publication or two out there instead, it would have been worth it. You should have some conferences on your CV, since not having any will make you stick out in a bad way, but having lots won't really help you stick out in a good way, either. Absolutely. Publishing matters a lot, and the earlier you get the hang of it, the better. You want to leave your PhD program with a pub or two under your belt. But publishing takes a lot of time--journals take months to get back to you, revisions take months to finish, journals take more months to get back to you, etc. So you need to start early. When you're writing your term papers, write them with an eye towards publishing them. If, once you've gotten feedback on them, one or two seem viable, then that's a great place to start. I'm not entirely sure what you have in mind, but you should definitely be reading widely and outside your dissertation topic. It'll help unstick you when you're stuck, give you new ideas for papers, and build your knowledge base for teaching. Keep a list of paper ideas, and take some time (when you're not burdened by coursework!) to start writing those papers. When you're dissertating, take some time now and then to work on something different and exciting. It's when you stop being excited that your progress will slow to a crawl, and you'll start feeling like crap. On the professionalization front, start familiarizing yourself with the different tiers of journals in comparative literature in general, and in your subfield in particular. Get a feel for what kind of work is currently hot, what kinds of papers are published where, etc. What are the good venues for really long pieces? Short pieces? And so on. Definitely. When you're on the job market, you should probably apply for anything and everything. There are lots of postdocs out there, and they all tend to look for different things. Look at the CVs of current postdocs in comparative literature, and see what they did prior to getting their postdocs (do the same for assistant professors, obviously!). To get a sense of what postdocs are out there, check out the yearly job listings. I think the MLA has one somewhere, and you'll find more via the Chronicle of Higher Education, University Affairs (for Canada), and jobs.ac.uk (for the UK). It's good and important to start familiarizing yourself with these sorts of professionalization matters. It's hard to do it all at the last minute, but easy to absorb over long periods of time. Generally speaking, when you apply for a postdoc you'll need to have a research project that you can pitch in three-ish pages. Your project should go beyond your dissertation work, and develop something new. Some postdocs have a theme, which case you'll have to demonstrate how your project fits in with that theme. Always demonstrate how well your project would fit into your target department (cite faculty members there if you can). Committees are looking for interesting projects and candidates who can hit the ground running and start producing solid research. Consequently, you'll want a pub or two to reassure them. You do want to graduate with some solo teaching experience if at all possible. But you don't need tons (2-4 courses is plenty in my field), and time spent on teaching is time not spent publishing or writing your dissertation. Teaching can easily swallow up any and all available free time (so don't let it!). I dunno. Are the people in your department who do this getting TT jobs when they graduate? If it were me, I might or I might not do this, depending on how much time it would add to my completion, and what the costs would be. If there's no additional tuition and your department will fund you for the extra year or two it'll take, then it might be worth it. A Master's degree in a subject will suffice to allow you to teach that subject at a community college, so that could help. Just pick your subject carefully. If I were to go back and be offered the chance, I think I'd try for something a little more marketable to non-academics, like math, computer science, economics, public policy, law, or something (not that those would have complemented my PhD at all!). Learning a language isn't a bad idea. I dunno about the kinds of degrees listed above, though. If you do this, I think you should be aiming for versatility. Personally, I'd focus on a thing or two. There's never enough time in grad school, you always feel like there's more you need to be doing, and you don't want to burn yourself out. These kinds of opportunities can be really useful, though, especially if they're paid and would offer you a chance to develop skills marketable outside the academy. Because you really, really don't want to find yourself with no job offers in hand, and no idea what to do next. It's like the Master's degree: look for skills that are transferable and marketable.

Maybe it's down to disciplinary differences. We usually have to submit a teaching statement, diversity statement, syllabi for courses taught, syllabi for proposed courses, sample assignments, and sample course evaluations (unedited and with comments). All that quickly adds up to 50-100 pages. It's the unedited and complete course evaluations that take up the most space, since a single course can easily eat up ten pages. That's why the table of contents is so important (and a one-page summary of the course evaluations is a good idea, too). (I did exaggerate, though; mine comes in at 80 pages. But still. It's silly, because nobody is ever going to read it all. But that's what everyone asks for, and sending a 10-20 page dossier will get you cut.)

Although some people like to talk about the importance of teaching, the reality is that teaching is mostly irrelevant when it comes to hiring. What matters is that you're competent, and present competently. Even at teaching-centred institutions. Part of the reason for this is that nobody teaches us to teach, and we just have to sink or swim on our own. Don't worry about falling a couple of tenths of a whole number below the departmental average. Everyone gets some bad reviews, and that's not even a bad score. Plus, we all know that teaching evaluations are mostly BS. You should worry when you start consistently getting 1s, 2s, or 3s out of 5, and everyone else is consistently getting 4s. The goal here is simply not to raise any red flags, not to astound everyone with Forget about the evaluations. Focus instead on your teaching statement, on developing your syllabi, and on answering questions about your teaching. Your teaching portfolio is going to be a very large document (mine is about 100 pages), since you have to include so many different things in it. Nobody will read it all. At best, everyone on the committee will read your teaching statement, make sure your evaluations aren't disastrous, and then glance at a syllabus that catches their fancy. And, with that in mind, make sure you include a table of contents so that they don't have to flounder around.

If you're up for more training, speech language pathology is always in high demand. And while not all SLPs have training in linguistics, it's a distinct asset (and, personally, I'd want mine to have it).

Philosophy probably has the worst job market, especially relative to the number of job seekers. Just about every open specialization job gets 650-1200 applications (I know, because I apply for all of those!), and even relatively niche specializations get 100-300. History is not far behind, however. This is because history and philosophy departments tend to be fairly small, and don't usually exercise a whole lot of power in the university (meaning they're not prioritized for hires). The English market is hard, to be sure, but English departments tend to be huge, and exert a lot of administrative power. Graduates of top programs don't struggle all that much on the market. I have no evidence for this claim, but I suspect that religious studies/theology has the best job market in the humanities, especially if you include non-academic jobs. At least as far as the US is concerned.

They expect you to do all of the reading, and to come to class with a working knowledge of the claims made and the arguments offered in their support. They also expect you to come to class with a couple of questions about the reading--either clarificatory, or for further discussion. Formal expectations are pretty low; usually just a presentation or two (where you're responsible for teaching one of the readings yourself) and a final paper. Your written work is expected to be polished, and you're expected to delve into the literature/secondary literature on your own. You're expected to come up with paper topics of your own (i.e. no more suggested topics; you can, of course, develop a topic in consultation with the prof), to read up on the topic yourself, and to offer up an original piece of scholarship (so... attempt to solve an extant problem for yourself). If you're in a PhD program, then you're expected to be a mostly self-directed learner. Your profs and advisors will offer you some shortcuts, but you're pretty much in charge of your own education (including your own socialization into the discipline and its norms; you're in charge of familiarizing yourself with journals, learning to present, finding conferences, learning to publish, etc.). Oh, and nobody will ever teach you how to teach. You're entirely by yourself on that front (unless you get very lucky). Well, you should expect a fair bit of reading, and you should expect it to be pretty hard. You don't have very good tools for reading contemporary, cutting-edge work just yet, and that means that a lot of the reading will feel pretty hard and inscrutable. Just remember that everyone else is in the same boat, too. Graduate courses often presuppose a fair bit of training in related subfields, and you might not yet have that training (e.g. metaphysics or epistemology might presuppose a fair bit of familiarity with phil. of language, or logical methods, or whatever). That's OK. You're pretty much expected to pick it up along the way, largely by doing it for yourself. But everyone also knows that developing all of these competences takes time, and that you won't have them all in your first few years. If you expect to feel out of your depth, then it won't be such a big deal when you do.The key to remember is that you are, and so is everybody else--but that you've also got the foundations you need to get up to speed relatively quickly. Oh, and remember to let other people talk in class. Your colleagues are every bit as good as you are, and you'll learn a lot from them. So learn to shut up a little! You need resilience and determination to make it through grad school (especially the PhD). You will feel incompetent, outclassed, powerless, like nobody is doing enough to help you, depressed, completely hopeless when it comes to jobs, etc. Everybody feels it, and you need to realize that you're not special in this respect. You also need to know that you are competent, and that there's life outside academia. In fact, it's mostly better. You need to learn humility. You were top of your class as an UG, but now you're stuck with half a dozen other people who were also tops of their classes. Grad school isn't a contest, and it's certainly not a race. It takes as long as it takes, and you're not competing with your peers. You will learn more from them, and from your interactions with them, than you do on your own, or in your classes. Preening and posturing are insufferable, and will leave you relatively isolated. Be kind, be generous, and cultivate friendships. As for more formal skills... honestly, the most important skills are organizational. Discipline and time management will see you through the PhD process; lack of them will see you floundering. Good editorial skills (these fall under 'organizational skills') will rescue all your term papers: spend a lot of time thinking about your papers' structure, and experimenting with it. Learn how to effectively write a literature review section, and how to present the problem you're addressing. Learn how to make your case effectively, and concisely. Learn how to get it done, and how to get it done in time (a lot of students tinker infinitely and never submit their papers, and later their dissertations). If you're in a PhD program, then odds are you'll be allowed to take incompletes. Never take an incomplete; it's better to submit something that you think isn't great. When you take the incomplete, you'll procrastinate for a while, forget most of what you learned, and then spend the last few weeks until the deadline panicking, junking your paper as crap, and producing work which, at best, is at about the same level as what you had a few months earlier. Then you'll probably ask for an extension, and the cycle repeats itself. A lot of the students who don't finish are eaten up by this cycle. (The same thing applies to handing in work late as an undergrad; if you're going to hand it in a day late, then you'd better be confident that the extra day's work will improve the assignment by more than 5%, otherwise the late penalty isn't worth it; 10% for two days, etc. The expected returns diminish pretty quickly.) Extensions are fine, but incompletes aren't. They will fuck you. Someone might tell you that some profs expect their students to take incompletes on their papers, because their expectations for paper quality are so high. Don't listen to them. To the extent they're right, these are problem profs, and they often don't graduate many students; and anyway, you won't get a terribad grade for the paper you produced in the first place. But the longer you take to write it, the higher their expectations will become. You don't need to record classes. Group study can be useful, especially for formal methods courses like logic, or if you're really lost at sea, but I wouldn't count on it. Groups are too easily distracted. I have always taken copious notes, but it's just a way to reinforce whatever I'm learning. I almost never look at my notes. What I do look at are the parts of the text I've highlighted, and the notes I've written to myself in the margins (where I ask questions, explain to myself why this excerpt is relevant to some project or other of mine, question premises, raise objections, etc.). Get good at organizing your files. Your PDFs should be easily identifiable by both author and title (e.g. maxhgns - Preparing for Graduate-Level work), and should be filed away neatly on your computer. Clearly identify your paper drafts (I give the title and version number; e.g. Preparing for Graduate-Level Work 1.0, 1.1, etc.; I go to 2.0, 2.1, etc. after major changes, or once I get my submission back from a journal). It can be useful to write yourself very brief summaries of each article you read, so that you can quickly be reminded of the paper's main claims and supporting arguments. You may outgrow this over time (if so, don't worry about it). But it's a good starting practice. It really helps to assimilate the material, and file it away in long-term memory. Honestly, time management is the most important skill. You need to start working a little every day, rather than doing everything at the last minute. Start your reading early in the week, and start your term papers long before the end of the semester. The earlier you start them, the better they'll be, and the more directed your approach to the course will be.

~150 for 5. They were all in the UK and Canada, so there was no GRE and only a few application fees. If I were redoing things, however, then I'd also apply to a handful in the US.

I did, because I already had a pretty detailed proposal for the research I wanted to pursue (as a result of also applying to the UK). But I also figured that it was part and parcel of showing how I would fit into the department's life. I ended up working with one of the people I mentioned, and only taking a few classes with the others. As for whether to do it... I think you should, if you can do so genuinely enough. But doing it poorly (e.g. just listing people) is worse than not doing it at all (which is sort of the neutral default). I did actually contact the person who became my supervisor beforehand. I wanted to get a sense of what the department was like, but also whether my proposed project was of interest, and so on. It was a little weird and awkward, but it was fine. I don't know that it directly helped my application at all, but it did help me to focus my statement a little better. But I guess you can't entirely discount the mere exposure effect! For UK applications, however, it's expected that you'll clear your project with the supervisor before you apply. It depends on how the department handles admissions. At my PhD-granting institution, potential supervisors have the first look at your file, starting with the writing sample (the idea being that at least one expert reads your writing sample, before any other considerations come into it). If you identify someone, the odds are good that they'll be one of the two or three faculty members who look at your file initially. If not, then you get assigned at least one such person based on how your interests match up. They then draw up a list of the top applicants in their pools, and compare notes. The final decision depends on a number of factors, including who already has students and whether they have too many, who doesn't have any/enough students, the areas the department hopes to cultivate over the next few years, balancing the interests of the students who are admitted both with one another, and with existing cohorts, etc. Like I said above, it depends on the department and on the considerations that they bring to the table, but generally speaking a single faculty member won't be enough to accept or reject your application. The process begins with individuals combing through files, but ends with them conferring and coming to a decision as a group, based on the department's needs and what it can support. What a strong supporter can do, however, is make a case for particular students, for making exceptions, etc. And if they work in your areas of interest, their opinion does carry extra weight.

Your philosophy GPA is the GPA for every philosophy course you have taken. Your undergraduate advisor is right when they say that admissions committees mostly just care about the grades you get in your third- and fourth-year courses (i.e. 300+ level courses), but they have a look at those for themselves. It's separate from your GPA. When they ask for your philosophy GPA, they're not asking for your GPA from your last couple years. It can make sense to do that, but you have to decide whether it's worth the trouble. If your faculty advisor thinks your sample is good enough, then that's sufficient for a go at applications. Remember, too, that you don't just get one try at this. You can always apply again. Given that it's just about February, I'd say that you have more than enough time ahead of you to perform substantial revisions on your sample and re-learn your HS math for the GRE. I suspect that if you give yourself another year, your writing sample won't end up being all that much more polished than it would be anyway. Yes--provided you do well in them. If you tank them or just do OK, then that's going to harm your application a little. What doing well in a grad seminar tells the committee is that you're capable of working and doing well at a level that approximates the grad level (since UGs in grad seminars are usually graded as such). And it gives you a taste of what it's like in there. But remember that the expectations are different and that, as an UG, it's not actually a seminar for you (it'll be up to you to keep up, rather than up to the teacher or the rest of the class to slow down if you're not caught up). If I were you, I'd take or sit in on one or two that were of interest, but I wouldn't overdo it. As a graduate student newly on the job market, it's normal to have a list of graduate courses you took (that is: classes taken as a graduate student), and it would be normal to include independent studies on that list. As an UG, it's not normal to do that. I assume those classes show up as independent studies on your transcript, right? It's just that the transcript doesn't say what it was on? In that case, you can mention it in your statement of interest if you want, but otherwise forget about it. It's reasonable, sure, but I wouldn't think about my applications that way. I'd apply to whatever the best programs are for my two prospective AOSes, and at least one prospective AOC. In your case, I guess that's philosophy of language and epistemology, modified perhaps by mind or metaphysics more generally. But determining which programs are the best isn't simply a matter of looking at the PGR; it's a matter of exhaustive research, and of finding the best set of supervisors you can for your interests. So by all means, start with the PGR's specialty rankings (forget the overall ranking for now; besides which, given those interests, it'll track fairly closely). But then read up on all the departments in that set of rankings. Find out what the faculty working in your areas of interest are working on. Find out who's cross-appointed where. Find out what ties exist between the philosophy department and departments that complement your interests (linguistics, cognitive science, etc.). If you're serious about philosophy of language as an AOS, then you should really be seeking out a university with a strong linguistics department, too. Find out what the progression requirements are, and compare them--try to determine whether you could reasonably complete them all in the time allotted. Look to see which programs have the strongest, most active colloquium schedules (that's a good way to figure out whether the department's rolling in money or tightening its belt). Look to see which departments will give you a few teaching opportunities without having you teach too much. Scour the graduate student profiles and CVs, and try to get a sense of what yours might look like when you get to their point. As for jobs... look. Landing a job is not actually correlated with overall PGR rank. Landing a job at a PhD-granting institution, on the other hand,, does seem to be loosely correlated to rank--at least insofar as the top few departments are concerned. But here's the thing: nobody's chances of landing a job are good, not even graduates of top programs. Top programs do tend to get the flashier placements, but those bright successes obscure a struggling underclass of newly-minted PhDs. Prestige matters a lot more than it should, but it also matters a lot less than factors over which you have a fair bit of control: who your supervisors are, your publication record, your research agenda and future plans, your teaching experience, and your academic network. Your network is probably the most important factor here, because it's through that network that you get professionalized, make important contacts (for letters, grant and postdoc applications, etc.), and are offered CV-boosting opportunities. Your choice of supervisors is really, really important, because they're supposed to introduce you to their own networks and get you settled in. I'll let you in on a secret. Well, it's not really a secret, but people often don't realize this in time, if ever: Name recognition matters in this discipline, but it's your name that needs to be recognized. Institutional prestige is really just a proxy. If committee members were to ask their friends in the relevant subfield to list the five or so best graduate students/new PhDs in the subfield, you want your name to come up on as many of those lists as possible. That will get you an interview (which is what your job-seeking goal really is). For publications, you're aiming for an R&R because outright acceptances are so very, very rare; for jobs, you're aiming for an interview for similar reasons. But that means you need to be pretty prolific as a graduate student--all over the conference circuit, well-published, and well-integrated into a broad professional network. Not as much as everyone seems to think. It's obviously great if you have a letter from David Lewis saying you're the best undergraduate student he's ever seen (provided, of course, that he doesn't have a reputation for inflating his letters!). But most applicants don't have those kinds of letters, and most UG applicants are exceptionally poorly placed to even know whether their references are prestigious, or just how prestigious they are. Philosophical subfields are small, and there are some very well-known people who don't teach in fancy departments, or even at PhD-granting departments. You're not a very good judge of how well-connected your professors are. The kind of letter that you actually want, anyway, is one that can speak directly to your abilities, and in a lot of detail. It doesn't really matter who those letters comes from (as long as they're philosophers, have a PhD, and are at least associates). What matters is their content. If David Lewis can't explain in detail why he thinks you're the best, his letter isn't worth much. They'd have to be aware of the inflation, or at least believe it to be true. In my experience, UGs talk a lot about grade inflation, especially compared to their institutional rivals, but that's all it is: talk. I don't know that there's much evidence that it's true, or (even if it is!) that anybody outside the rivalry knows or cares about it. (The real exception is for UK students, whose grades are radically deflated--like, seriously. 60% is actually quite a good grade.) Look: your grades barely matter. They matter only insofar as they're not bad, and won't rule you out. Getting lots of Bs or lower--especially later in your UG career--is not good. Beyond that, nobody really cares all that much. Yes, it matters. But again, not as much as people sometimes seem to think it does. What really matters is that you're a strong applicant coming out of a strong philosophy program at a legitimate university the committee has heard of and recognizes as a decent program. And it helps insofar as you've had access to opportunities and resources to which other applicants haven't had access. But PGRness doesn't really have anything to do with it; it's a measure of the prestige of PhD programs, not BA programs. An UG version of the PGR would be a very different ranking. A little, but not much. Any awards or scholarships you might have received matter more. No. Include any awards or scholarships you've received, any community-, department-, or university-level service you've performed, jobs you've had, any teaching experience you might have, that sort of stuff. Publications of any kind, if you have them (just be clear that they're not peer-reviewed and academic, if they aren't). Most of that will fall off your academic CV as you go along, but for now it's all pertinent enough.

It's quite rare to encounter an article that doesn't have some typo or grammatical infelicities. It's not a big deal, especially if you took the time to proofread. Remember, it went through the journal's copy editor, too. As for strategies... I find it easiest to spot these things when I actually print out the document.

I basically agree with the others--as long as your CGPA remains high, it's not a big deal unless you're planning on working in philosophy of science. Do remember, however, that as a grad student you'll take lots of classes you hate or don't care about to fulfill distribution requirements. And there'll be a logic requirement, too. It's absolutely crucial that you do well in those, because they will affect your standing and ability to secure all kinds of funding (including postdoc funding). Plus, you often have to send all your transcripts as part of your job application package. Finally, FWIW, I don't think it's at all unfortunate that those classes were required. A liberal arts education is supposed to offer a basic foundation in science and mathematics. You don't have to have perfect grades, but it's really important that you have that foundation, and it will be especially important if you get a PhD. Especially in philosophy, since it touches on so many other disciplines, where far too many of us (and I include myself!) are arts students. I've spent quite a bit of time catching up over the last few years, as science and mathematics have become increasingly relevant to my research and teaching, and as my own interest in them grows. I should have spent more time on them as an UG.

Of course it is. Just make sure that the programs you apply to will offer you full funding--there's no sense doing an MA in philosophy if you have to pay for any of it. There are lots of very good MA programs out there. Determining which would be best for you depends to some extent on what your interests are, but since you don't have a background in philosophy I'd avoid the 1-year programs, and concentrate on 2-year programs with a fair bit of coursework. Simon Fraser's is one of the very best in this respect, but you should also consider GSU, NIU, Milwaukee, Toronto, Calgary, and Victoria. There are lots more, but we'd need to hear a little more about where your interests lie.

What matters is that it wasn't a total disaster, and that your evaluations couldn't be held against you. The precise decimal point is entirely irrelevant. Nobody is going to look at your job materials and say, "Well, Quant_Psych_2018's teaching scores are all in the 4.6 range, but Dr. Fancy over here has scores in the 4.7s, so fuck Quant_Psych_2018." You should aim to be above the department average, and well into what would be a passing grade, but the truth is that they don't matter all that much. Everyone has some bad comments, everyone has a class that went worse than others, and so on. What you're working for is a narrative that tells search committees that you're a competent teacher--maybe even a very good one, for teaching-focused schools. But as long as you're not raising red flags, you're fine and shouldn't sweat it.

It's probably fine, especially if we're just talking about one recommender (as opposed to all three). Academics are used to other academics being really flaky. And it's unlikely that they'll get started on the pile right away or, if they do, that they'll get through the whole thing and just chuck your application as incomplete. If they like your file but notice the missing letter, they'll set it aside for a bit and see if it trickles in (and perhaps even notify you or the writer in question). The worst case scenario, of course, is that your application is chucked out of hand for being incomplete. I don't think that's likely at most schools, however.

I treated myself to a new and engrossing video game, and a few weeks work-free. When I got back to work, I prepped my defense talk in very small chunks at a time (e.g. read a dzen or so pages at a time, made just a couple slides, etc.) and then used the rest of my workday to start new projects.

Yes, always. Even now that I've graduated. He asked me for special dispensation once to see another talk because he'd already seen mine three or four times by then, and the other talk sounded way more interesting (to me, I mean!) Yes, always. My supervisor was very, very generous with his network of contacts. The answers to both those questions is going to vary depending on the supervisor, of course, but I do think that the best supervisors are going to regularly attend your talks and introduce you to their contacts. The two things go hand in hand, actually: often, after I give a talk, academics I don't know talk to my supervisor about my talk first. And then he performs the introductions. I meet waaaaay more people when he's in attendance than when he's not.

BPhil admission is competitive, but not as competitive as people often think. The cohorts are actually quite large. There are two main catches: (1) funding is extremely competitive, and there's not much to go around, especially for applicants outside the EU, and (2) very, very few BPhils make the cut to the DPhil. Oxford winnows its cohort big-time. I don't think any of the things you listed are really (or, at least, necessarily) strikes against you. The real questions are: how many programs did you apply to, how close is your fit with those programs, and how many students do your prospective supervisors have/what's the current student AOS distribution in the department. FWIW, I know that being shut out seems like a horrific outcome. That's how I experienced the thought when I was applying. But with hindsight, I can see now that it really wouldn't have been a big deal. I'd have just tried again a time or two, and then moved on to something more lucrative, certain, and with significantly more control over where I live.

Do you get percentages? If so, I'd try putting those into the boxes. If not, then you can try putting in 'band x', or whatever. If it won't accept that input, and it won't accept something like n/a, then I wouldn't worry about it, and I'd just perform the conversion myself and put in '4.0'. They can sort it out themselves when they see copies of your transcripts. (This may have changed since my application days, but I think that the online GPA reporting is mostly for HR/general admissions purposes anyway, and the department just looks directly at your transcript.) If you can, and if there's time, you could also ask whoever the department's point person is, or ask your own advisor(s). Your advisor(s) might not know, but it might be easier for them to find out.

In addition to Baxandall's Painting and Experience and Patterns of Intention: Linda Nochlin's Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, for obvious reasons. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir's African Art and Authenticity: A Text With a Shadow for pretty similar reasons (it's pointing out similar problems with the authenticity and cultural purity narratives as Nochlin is with the canon and the genius narrative). Also Bill Holm's Northwest Coast Indian Art, An Analysis of Form, because despite its flaws it's still a really good treatment of First Nations art, and there's really not very much of that out there. (If you'll forgive the intrusion of a philosopher rather than a fellow art historian!)

It increases your professional visibility. The more recognizable your name is, the better--provided it's not recognized for really bad reasons! Name recognition gets you speaking engagements, collaborations, publication invitations, and helps to prevent your job application getting tossed out of hand. Blogging's not the only way to get name recognition, obviously, but it is one way of doing so. The academics in my field who blog regularly enjoy pretty inflated reputations and professional status (and I don't mean that as a criticism!). I don't blog, but I do regularly read a few academic blogs. I tend to favour blogs that deal with professional gossip and news, and commentary on current events, though. I find the ones that offer mini-papers kind of boring. I read lots of papers anyway; I don't need to see a new paper taking shape before my eyes. From what I've seen, the former kinds of blogs attract a larger and broader audience; the latter attract mostly people already in the blogger's professional network (or their subfield). The latter seem to have readers who are far more dedicated to the blog, while the former draws a lot of irreverent and troll-y commentary. Most single-author blogs seem to peter out and die pretty quickly. The challenge is (1) to build an audience, and (2) to sustain it. And to do those things, you have to be pretty active (and patient!). The most important thing to do, I think, is to post regularly. It doesn't have to be frequent (although posts shouldn't be too distant in time, either!), but it should be at pretty predictable intervals. The blogs I visit most are those which have new content daily or weekly. Sporadic blogs get sporadic visits (from me), and sporadic visits make it much less likely that I'll participate in the comments. Are there any group blogs in your field that you could join as a contributor? I think I'd try that first, mostly to get a feel for things without the pressure of having to generate lots of regular content. Plus, it'll help to build your audience a little. Once you have your blog, I think the easiest way to build your audience is to be active on other blogs and social media platforms. Just make sure that your posts are connected (by hyperlink, I mean!) to your blog or the name under which you blog. Share your posts on FB and Twitter. Your goal is to get re-blogged, so that traffic is driven to your site.

I'm not in English, so I can only offer general thoughts. But here they are: You can cultivate areas of competence and specialization in lots of different ways, but they basically all boil down to reading and writing in the relevant areas. The easiest way to do those things, of course, is by taking or auditing lots of grad-level courses in the area, in related areas, or in cognate areas in other fields (e.g. for gender and queerness, look at what's being taught in women's studies and philosophy; for religion, look at the religious studies department). When you take courses that aren't directly related to your interests, you can still make contact with them by trying to ensure that your written work makes contact with your interests. So, e.g., if you're taking a class on Edwardian literature, your research project could be about religion or gender or (female) mental illness in Wooster and Jeeves. It's really up to you to make your studies interesting and relevant to your interests. Another easy way to build up competence is through your teaching or TAing assignments. These will force you to do some reading, often with a syllabus designed by someone who's already an expert, and force you to regurgitate the material on-command, extemporaneously, and so that undergrads will understand it. If you have some ability to choose your assignments or rank your preferences, then use that to explore new areas and shore up competencies that you otherwise haven't had the chance to cultivate. It's easier to teach or TA material that you already know really well, but that does a lot less for you with respect to developing your competencies. You'll learn more from teaching than you will from just reading or taking a class, so bear that in mind when you select your teaching assignments. You also cultivate specializations by giving regular presentations about them, and by publishing on the subject. So if you really want to be an expert on American suburbia, then you need to write lots of papers on the subject and present them to lots of conference audiences. This has the added bonus of introducing you to the networks of scholars with whom you'll have the closest contacts later. (Note that presenting at conferences is a lot like teaching; it's another way to get comfortable with regurgitating stuff on-command, extemporaneously, and accessibly. Writing papers has a lot of the same effects.). Finally, you can just sit at home and read stuff, and write papers on topics that catch your interest. This works, but it works best when it's reinforced by interacting with other people--especially by explaining things to other people, and answering their questions. So whatever you do, remember to interact with your peers! You're going to learn a lot more from them than you will from your classes. Like I said, I'm not in English so I'm not much good on the recommendation front. But it looks to me like the interests you've listed above are pretty specific, and likely fall under broader subfields in English literature. So the trick is to identify what those subfields are, and then to search out the journals which are best in those subfields (while keeping sight of which journals are good generalist venues, too). Keep track of which journals publish the kinds of things you're reading; those are going to be your target journals. Keep track of where the articles you're assigned to read in class (or that you're assigned to teach) are published; those are going to be your target journals. Look at where people who have the kinds of career trajectory you want (grad students, postdocs, assistant, associate, and full professors) are publishing; those are going to be your target journals. Look at their CVs, and see what kinds of things they did to get where they are/to the place where you want to be next, and emulate their trajectory as closely as you can. As for access... that's almost entirely a matter of the journals to which your institutional library has access. I don't know what the academic world is like in the Philippines, but the odds are that if your institution has a graduate program, then its library will have access to some or most of the main journals in that field. If not, then Google around--lots of people post drafts of their papers on their websites, on academia.edu, etc. If the article in question is a chapter in an edited volume, it will often be available through someone's course website--especially if it's a famous one. Similarly, academic books tend to be available online (although this is usually a violation of copyright), provided you know where to look for them.

It certainly won't hurt your chances, but it's not expected that applicants will have done so. Frankly, your chances of getting a paper accepted in a good journal are pretty slim, and your chances of doing so in time for PhD applications are even slimmer (the process takes months and years, even if it's accepted at the first journal to which it's submitted). Learning this is part of professionalization in your discipline. That you don't know yet is a pretty good indication that you shouldn't be trying to publish your work, since you aren't yet able to identify appropriate and good journals. Generally speaking, one doesn't usually search for journals. Rather, one submits work to journals with which one is already familiar. You get familiar with journals by reading the work that's published in them. You want to be publishing in the same journals that you read the most. Your field probably has a mix of generalist and specialist journals. Your first task is to start figuring out which are which, which are the most prestigious in each category, which are slightly less prestigious but very good, etc. Googling around can help, but you're going to learn a lot more from (1) reading work yourself, (2) seeing which papers from which journals get assigned in graduate and undergraduate classes, and (3) seeing where established scholars who work on the same kinds of things as you do are publishing their work. For that last one, you should be skimming the CVs of people whose trajectory you hope to emulate (current PhD students, postdocs, assistant professors, associate and full professors, etc.). In theory, anyone can publish an article in a double-masked peer-reviewed journal, yes (although perhaps not any random person). In practice, the odds are stacked pretty high against that happening. Remember that once you get a PhD, you're a world-level expert on your subject. The kind of work that gets published (especially in good peer-reviewed journals; predatory and vanity presses are another thing) is world-class research by people with years--decades, even--of experience in the field. Rejection rates are field-dependent, but they usually range from 90-98%. That means that the quality is very high. You need more than just good ideas or good writing skills: you need to have a thorough mastery of your subject matter. And that's not something that you can pick up on the fly. It takes years of work: years of reading, writing, refining, presenting, getting feedback, etc. Think of math. In theory, yes--any old McDonald's worker could develop a good and interesting proof of a theorem (for example), and get it published. But the level of math required to do that kind of thing is much higher than most people ever get to. High school calculus isn't going to cut it. So that McDonald's worker would have had to spend quite a bit of time learning about, e.g., number theory, category theory, functional analysis, etc. It's entirely possible to do that on your own, but it's hard and most people aren't likely to succeed. The same holds for other disciplines. Things get a lot harder if your field of study requires data or lab equipment. If you're an advanced undergraduate, then you've already got much more background than the average McDonald's worker. But it's still not usually enough. And if the journal doesn't implement double-masked review, then your odds are a lot slimmer (precisely because credentials matter for those journals). No, no, and yes. Although the same kinds of structural obstacles that I outlined above will apply here, too. At this stage, your default assumption should probably be that you're not ready to publish, unless someone with a PhD in the subject has read your work and suggested that you try to do so.

Yes. Your grades are fine. Your chances of getting into an MA program are small, into a PhD program are slimmer, and getting a job are close to nonexistent. But that's got nothing to do with your grades; the competition is just really, really fierce. Don't take yourself out of the running, let the admissions committee do that. At the MA level, you're competing against dozens of people. At the PhD level, a couple hundred. For jobs, between six and twelve hundred.

Have you considered Toronto (Toronto has one of the strongest phil. of law and metaethics concentrations in the world) or Queen's (by far the strongest ethics and applied ethics contingent in the country, and very strong in phil. of law too)?

Of course you have a chance. Your grades won't get your application tossed out of hand. Just remember to focus on your writing sample and cover letter. Why are you targeting those four MAs, though? Why not some of the other MA programs in Canada--or, indeed, in Ontario?