Philosophizer

napoleon314, I'm pretty interested in hearing how you actually do. I think your GPA is definitely good enough, even for a top school (GPA just isn't the most important factor), and your GRE scores are quite good, and I imagine you're just generally a well very well rounded candidate and a rather smart fellow. However, as you know the schools you applied to are extremely competitive and hardly anyone has a good shot of getting in with that particular list (I'm guessing Michigan is probably the least competitive of those), and I get the sense that most philosophers don't care that much about interdisciplinary studies and/or backgrounds. In fact, when I was an undergrad, I was considering double majoring and the advisor in the philosophy department told me not to. The advice was to just focus on philosophy because admission committees wouldn't really care about or know how to assess what I did in other fields. I do know of some people who got advanced degrees (law, medicine, etc) before going on to philosophy, but if I were you my biggest concern would be my relative lack of formal background in philosophy - I don't think this would hurt you at slightly lower ranked schools, but again, you applied to tremendously competitive programs.

As someone who did a terminal MA at a strong program, my advice would be if you can get into any PhD program on PGR, choose that over any terminal MA. Perhaps you didn't get into the PhD program you wanted, and perhaps you're concerned about the job prospects if you go to a PhD program ranked in the 40s, and those are legitimate concerns. However, while doing the terminal MA might put you into position to get into a slightly better PhD program, it's almost certainly not going to turn you into top 10 material (there appears to be a real bias against people with MAs in philosophy). Meanwhile, it will probably cost you a pretty good deal of money and set you back an extra two years from your ultimate goal. Long story short: doing a terminal MA at a good school can be a great experience, but that doesn't make it worth it. PS. When I was trying to decide between the terminal MA and a lower ranked less appealing PhD program, the advisor at the school that offered the MA even suggested to me that it's always better to go for the PhD. I didn't believe it at the time, but I've obviously come around. Still, I would strongly encourage anyone to think long and hard about this and make the decision that feels right to them, don't want to live a life of regret.

I applied to 14 schools, half ranked in the top 20, the other half 21-45 (according to the gourmet report). Haven't heard back from any yet, 14 seemed like a lot of schools, but I'm still very nervous about it!