reixis

Hi sidevans,
 
Thanks a lot for compiling this information and for running the blog. This will certainly help us out. Just one question that popped out of my mind after looking at both your list and Ian's previous ones: is there any particular reason for not including UConn in predictions?

Hi sidevans,
 
Thanks a lot for compiling this information and for running the blog. This will certainly help us out. Just one question that popped out of my mind after looking at both your list and Ian's previous ones: is there any particular reason for not including UConn in predictions?

Just checked out and all my references are in due place. It's finally over!

Just checked out and all my references are in due place. It's finally over!

Fantastic! I wish you the best of luck this season. You seem like a fantastic candidate and, even if we might be competition, I want you to do well!

Just checked out and all my references are in due place. It's finally over!

Thanks for you kind words! He emailed me last night (actually, a few hours after I posted here) and he said he will upload it in the next days. I hope it gets there in time. I feel kind of relieved right now.

That is just absolutely horrible. Oh my God. And especially considering your background story, your prof should be particularly pumped to get those letters out for you! It does seem like there is always one professor that is the hardest to contact. :/ That was the most stressful part of the entire application process for me! Please keep us posted because I am pulling for you reixis!

This is a good time (maybe a bit late, actually) to say that I'm now confident that I will be unable to participate to the extent as I did last year in philosophy admissions. Many people relied on my blog as a quick summary of what's happening in the course of the admission season. I won't repeat everything here, but feel free to read my longer statement at the blog (https://faircloudblog.wordpress.com/).
 
Here, I will suggest a few things to the 2015 applicants.
 
First, when you receive funding information from departments, upload that information here. This portion of my site requires little maintenance, so I expect that it will work for users this year as last year.  
Second, if you're bored, consult the results of last year's Philosophy Admissions Survey, posted here. The survey gives you 90+ examples of actual successful (and actual failed) applicants from the 2014 season. You'll see immediately how difficult it is to predict how a candidate will do in philosophy admissions.  
Third, I hope someone will take my place this season. Maintaining a site like this requires some basic Internet skills, a lot of time and effort, as well as punctuality and good judgment. It may also be helpful that the site manager has a decent reputation among those who would use such a site. Finally, it's enormously helpful that the site manager has actual connections to strong graduate philosophy applicants, as I did last year, and is herself an applicant.
  EDIT: Fourth, I recommend that you consult the history of notifications, which I neatly compiled here.  
I would love to hear from you all this season, even as I busily devote myself to the JD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Please email me at ian dot faircloud at gmail. In the meantime, I truly wish you the very best this admission season.

Hello everyone,
 
I'll be attempting to do something like what Ian did last year in terms of a frequently updated blog tracking which schools have notified applicants of which admissions status. Granted, I'm just putting together the site now, so it likely won't be as polished as Ian's site. But I have a fair bit of time to commit to regularly updating the site, and I'm very much invested in the process since I'm applying for fall 2015. So hopefully some of you will find my site helpful, even though it's quite bare-bones at the moment. It's at http://philosophyadmissions.wordpress.com/.
 
I'd also like to note that I don't intend for this to be my personal site. Ideally, I'd like to pass the reigns to someone else next year, such that the site becomes something like a community-owned resource for the philosophy applicant community. I'd also like to do another round of the Philosophy Applicant Survey after results are in, and may try to get some help on that front from other members of the Grad Cafe community.
 
That's all for now; I'll be on these forums as much as possible throughout the whole process. Good luck to everyone.

Okay, strangest nightmare I've had about this process:

In the dream, I was accepted to every school. Not just the schools I applied to, but EVERY school. Then when all the schools found out, they got offended that I was considering all of the other schools and rescinded the offers.

I really want the semester to begin so I can think about something beside admissions!

I would second what Gnothi said. I guess I didn't post it here, but I received an offer from the University of Otago (New Zealand). It seems like a very good place, and I have heard a lot of great things about the department. I was very tempted to accept the offer straightaway, but was advised by my advisor and my girlfriend to at least wait for US decisions to make a more informed decision. Luckily the timing was right and I will be able to wait until Feb/March to accept the offer. Anyway, it was particularly good to receive an early offer, as I was very suspicious of my prospects of going overseas.
 
In time, one of my letter writers (a US professor) told me that I would do good to let US programs know about this early offer. What do you guys think? I think there are two possible scenarios here: one in which they hear about the offer and feel tempted to make me an offer as well; and another one in which they use this fact to reject me since I have somewhere else to go. I suspect that the second case is more likely to happen, but I might be wrong.

I would second what Gnothi said. I guess I didn't post it here, but I received an offer from the University of Otago (New Zealand). It seems like a very good place, and I have heard a lot of great things about the department. I was very tempted to accept the offer straightaway, but was advised by my advisor and my girlfriend to at least wait for US decisions to make a more informed decision. Luckily the timing was right and I will be able to wait until Feb/March to accept the offer. Anyway, it was particularly good to receive an early offer, as I was very suspicious of my prospects of going overseas.
 
In time, one of my letter writers (a US professor) told me that I would do good to let US programs know about this early offer. What do you guys think? I think there are two possible scenarios here: one in which they hear about the offer and feel tempted to make me an offer as well; and another one in which they use this fact to reject me since I have somewhere else to go. I suspect that the second case is more likely to happen, but I might be wrong.

I would second what Gnothi said. I guess I didn't post it here, but I received an offer from the University of Otago (New Zealand). It seems like a very good place, and I have heard a lot of great things about the department. I was very tempted to accept the offer straightaway, but was advised by my advisor and my girlfriend to at least wait for US decisions to make a more informed decision. Luckily the timing was right and I will be able to wait until Feb/March to accept the offer. Anyway, it was particularly good to receive an early offer, as I was very suspicious of my prospects of going overseas.
 
In time, one of my letter writers (a US professor) told me that I would do good to let US programs know about this early offer. What do you guys think? I think there are two possible scenarios here: one in which they hear about the offer and feel tempted to make me an offer as well; and another one in which they use this fact to reject me since I have somewhere else to go. I suspect that the second case is more likely to happen, but I might be wrong.

I had an early acceptance last year as well.  I'm currently attending the program that accepted me early (UNC), and I'm confident that I made the right choice, but I will warn that an early acceptance can create a psychological bias in favor of that program.  I immediately started imagining my life in Chapel Hill.  I started researching apartments and looked up what there is to do in the area.  Once you start imagining your life somewhere, other places start seeming less appealing.  It's natural enough.  I would just caution others to try not to let this bias get in the way of making the right graduate school decision.  "X accepted me earlier than Y" is not a good reason to choose X over Y.  Similarly, and more importantly, "X accepted me early and Y only accepted me off the waitlist" is not a good reason to accept X over Y.  It's nice to feel wanted, but all first years will be on equal footing once the program begins.  Professors are not biased in favor of those admitted immediately vs. those admitted off the waitlist.  
 
Good luck to all!  I know these next few months will be stressful, but hang in there!

It definitely does, I got a fairly early one last year and just knowing you've got somewhere to go is a huge relief. However, it wasn't as easy as I expected. Once I had that acceptance I was a lot more hopeful for my chances at other schools (I knew this was irrational but it didn't change anything). That meant it was a lot more disappointing when rejections kept coming. 

Happy New Year! Same thing here.
 
I'm still missing one letter and Harvard's and MIT's deadlines are tomorrow. I'm constantly checking applications systems looking for status updates. Not so much of a pleasant first day of the year. 

Good question, and sorry if I was a bit misleading earlier. UConn doesn't typically (ever?) pay for students to visit unfortunately - it's just not in the budget. I'm not even sure that it's "usually" the case that departments pay for applicants to visit - none of the programs I was invited to did. I think it's become less and less common unfortunately.
 
It's not much, but we do offer free places to stay (with grad students) and current students generally chip in to pay for meals for visitors, but there's no official support. I know that's probably disappointing, sorry!

Hey Nathan, thanks for the post!
 
I have one question about department visits. I heard that departments usually pay for students to visit, but what about international students? Granted that I can secure a visa by my own, is it a common practice to help students from overseas on their expenses?

Thank you for the advices! I sent an e-mail to the person responsible for philosophy graduate admissions. I am waiting for her answer.

Thanks for the advice. Actually, I wrote each chapter separately and at different times, so that is not much of a problem in my case. I asked my advisor whether she thought it to be a good idea to rewrite all of them in a monolithic text or to maintain the paper format and write an introduction indicating how each paper relates to the others. Her take was that the second option was better since all the papers dwell on very related topics, but each of them could stand on their own. She said that this could save me some time as I wouldn’t have to rewrite each chapter if I wanted to use only a part of my thesis in the future. It is true that by going this way you lose in the breadth of your work, but for practical purposes, I thought it was a price worth paying since it’s only a senior thesis.

I figure Cornell is still a solid place too—Bennett is staying, like you said, and they still have some strengths in language (plus affiliated linguists, which is important to me). Plus, there's a good chance that with Sider gone they'll be able to hire some new people, or make a senior hire to replace him. Either way, not the end of the world (so maybe 'much less attractive' was a bit strong on my part). 

Hey, thanks for the answer! It's my first application round, so I'm not really used to the process as a whole.

About Cornell, I was also expecting to be able to work with Sider in case offered a place at Cornell. Anyway, Karen Bennett is likely to stay (I heard she turned down an offer from MIT a few months ago) and there is also Nicholas Silins who works in philosophy of mind/perception, which is one area of my interest. That wasn't really good news, but I'm still confident that there will be people to work with in my areas of interest. 

Hey, thanks for the answer! It's my first application round, so I'm not really used to the process as a whole.

About Cornell, I was also expecting to be able to work with Sider in case offered a place at Cornell. Anyway, Karen Bennett is likely to stay (I heard she turned down an offer from MIT a few months ago) and there is also Nicholas Silins who works in philosophy of mind/perception, which is one area of my interest. That wasn't really good news, but I'm still confident that there will be people to work with in my areas of interest. 

Yes, from what I gathered by looking at previous years statistics, the schools I'm applying to have reached out to students in late February. I guess I'll take my free time to read some philosophy/literature and watch movies/series that were on the waitlist for the past few months.