tarski

Some of the programs I applied to let you go away for a year (humanities). One of them explicitly said it was only allowed once you were done your coursework, so I think it would be just for research. Unlike Gnomic, though, I got the impression we could go away to do our own research rather than a short term project with someone. Sounded like it would be a year of thesis work, but with access to another advisor, some particular library, and maybe audit a couple classes.

I like emails because they're faster, and I want to hear asap . I know what you mean, though, letters are nice.

Yes, I hate the summer plan question so very, very much. I've been having an interesting mix of confidence and fear these past few days because one of my schools has done some initial rejections, and I wasn't one of them.

No, but I was considering it at one point (for philosophy) and remembered that their philosophy PhD also let you in without an MA, which is unusual (/used to be unusual/is becoming less unusual) for a Canadian school.

Seems pretty safe... http://www.mcgill.ca/linguistics/graduate/admission/

I'm not poli sci so I apologize for barging in . However, I wanted to say that I don't think it's just about choosing some number- 1 hour a week, 2 hours a week, etc. Some of the practice tests, particularly powerprep, predict your score very well. Take a practice test and see where you are, and then you'll know whether you need to study all day or just a little, or somewhere in between.

This recently got posted by someone else in a philosophy forum... other people might appreciate it too, so here you go .

Agreeing with the above post- usually profs are accommodating if you print out all your old assignments and bring them in, or something along those lines. If that doesn't work at all, you could register to take some classes part time, but it sounds like you're applying this season?

. You have my sympathies.

No, but one of mine has called their first admits so I'm guessing I'm out. Whee...

I like books too, but tons (probably most) of my reading is journal articles, so I have been lusting over e-readers as well. No definite plans though, so no suggesions yet .

Ugh, this. Or "WRONG".

Ugh... and of course, in the worst case scenario you find out later that X would not admit you and Y already wouldn't admit you because they're afraid of you going to X. This question scares me.

This really made me laugh- I know what you mean .

Here is a website about applying to grad school, particularly about applying with an SO in mind: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mooreks/graduatehelp.html Here is a relevant quote: I spent a few minutes checking if they had a more detailed explanation of asking for this sort of consideration, but I think this was it. However, it seems like at least one person has done this and had some success. On the other hand, it sure seems to me like it has a risk of backfiring (part of this person's strategy was to apply to very many schools, which helps with that risk).

My sample was only too long for a couple schools, so I did the same thing as the above: sent the whole thing with instructions for what to read on the cover page.

For me, it was probably having a reason to polish my writing sample as much as I did (lots !).

+1 to this- it just made me remember how I did lots of research on faculty in early summer, and then a bunch of them moved to different universities in the fall. That can't really be helped, though .

Heh. Well, maybe it wasn't a joke (shudder)- I listened to talk last December where the professor accepted Hume's doubts about causation, Descartes' hyperbolic doubts about perceptions, and said that doing anything that ignored those considerations was useless . As for the why, why, why, I just pretend it's all about teaching. I do actually want to teach a lot, but I also want to research, but I don't talk about that as it becomes the more confusing element ("Philosophers do research?? I thought it was pretty much over after Plato.")

sometimesiexist, I feel your pain . I find hadunc's solution works pretty well: rather than "I study philosophy", it's "I want to be a philosophy professor".

Oh my... I just saw the latest comment by Ludlow in that thread (AKA Sklar), who made the sensible comment that even if we aren't worried about our online footprint now, we should be thinking ahead to worrying about it for jobs. The "oh my" came from googling his pen name, it has some interesting results.

Interestingly enough, the worry about revealing details online and so on was opened up for discussions on Leiter's blog today. One key quote: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/do-phd-admissions-committees-google-applicants.html#comments However, that's just about being worried about admissions people knowing who we are: maybe there is also a genuine worry about hiding from each other, because we (or some of us, depending on school) are in such a tight competition. The who_got_in crowd can definitely be a little aggressive sometimes, which is why I've adopted the practice of listening in there for interesting information, but otherwise posting here.

That's a good point. The guy I talked to was in his first year, when a lot of people seem to have doubts (judging by various posts in the past), but he loved the place.

I was most annoyed just by filling out slightly different forms over and over again. I applied to a large number of schools, so simply filling out all their forms took up a fair bit of time.

For some reason we/they like to be all sneaky and anon-posting in the who_got_in thread at lj, there's more than 750 posts in the thread now. I've been visiting this and that forum since August. http://community.livejournal.com/who_got_in/98287.html?page=7#comments