tarski

I'm not sure if this is misunderstanding or outright rejection : "My friend's son studied philosophy. I think he's in the circus now."

I only contacted one from one school. He was absurdly helpful, though, and reccommended that I email random grad students from other programs. He said that he'd contacted tons of grad students out of the blue during his own application year and they were all helpful. I didn't ask him to talk to a prof or read anything though, just info about the community, research, etc.

"LORs are always positive" Heh. While filling out some forms, my advisor said if he ever got the chance to design one, he'd put "Laziness" or "Shiftlessness" in the Top 2%-5%-10% section, just to see who cared enough to pay attention .

I know . Some of mine historically get back early Feb (phil, though)... waiting-waiting-waiting.

I've been to some interdisciplinary conferences, and you can always tell when it's a linguist's turn (handouts!) I agree with Venetia- I have a laptop myself, and never use it in class, but still find it useful to be able to work in slightly different places.

Yeah, yeah .

Suddenly very happy that all my random emails to secretaries were super-polite and checked over for grammar, heh.

Hah, I've gotten multiple emails from a psychoanalysis place, too. Don't know why...

As the others have mentioned, "generally speaking it doesn't matter". However, a few schools actually mention on their websites that they start looking early and prefer early applicants (UPenn philosophy, for one), so keep your eyes open for that.

I just did some quick reading about that and it looks very interesting! Unfortunately my medieval experience is limited to an essay Chalmers wrote about Ockham's mental language (my interests in thoughts).

Yar, I can do one-word too . Thoughts.

eek @ the 11th reply

My learner's permit expires in August... yeah, I have to take care of that .

You can ask to be safe. But for what it's worth, every single department I asked was fine with it.

I've applied to schools throughout the top 50 in my field. In the top 10 or so, placement records make it obvious that everyone gets good jobs. In the 40-50 range, not all the placement records are good, but some of them are. You just have to look a bit harder.

I'm curious about how common this sort of thing is in history & disciplines (and why they do it)- "Email from potential advisor to gauge my interest in attending." Would any of us reply with anything other than yesyesyesyesyes ?

In November I had a dream that it was February, and I'd forgotten to apply to any schools. I was running around with a packet of admission materials .

I think "formerly" is good- his relationship to you was "professor", but he does not actually have an official rank anymore. As for the last name issue, that's an awkward coincidence. Some applications have a space where you specify the relationship you have with the writer, which would deal with this, but if they don't... perhaps use the "additional information" page to specify your relationship with the letter writers? (Thesis advisor, prof for 2 courses, etc.) But then, not all of them have an additional information page, either. Just blindly guessing .

I'm really looking forward to my last term, too! History of philosophy seminar: God in early modern Roots of analytic philosophy Metaphysics AI for cognitive scientists Discrete structures (only one I'm slightly nervous about because it's math, but it's relevant for the above AI course and logical stuff in my thesis) -And finish polishing my thesis over the break so I can hand in it in January.

If he's teaching classes, wait outside and ambush him . I did that once this term.

haha, wow. Yeah, I think it would be worthwhile to risk picking your phone up this month . Congrats on the interview.

Hm.. a couple of the comments in the thread about late applications scared me, but my prof just said it would be fine to go ahead and do them. He's been doing this for a while so I guess I'll trust him. In other news, I've gotten way too fast at putting together detailed rec-letter writer packets.

I'm applying to 18 PhDs and 2 MAs... I'm almost guaranteed admission & funding from one of the MAs... but for everything else I'm just keeping the "So we'll see!" attitude too, for similar reasons.

"I am awesome can haz PhD plz?" Wow, though. That is really short, even shorter than Toronto.

Most of my apps allow extra letters, and this term I took a course with a prof that I really want to write a letter for me. It was my first course with him, but he really, really liked what I did and he's well-known and works in my area and is older (as opposed to my current ones who are younger, which my thesis advisor keeps on telling me might be a problem). I wasn't originally planning on asking this guy at all, but things went well and he is enthusiastic about it. Now, most of my deadlines haven't even passed yet (even though I've submitted/almost totally submitted them all), so I can easily add him. However, 4 of them have already past- 2 today, 1 Nov 30 and 1 Dec 1. The Nov 30 and Dec 1 I feel pretty good about sending his letter in, partially because their 'actual' deadlines are mid-January, but the Nov30/Dec1 was their diabolically early international deadline, and partially because he knows tons of people at the program. Unfortunately, all the evaluation for this course really happened after those dates and I just didn't see asking him making much sense back then. The Dec 15ths were domestic+international deadlines, though... but one of them is an extremely competive program, and I feel like grabbing every advantage that I can. Should I just send it in? Asking permission might be better, but their app deadline was yesterday, and 300+ applied; I'm guessing their email is a bit backlogged... would an unwanted extra letter *hurt*, or would they just at worst ignore it? Of course, if they start reviewing fast, they might reject me before they ever see the letter, but I'm not sure they'll be quite that fast...