tarski

I don't think you should worry too much, as long as your actual GPA is fine. These will be courses that are (1) long-ish ago and (2) not in your field.

+1. Your entire SOP and application expresses your desire to go there; saying they're your top choice does not really add anything. And if they were cynical, they could speculate that someone put this in all of his SOPs (not saying that that's what you're doing, of course).

Hopefully this is the case, and it can be resolved quickly. As for the balance of what you have vs what you don't have, I guess asking the DGS like you are doing is the best option. It seems like you will have a fairly significant amount of records from your current place (although I'm not familiar with how much of a year 60 hours would be, my school doesn't count them like that).

I'm very sorry to hear this, hopefully it will work out . Some scattered, potentially bad ideas: Your confessional school must have a reason for the claim that you owe them $1,000 (Spinoza and the principle of sufficient reason!). You didn't specify how fully you have spoken with them. Did you just email and get the refusal? Or have you gone to the campus and tried to figure out what's going on, fully explaining your situation, or at least phoned and did something similar. In my own experience the silly bureaucratic stuff progresses faster if I'm in their office. If they actually have a reason, and it's one for which you cannot find a counterargument...a loan from family? Something that wasn't quite clear from your post: did you do three years at this place, then one year elsewhere and now you're applying? Or was it more years at the elsewhere. If the former, it seems pretty problematic because you'll be missing the majority of your records. If the latter, the situation seems better.

I feel your pain: I've done two Canadian grant applications, both of which shared some content with my SOP, but they were expected to come with bibliographies while that doesn't seem to be the case for the SOP. I rewrote it as much as I could, and just named one article and its pretty well-known authors.

Do the SOP prompts of your places ask about research interests? Or maybe you are applying to places that have two statements, one for research interests and one for background. It's just that this one seems to be entirely background, where people usually talk about research interests.

I think it depends on the school. Apparently some departments have to compete with other departments for money, and the GRE is how they might measure people from different disciplines. But some departments don't do it that way.

That's the general trend, but if you look at the TestMagic forums (for some reason there in particular) you get a lot of examples of non-English speakers who get 750+ verbal scores by enough brute studying. Some of them seem to go through tons... and tons... and tons of books. In my own experience, I scored around 450 on the first few practice tests (but I had learned about format and so on, and done a small amount of practice), and then after lots of studying vocabulary (several book-lists, Kaplan cards, freerice) scored 770. The verbal, like the quant, can be effectively studied for. "Academic potential" is a broad term. The GRE does measure how good how are at studying some facts, and doing *small* bits of analysis with them. But there's nothing about research ability in there, which is far more important. And if you define "Academic potential" to be mostly about research ability, a high GRE score is not necessarily a good sign. ---coda--- At best, it demonstrates your ability to jump through a silly hoop better than the other guy, and as long as they ask for it, that is what we need to do. Even after all these complaints about it, the fact of the matter is that what's best is to to do well on it.

The edit helps . So then my answer is no, because some of the most competitive programs in my field (MIT, Cornell) don't even ask for the scores. But everyone else asks for it, and we do what they tell us to...

Are you asking if they are necessary, or if they *should* be necessary? If the former, it's a simple yes/no answer based on a program's requirements.

That's interesting... I've received emails from UPenn before (like the one for the address to send your sample to) but I never got this one. The philosophy department website says that people generally have "upper 600s" in both sections but doesn't say it's a hard limit.

ah, here we go, I found it. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mooreks/graduatehelp.html Here's a relevant quote from the "two-body" section: "If you can afford it (this may cost $4000 between the two of you!), I highly recommend the "Application Blitz" method. Unexpected events happen in both directions and you are running a great risk by applying to too few schools. Think of it this way -- you could each get into 1/2 of your schools, and still have no matches."

I forget the name of it, but there's a successful psych PhD applicant who put all her information on a website. She was in the situation with a significant other also getting a PhD. The gist of the advice was to apply to way more places than you would normally apply to (which is kind of obvious), because not only do you need to get accepted, you also have this additional condition. For some reason I wanted to say ~24 is what they both applied to, and they got a few matching cities.

I lucked out on verbal and got 20 points higher than my best practice. My math was right in the middle of a range of practices. (powerprep)

You'd be fine without french in Montreal, really. Also cheap sushi *everywhere* in Vancouver!

You might want to try to get some more detailed placement information. They seem to be one of the schools that (unfortunately) just lists some schools, but they don't tell us about: - How recent grads have fared - How long it takes people to get a job - What percentage of people get an academic job http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/graduate/placement.shtml I don't have any firsthand knowledge of the program though, sorry. You might want to try the philosophy thread in livejournal's who_got_in, which seems to get more traffic.

From what people have said in this thread, it sounds like being early is generally something you don't have to worry about. However, a very few programs say on their websites that they start looking at applications early and that they do like early applications, so keep an eye open. For philosophy, I've noticed that UPenn & Arizona say this.

You might feel that you don't have room to discuss your stuff in a proper amount of depth, but remember that all the applicants to this place have a similarly small space to work with. Just do the best you can within that. My SOP limits range from 300-1000 words... I feel like I'm leaving a lot out of the 300 word one, but I just stick with what they prompt for, do that well, and hope it's what they want.

Jerrylandis: Yes, they always include this warning, but for every app I've filled out except Stanford, saving your writers' details and clicking the button to send the rec request are two separate processes (but in Stanford's app, the "save" button was also the "send" button). So my plan was generally fill out all the forms early, warn my profs at the appropriate time, and then click the "send" button. Stanford defied my plans . It's not that embarassing though, because they knew in general that this would be coming. LateAntique: Thanks, warning them to just delete emails for now seems like a good idea, if it turns out that more apps work this way. I've already done the other stuff, giving them a package and so on. Today was just sort of a shock: oh, this form actually sent something out before I paid them .

Blah, most of the systems (it seems) let you enter your letter writer info and then choose to actually send the request later, but I think Stanford just shot them off as soon as I entered their info and saved it. Beware! Just sent quick notes of apology to two of my profs, who had agreed to write me letters some time ago, but I had not warned them about the incoming email.

Just thought I'd add here that I had a bit of trouble with it, too. The only thing that worked was registration number + undergrad institution code.

We have very similar research interests. Anyways, don't give up before applying: apply, and see what happens! I've read all those blogs as well; the disclaimers get boring after a while . As for which MA programs you want to apply to: my own strategy is being very cautious, (I'm applying to around 20 total programs, PhD and MA) so I would advise that you try to find an MA with an alright placement record that's not mentioned in the MA section of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (because I'm pretty sure that all the ones you mentioned are).

I'll be waiting soon, too :S. First deadlines on Dec 1st, will be mailing it all within the first week of November. And I'll do the January applications the week after that just because my letter writers will be ready for it.

I think the trickiest thing about a lot of those programs is the funding (for internationals). Last year's who_got_in thread on livejournal seemed to indicate a bunch of Americans/Canadians getting in to the BPhil, but without funding, or very slow decisions on funding. That said, admission is probably still fairly competitive (as well).

I'm looking at MA as well as PhD programs: what do you think of 1 year MA programs? I would only do an MA if I struck out on PhDs- I want a PhD eventually. So, I would be using the MA to improve my application. But with a 1 year MA, it would seem like applying next fall would be crazy- none of the profs would know me, and I would have no MA grades yet. Thus I would do the 1 year MA, apply the next fall after completing it, leaving a gap of a year where I would need to... get a job, or something, so as not to starve. Of course, the 2 year MAs avoid this problem. Get to know people in year 1, apply for the PhDs in year 2, transition smoothly to a PhD after year 2. The one exception to this problem would be that 1 year MAs seem to frequently accept their graduates as PhD students, but then you're stuck at that institution.