sleepingdogmatist

Public, texcards, and ielah--thanks a ton for your advice. The word on restaurants and grocery bills is a big help, honestly. Although I've become a bit soured on roommates during undergrad, I might give it a shot again and see what happens. I don't have any outstanding debt at this point, but that's also at the expense of not having a car. If I end up in CS, then I'll probably try not having a car for a year, and then buy one if I find I really need it. And the bus is free? Aces.

I've received a PhD offer from Texas A&M with tuition plus a $13k stipend per year for six years (yeah, as you can probably guess, it's in the humanities). Though I understand that College Station's cost of living is well below the national average, I'm not sold on the idea of being able to live comfortably on that amount of money. I think it's probably an extremely bad career move for me to attempt to work at all during my time as a graduate student--including the summers, as this is when I'm planning on trying to do intensive language study, etc.--so I don't think there would be much of any supplementary income I could add on. Could one make this amount of money work without loans? Would I be miserably poor? What are grocery prices like? How much is the typical bill in a decent restaurant? I'm single (and not a parent), so the money is just going toward my own expenses.. well, except for my dog. Speaking of which, are there any dog parks in town? If any of this stuff is already covered, my bad.. I didn't see it.

Yeah, I also just got my PhD rejection from BC in the mail, and it included an unfunded offer from the MA program. I intend to decline it in the near future, if that helps anyone that might be on a waiting list or something (I don't know if it works that way at BC).

Revised: there's a BC acceptance posted for someone on the results board. He or she received a phone call from Patrick Byrne, according to the post. I don't see anything about a decision letter on my Agora status, but then my last name is also in the latter part of the alphabet, too, so that could be it. I've heard nothing either way thus far, but am not optimistic.

Yeah, I hear you. My interests are sort of varied, and I ended up applying to lots of phil. programs (mostly continentally-focused places) and some rhetoric/interdisciplinary programs.

Very cool--both of them sound interesting. I remember looking at things from Kearney a bit when I was investigating the department a few months ago. Though I do have a fairly heavy interest in philosophy of religion, my interests have reoriented a little bit over the past year as I've had time to think and read more. Several of my professors in undergrad were students of John Sallis at one point or another, and I got really turned on to his work on Nietzsche and tragedy (Crossings is a very cool book, if you haven't read it) through them. David Rasmussen's earlier work on myth is also really interesting to me. I'm going for a kind of philosophy of literature bent there, I suppose. Although all my recommendations are from people with some kind of BC connections (and specifically with those two faculty members, actually) and my GPA/GREs should be reasonably competitive, I don't think that I'll be a serious contender because of my lack of relevant language experience. That's at least a good start, what with their enthusiasm. Best of luck! It'd be an amazing place to study--having the opportunity to study with so many eminent scholars would be surreal. Where else are you applying, if I can ask?

I have an application in there. It's definitely one of my "reach" schools (although I think it's a reach for pretty much anyone at a 1.9% acceptance rate). Who are you applying to study with?

One would really think that if you pay $20 for somebody to mail a single sheet of paper to someone--and over the course of about 3 weeks--that they'd do it correctly and without issue. I haven't had any ETS snafus (yet), but I would be furious if I did given how much the entire thing costs. Not that it's particularly relevant to this discussion, but I've spent $300 on GRE score reports alone for my applications this year.

I ended up writing about Spinoza and Zen Buddhism at length in mine (I believe the question was something along the lines of "Do you believe it is necessary to understand the past to know how to act in the future?"), and received a 6. My verbal score was a 700, and I come from a medium-sized and relatively unknown state school with a predominantly continental department.

I've been reading articles from faculty members at Vanderbilt, and I'm really liking what I'm reading. One of my undergrad professors advised me that my GRE numbers (700V - 97%, 6.0AW - 96%) might only be enough to get my application looked at but not seriously considered. I've got a pile of good references, a 3.93 GPA (although from a smaller state school, Marshall U.), an article getting published, several conferences on my CV, and a few awards for writing outside of my university. Any folks in the know with Vanderbilt that might be able to apprise me of my chances? I'm seriously considering trying to do work with Wittgenstein and philosophy of religion with the chair, Dr. Michael Hodges. Any help or information would be greatly appreciated, especially info on what kinds of scores philosophy folks at Vandy have.

Further editing.

Also redacted.

Just got word back from the DGS at Houston, and I was right -- no funding or tuition whatsoever. Looks like I get a year to think about things.

Redacted.

Moral of the story for what used to be here: getting into a philosophy PhD program is hard. Oh, and the "problem" didn't lie in the samples (I submitted one of the same ones this year with little revision), the letters of rec., or anything like that. This year, I applied to a broader range of programs and worked for a few months on making everything shiny. I currently have one funded PhD offer from a good program, waitlists at two other PhD programs (one of which is arguably the very best in its area), three funded MA offers, and I still have a few programs to hear from yet. In my opinion, the thing that probably made the most difference this time was luck, followed kind of distantly by fit and a somewhat more focused purpose statement.