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Is there any particular reason you think this is why you were shut out? "Connections" definitely matter in the sense that a letter writer an adcomm knows and respects will help more than someone no one has heard of. We all know adcomms apparently think it's easier to interpret a letter coming from someone famous/generally well known. A letter writer with some kind of positive personal/professional connection to a school presumably helps in the same way. But it seems pretty unlikely that all, most, or many of the schools you applied to contacted professors in your department that were not associated with your app in any way.

I really think this is a mistake. People need to consider all of the factors that will impact their ability to be happy somewhere, because unhappy students do worse work and often end up leaving without a degree. If location isn't going to have a big impact on your ability to be happy somewhere, that's great. But telling a student that taking these factors into account suggests you're not actually serious… christ.

I was only looking at acceptances, and only one person has posted stats with an acceptance so far. Good point on the wait list, though. Re: the mentally lazy bit, I've said this before, but I suspect a fair amount of the GRE boost is unconscious—super high GRE scores make adcomms think of an applicant as a "smart person," which makes them inclined to interpret the rest of the applicant's file more positively. Re: predictive power, a few studies have been done. This has a decent and short summary.

perpetuavix is right about the 12-month thing. Just to emphasize, though, "typical" condom use is what is typical for a couple that uses condoms as their primary method of birth control, not using a condom in a typical way every time you have sex—it includes sometimes not using a condom.

I only looked at Harvard, but 1/3 admitted students in the first page of results that posted scores had relatively low scores: 163V/155Q. Not saying that GRE isn't important, but there are at least some outliers.

How would having non-uniform deadlines possibly help? If B's deadline was April 15 and H's was April 20, that would just make it less likely a wait listed applicant would hear in time... Having a standard deadline doesn't solve very problem, but it seems pretty clear that it's the best option.

Harvard says they recieve "nearly 300" phil phd apps each year. I would guess they make about 10 first-round acceptances, which would put them at a 3.3% acceptance rate. Harvard med in 2012 was 3.9%. That's not much higher.

I found this paper by Thom Brooks interesting and helpful. From what he says about book reviews: Leiter (as you can see if you follow the link) doesn't think grad students should spend their time writing book reviews, but it seems like Brooks has a good point about them being a good way to start publishing and practice writing for a larger audience. (though probably not add much to your CV)

Am I right in thinking that you weren't able to study much? It can make a huge difference. I raised my quant score from a 152 when I took my first practice exam to a 170 when I actually took the GRE. I forgot basically every math formula I ever learned after high school, so on my first practice exam there were several questions I had no idea how to approach and I spent a ton of time reasoning through how to find the area of a triangle, etc. instead of being able to just spit out a formula. Brushing up on that stuff made a huge difference for me. I also found doing practice problems pretty soothing. I don't think it really took time away from doing philosophy, because it's such a different task. It often was a good break.

Keep in mind that the PGR rankings are based on faculty reputation only, and don't say anything about what it's like to be a grad student there, etc. I agree with you that the placement record does not initially look very good—there are definitely schools that place a significantly higher proportion of students directly into tenure-track positions. I'm not totally sure how to interpret the mind people going into research post docs, though.

I agree—he's only looking at leiter ranked programs there—especially for continental phil. There's a separate phil news analysis of placement for continental programs, looking at 16 leiter-unranked programs. A large number of placement for these schools was unknown, making interpretation difficult, but 48% of the known initial placements were into tenure-track positions.

I think it's premature to say that "there is no meaningful correlation between overall PGR rankings and TT placements." The phil news analysis of how well its placement rankings match the Leiter rankings seems to disagree: when he compared Leiter faculty rankings from 2002-2007 to tenure-track/permanent placement rankings from 2008-2013 (a 6 year gap to try to capture rankings of the faculties the students entered under), he found that faculty ranking could explain about 31% of the initial tenure-track/permanent placement ranking and 25% of current tt/perm placement rankings. The latter went up to 58% when he excluded 6 obvious positive outliers (schools with placement rankings significantly higher than their faculty rankings—Yale, UMass Amherst, Washington, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, and Mizzou). People have linked to Leiter's criticisms of the phil news analysis. As far as I can tell, the phil news analysis was updated in light of all of Leiter's criticisms—it now uses old rankings, as suggested, and at the bottom of the pg there's an added analysis of placement into phd departments in specific. Leiter also says the phil news analysis is not counting any american grads who got "lecturer" positions at UK schools. I'm not sure where they got that from, but the methods page does say the "tenure track" category included "permanent lecturers." Maybe this is still a problem, but it's not obvious to me that it is. One thing that does seem odd is that he has OSU with 100% of initial placements into lecturer/temporary positions from 2000-2013, while the APA's guide has them placing 4 grads into tenure track jobs from 2008-2013, so I'm not sure what's up with that. I'm not yet sure how I feel about excluding the outliers, but uh "only over 50%" is a lot. One thing that's worth noting is that 2/6 of the outliers have risen significantly in the Leiter rankings: Yale moved from an average of 22 from 2002-2008 to 7 in 2011, and Northwestern moved from an average of 50 from 2002-2008 to 31 in 2011. It makes sense that these graduates might have acquired more of that leiter "glow" as their schools moved up, affecting their current more than their initial placements.

1.) I don't see a disconnect, because the thread is what to do to relieve stress, not just what do you do to relieve stress. Which is why I read your post as a suggestion (not for alcohol, but for "other substances"). If it wasn't, I misread you. This is a stressful period in our lives. We will have many more. Like I said, coping habits are hard to break. 2.) I took us to be agreeing about alcohol as a coping strategy and disagreeing about other psychoactive drugs. 3.) There's a significant difference between using a drug as a coping strategy and using it broadly to relax. Plenty of research indicates the former is significantly more dangerous in terms of addiction. 4.) I actually did not mean that in the sense in which it is obviously and empirically false. See 2, 4.

Welcome to the forum, BBB! This seems accurate. Another thing I suspect is a significant contributing factor: people are less inclined to read women and URMs as academically competent. So a woman or URM student making a comment in an intro class is presumably less likely to be treated by their peers and instructor as though they're making an valuable contribution. Beginning students often have trouble vocalizing their thoughts. I would guess that a white male student having trouble putting a thought into words is more likely to be read as getting at an insightful point, while a woman or URM is more likely to be read as having trouble understanding the text. Pressures for women to not be confrontational make this worse. Multiple times, I've seen a woman make a critical comment about an argument, an instructor respond by explaining some part of the argument that doesn't address the criticism, and then the woman drop the point. I ended up majoring in philosophy because I liked it and because I thought I was good at it. These are interconnected: part of why I liked it, of course, was that I was treated like a participant and contributor in discussions. If women's and URMs' comments are more often being dismissed in intro classes, that's going to make the classes less fun, and is likely to make students think they're not especially good at it. I think many programs would consciously like to have more diversity and might try to give a boost to women and URMs because of that. There's also plenty of evidence that unconscious biases in hiring and admissions can have significant effects on how files are evaluated. It's hard to tell how it would even out. The link doesn't seem to be working. "Over 10%" and "below 10%" is not obviously a significant difference. There's plenty of data about how young women tend to have more polished high school records than young men—on average, they study more, get better grades, have fewer disciplinary problems, etc. In undergrad admissions, if you didn't pay attention to gender and admitted people based only on the quality of their files, you'd probably have a higher acceptance rate for women. With that in mind, I wouldn't assume a higher acceptance rate for women in grad admissions is the result of an intentional bump. In college too, women, on average, have higher GPAs and complete more credit hours. Vineyard, unfortunately, is an example of the kind of attitudes that continue to hinder progress in the discipline, and has recently been on a campaign to minimize the issues women in particular face.

Regularly using alcohol/thc/whatever to cope with stress is a great way to develop a psychological addiction. Working on some behavioral stress-management techniques will increase your ability to deal with future stressors. Using a psychoactive substance as your coping technique is likely to decrease it. I think this is worth repeating: It's hard to break habits, and it's especially hard to break coping habits. It's not worth it. (especially with alcohol, because it will kill you.)