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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.)

Like establishment said, my main goal was to show how easily you could make the exact same argument against the acceptance thread. I wasn't actually being sarcastic (though I appreciate the attempt at charity, establishment!). A little hyperbole, sure. But I really do not see how, on the whole, announcing acceptances is genuinely helpful to anyone. I know why we like it (because we are neurotic and obsessed). In the very rare cases where admissions decisions are available on the website, it can help people find out a bit earlier than they otherwise would. It can be somewhat helpful to be able to infer that you were rejected. It also makes people think they were rejected when they weren't. It clearly creates stress. I don't think finding out you were accepted a few days before you otherwise would is an enormous help, and since it seems to be a significant source of stress, it seems unlikely that, on the whole, it's actually helpful. Which is why so many people say to avoid gradcafe... ...

Branching from try out this take arguments out of original threads thing: This is bizarre. We have a thread that's dedicated to announcing our acceptances. I don't know how that would actually be helpful to anyone, and it can obviously be upsetting. But discussing things to consider when looking at different departments is too smug and potentially harmful? Uh, ok.

Thanks for starting this thread! I've been thinking about making a post along these lines. Someone (zizek? bsg? I think it was someone with a photo of a man as their picture) posted this list of 5 things to consider as you choose from Marcus Arvan of the philosopher's cocoon. Summary: who's leaving/retiring, attrition rates, placement rates, climate (for women and minorities and more generally ex. supportiveness), and funding situation, particularly how easy it is to get funding beyond 5 years. He then says: My current thinking is along these lines. All of the departments I applied to, of course, are strong in my areas of interest. Some have more people working on the particular issues that especially interest me right now, but I'm trying not to put too much weight on that. The main thing I want is a supportive department where I can do quality work in a reasonable about of time and give myself the best possible chance of getting a job. Those things are more important to me than a perfect fit with my current interests. So placement rates and climate are major factors for me, though climate seems almost impossible to assess before visiting. A few things beyond the very obvious that I'm looking at in regard to being able to do quality work in a reasonable amount of time: How easy would it be for me to be happy here? I'm trying to factor in funding amount (w/ cost of living in mind) and location through this frame instead of looking at them independently. What would my non-research workload be like? How much would I be TA-ing? How big are the classes people TA for? (Someone in the comments of the cocoon post mentioned this as something to consider.) What would working with these undergraduates be like? (I know someone at a great program at a big state school who became pretty disillusioned about teaching. I don't really know how to weigh this.) What's the average time to completion? And what's the funding situation for people that take more than 5 years? I'm really interested in hearing what other people are thinking. This kind of discussion can be helpful because plenty of people don't realize things like average time to completion really vary between departments. It's pretty common to hear people say they wished they considered X when they were choosing. We need to decide where we're visiting very soon, and for some people that means ruling out departments. This is, of course, a great problem to have, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be in this position. But I'm not totally sure how to proceed, and discussion would be helpful for me and presumably others as well. And for people that won't be making any decisions until after visits, this still seems like a good time to start thinking about what considerations will be especially important so you can gather information, know what you want to find out at your visits, etc. I'm going to respond to Vineyard's comments in the in hopes that we can move the metadiscussion over there.

Do you think these are distinctions worth making on the survey? Or I could just distinguish between institutions that also have PhD programs and ones that don't?

I'm going to make a Survey Monkey poll, because the forum's poll options seem too limited to let us get meaningful data. I'll post it when it's done! Info needed for poll: I've seen people say they attended a "top 6" MA program, etc. What are these rankings?

I agree with this. I don't know of any fields where unfunded PhDs are normal. (Maybe engineering?) The "cheap labor" thing can't be the whole story. Say you're getting a $20,000 stipend and TAing for 2 courses each term. If your stipend was the only thing you cost the university, they'd be getting a TA for $5,000 per class. Adjuncts are generally paid around $3,000 /class, so that's already not a great deal. And then they're also paying for professors to teach graduate classes, supervise grad students, etc. Grad students might do some departmental tasks, but I can't imagine what they do outweighs the extra work involved with running a grad program. The labor grad students provide may be why schools can afford to fund them, but having a grad program won't save schools money. I want to say that academic disciplines need to fund "academic" PhDs (i.e. phds that primarily lead to academic employment, so not natural sciences, etc.) because there wouldn't be enough incentive to do them otherwise, but at this point, I think law has similar post-grad employment rates and similar average starting and mid-career salaries. Obviously employment prospects for law grads have gotten much worse recently, but I have no idea how they compared 20 years ago, etc. when academic employment was also better. And if you had to pay to get a PhD, job prospects would probably significantly improve. Like maxhgns said, I think the reasons are primarily cultural—having to do with how grad students are seen as researchers, part of the academic community, etc. I'm now really curious about the history behind this.

It wasn't! Matt is right in thinking my post was inspired by Platonist's comment. I didn't direct it at him/her in particular because other people have said similar things... Didn't mean to be passive aggressive about it. And DHumeDominates, congrats on Harvard!

I think it would be nice if we could avoid pressuring people to turn down other offers because they've been accepted by at top-10 school. Sometimes a lower ranked school can be the best choice, and it may be impossible to tell before you visit.

Just wanted to add a link to anyone reading this thread can find their way over there. I was thinking I would edit my post there to link to this thread without bumping up the old thread, but it looks like it's too late for editing, boo.

He's doing a spell. He will also need a lock of your hair and blood from a virgin bull.