Table
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As one of my undergrad professors once told me, if you are not willing to take an offer somewhere because of the location and other such 'social life' issues, then it would seem that you are not actually serious about pursuing the PhD.
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.
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I suppose that's somewhat low..(still above 90% in verbal)...but that's was one person from last year nonetheless. All the posts from this year for Harvard (even the wait-list) were perfect 170 in verbal.
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.
Worse yet, it's at best unclear whether it's predictive of success at the graduate level. Eric Schwitzgebel has some data pointing to the success of V-scores at predicting GPA in grad courses, but there's an issue with sample size (37) among other worries (http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.ca/2012/02/surprising-and-disappointing-predictors.html). To my knowledge, that's the closest anyone's gotten to making a positive case for the predictive power of the GRE. Given all this readily available information, reliance on the GRE scores by adcoms is mentally lazy at best. One could also probably make a good case for connecting the discipline's diversity problem to such attitudes. Trained philosophers should really know better.
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.
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This is probably what solves the problem.
I'm surprised I got such insightful comments haha
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.
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2) Acceptance results posted on grad cafe. It's truly disgusting how many perfect 170s and 169s get offers from the top 15 PGR schools. One possible explanation is that the best students happen to have the best GRE scores. (Ask yourself if you truly believe that!) Even if this were true, however, you would still see at least a couple outliers - but there are none to be found.
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.
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April 15 is absolutely ridiculous. Suppose a person received an acceptance offer from a bottom-ranked program B, but wait listed at a very-high-ranked program H, both of which set the deadline for their offers for April 15. Suppose the person has to accept or deny B's offer on April 15 when she does not hear from H. The most rational choice is to accept B's offer. But it turns out that she received an acceptance off the wait list at H after April 15, which she had to painfully deny because she was stuck with B. So April 15 is so ridiculous. This is partly because it is the standard deadline and almost every school follows it. If programs do not adopt a uniform deadline, the April 15 disaster would be avoided.
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.
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Well...I wouldn't say that's any different than Phil, except the fact that we have one MA program that consistently places its kids top-10...Acceptance rates for Harvard M.D. and Harvard J.D. are much, much higher (around double) than Harvard PhD in Philosophy, this was posted a couple years back and remains true.
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.
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I found this paper by Thom Brooks interesting and helpful. From what he says about book reviews:
While the premier journals tend to prefer established academics, I do not know of a second or third level journal that had a problem with postgraduate reviewers. If you want to get your first publication (and a free book!), become a book reviewer today.
Becoming a reviewer is a piece of cake. Type up a letter (email is also fine) that introduces yourself as someone who is a postgraduate working in a general field on a particular topic, offering to review a book for the said journal. That’s it. Eighty percent of the time or better you will receive a positive response.
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Book reviews are a simple way (in one thousand words or less) of trying out a new style of presenting your ideas on your field that is invaluable. Once you gain a feel for writing for a general audience in this way, writing acceptable articles becomes a far more easier task.
There are a few more things that can be said about book reviews. Perhaps the best thing about them is that they offer a crucial glimpse at the world of publishing.
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)
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(1) I took the GRE my final semester, while polishing my writing sample, assembling my applications, and dealing with regular courses.
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(3) I haven't taken a math course since community college, which was nearly three years ago.
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.
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I'm trying to evaluate how good CUNY's placement data is
I feel like my intuitions aren't very well calibrated with this issue. The CUNY Graduate Center is ranked #14 on Gourmet and has excellent professors (especially in logic), but it doesn't seem to have a very good placement record to me.
Does its ranking reflect some future expectation of things getting better? Can other people tell me what they would think of job prospects of going to this school?
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.
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I am not sure if this proves that non-ranked departments will be detrimental in your chances of getting a TT position.
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.
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Like perpetuavix made clear, there is no meaningful correlation between overall PGR rankings and TT placements (the Rsquared values of a linear regression is .17-.18). This statistics already account for the time interval between the year of the ranking and the year the students enter the job market. While some have correctly argued that other positions (post-doc, adjunct, lecturer) should also be accounted for, I believe that most of us are shooting for TT positions (at least that was the main argument in favor of following the PGR rankings in the first place).
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Finally, I would like to share again the link that Monadology posted in a different thread.
I am not sure what the criticisms of this study are, so I would love to hear about them. I find it really usuful, if not a little deceiving because programs like Penn State get a .96 ratio of current TT positions because the data is drawn from a "summary of placements", which most probably excludes those who were unable to secure such positions. That said, the study shows that a lot of SPEPy departments have healthy placement records (e.g. Boston College has 82%, Stony Brook 75% and Villanova 71% TT placement record with all their data available for the study)
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.
After reading that link, all I can say is that, PGR rankings only account for over 50%. And that only if we choose to take out the 6 outliers. Now, taking 6 statistics out of a data set of 50 is a very objectionable choice.
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.
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1.) I didn't suggest alcohol was a solution to everyday stress - we're talking about a particular event that is far more stressful than most people experience in the normal lives (and I actually didn't suggest alcohol at all, I was just pointing out a disconnect between what people actually do and what was being reported in this thread). Obviously, turning to any potentially addictive and harmful substance as your primary means of dealing with stress is dangerous - I assumed this went without saying among people well-educated enough to be applying to graduate school.
2.) I myself cautioned against overuse and suggested an alternative, so why respond as if I said "Just drink all your problems away" ?
3.) If you use a sedative-hypnotic drug (eg alcohol), it's a bit silly to pretend that you don't use it to achieve it's primary effect (relaxation).
4.) A blanket statement like "alcohol will kill you" is obviously and empirically false, and smacks of puritanical moralizing.
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.
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Welcome to the forum, BBB!
I think you're onto it, Monadology. For example part of it, also, I think has to do with it gendered and racialized social expectations for behavior. Women are faced with a social double bind: participate in a confrontation (at the risk of being seen as more confrontational than a similarly behaving man would be seen, because women are expected to be nonconfrontational), or refuse to participate (at the rick of being seen as meek, stupid, overly modest, not a philosopher, or as a spoil-sport). In either case, there's no solution that will allow her to behave in a socially acceptable manner.
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.
Further, are female applicants at an advantage as URMs? Some of the programs I researched had a lot of material and resources for diversity initiatives/student life support, but many universities had nothing about diversity at all, which gave me pause.
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.
At the couple schools I have seen that post these kinds of statistics, minorities (including women) are accepted at a significantly higher rate than average. Take Duke for example http://gradschool.duke.edu/about/statistics/admitphl.html . Women always over a 10% acceptance rate, white men from America are always below 10%.
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.
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Either we've got a forum full of teetotalers or people aren't being forthcoming. Alcohol is remarkably anxiety-reducing, but for health reasons this shouldn't be your primary technique given how long the waiting season is. Other substances can be equally effective.
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 good to practice good habits now, because it only gets harder from here.
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.)
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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...
You don't understand how saying, "Hey, I checked the website, decisions for XU are up!" might be helpful for an applicant that needs to make a decision?
There is no obligation to make any decisions for a month and a half
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Branching from try out this take arguments out of original threads thing:
This seems like a thread where people who have gotten accepted to multiple schools can brag about how "tough it must be" to choose between them. Woe is me! As much as I'd like to join in the fun and namedrop my schools, this thread will help nobody, and will instead make those who haven't been accepted feel bad.
TL;DR: No need for the humblebrag.
This thread cannot possibly be helpful to anyone, but will just serve as another circlejerk for those of us lucky enough to have multiple acceptances under the belt. As much as I love circlejerks...I just can't see this being helpful, but I can see it being harmful.
When I see something potentially harmful to applicants already in a rut, and at the same time the thing offers nothing helpful, I feel obligated to say something about it.
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?
You obviously know the various sorts of considerations that people make when they choose a school (you listed them), so figure out for yourself how they work.
Here's what might be helpful: A list of possible considerations that people might make.
Uh, ok.
- Griswald and Mavngoose1
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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:
You might have noticed some things I didn't mention, such as: "Go to the program that has the faculty member(s) you would most want to work with", or "Prioritize programs that are really the best in your area of concentration." I did not mention these things because, frankly, I do not think they are that important. Okay, they are sort of important -- and may be more important to some people than others -- but I would like to suggest not underestimating how much your interests can change in grad school.
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.
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I've seen that mentioned by Ian, I suppose he means those mentioned in the first category here: "After Tufts, several other terminal MA programs have very strong faculties: Arizona State University, Brandeis University (their M.A. program is relatively new, so has a limited placement ecord), Georgia State University, Northern Illinois University, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Virginia Poytechnic Institute & State University"
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?
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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?
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This varies by institution type, but I can think of quite a few fields where full funding is the norm at reputable PhD programs: history, English, classics, modern foreign languages, and science disciplines as well. MA funding for the humanities fields I'm familiar with tends to be more hit and miss. So philosophy is really pretty comparable to other humanities fields in terms of funding, at least in my experience.
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.
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Not sure if these remarks are directed at my last comment. But to clarify, I was wondering what MattDest is doing in light of the fact that he's already accepted Arizona's offer. It's likely that I'll be in a similar situation soon and I was just wondering how he's handling it. I agree that we should avoid pressuring people to turn down offers.
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!
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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.
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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.
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Can I ask why you'd want to know?
He's doing a spell. He will also need a lock of your hair and blood from a virgin bull.
Dear 2015 applicants, here is what we have learned from the 2014 season
in Philosophy
Posted
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.