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I applied to 15 schools and only sent official transcripts to 4: USC, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford (who wanted 2). Zizek's post made me paranoid as well. eta: it's interesting to me that many places are willing to accept unofficial transcripts until you're accepted, but no where accepts unofficial GRE scores. Anyone have an idea why that is?

Don't freak out! The one risk was that your file, along with the files of most applicants, would be marked incomplete in the grad admissions office before being passed to the philosophy department. The phil department wants to have some applicants, so now that they know about the issue they'll make sure that doesn't happen.

I agree with this. Like many have said, competency in second (and third) language can be a valuable research tool. But we have limited time. I don't see any reason to think it's the most valuable research tool for everyone. If you're not working with anything originally written in a different language, I think your time would likely be better spent elsewhere.

I was harassing him? It was a link to a thread about having trouble reading research papers, posted in between of snide comments toward people who think they sometimes write best by writing slowly. No one was talking about reading. I downvoted him because I thought it was pretty clear that the intention was not to be helpful. Your downvotes in this thread don't really demonstrate a commitment to only downvoting unhelpful posts. I don't care about the little jabs. What made his posts unhelpful was that he didn't listen to anything I said beyond that I didn't think his method was always best. It's too bad that an interesting topic turned into this.

I'd also be really interested to hear other people's strategies for philosophy brainstorming (or whatever you want to call it). One thing I've found that really works for me when I'm having trouble gathering my thoughts about a piece of an argument is to just read some other philosophy paper. Some random word of phrase often seems to trigger a new perspective. I often put a troublesome paper aside to do reading for another class and some vaguely related comment will make my thoughts just fall into place.

My experience is the same. The editing goes just more slowly than getting it right the first time would have. These are good points. I imagine that as we get more "fluent" with this stuff we'll be able to let it flow more. I think I do something similar to what you're talking about in your second point. I often think through technical points by writing down my first thoughts, paying close attention to the technical details but not worrying about whether the point will end up being a good one. Like you said, this helps me feel out the possibilities and I often find it easier to work out thoughts through writing. I wouldn't really be seeing the possibilities if I wasn't being careful about the technical stuff, though. edit: I wanted to add that I do a huge amount of my thinking on paper—basically whenever I'm gathering thoughts about a topic I'm writing things down. I have a terrible habit of always wanting to handwrite things. I think the slower flow helps me think things through and just feels more satisfying. I also think it's a bad habit to get into, unfortunately. I'm often reaching for paper and pencil when it would be much faster to just type the damn thing up.

I didn't say it doesn't work for me. I said it doesn't work for me for a particular kind of writing. A lot of my work is pretty technical and formal, and what works best for me there is to take my time while writing my first draft. This is the case for a number of reasons. Big ones: Mistakes here do not stick out in the way mistakes in less technical writing stick out. I find the places I'm inclined to go very slowly on are places where I do really need to tread carefully. If I just slap something on the paper, I lose these instincts. That does not help me. Do you really think mathematicians, etc. should be using the word vomit method for their papers? That would be bizarre. "Word vomit" works when you're primarily working in natural language, because your brain is very good at producing natural language quickly and without regard to detail. I don't see any reason to expect it to work when you're dealing with a lot of formalization and technical language that you're not yet completely fluent in. What I'm writing about often turns on the nuance, so not bringing it in would not work. I really don't think art historians use philosophical theory in a way that's anywhere near as technical and detail-oriented as some of the work that gets done in philosophy. That's not a bad thing, but it's a reason to be cautious about applying your experiences here. I appreciate that you're trying to help, but I really do not get why you are convinced that I must be wrong about this method not working for me when I'm doing technical writing that you (apparently) do not have experience with. Great, this method works for you. It also works for me for many types of writing, like I said. It also does not work for me for another type of writing. It also has never worked for you for that type of writing, because you don't do it.

By "letting it flow," I'm taking about the second step, "word vomit." I can't imagine anyone here tries to write philosophy without planning and structuring it first. Like I said, if I'm working on technical stuff, the "word vomit" method does not work for me. I didn't downvote you.

The phil department's website has the 2013 deadline which was the 4th, but the app is currently telling me it's due the 3rd and the grad division's site agrees. Thought I should mention this here on the off chance someone else is applying there and still hasn't gotten it in. I put it on my calendar as the 4th and was just surprised when the app told me it needed to be submitted in 10 hours. I'm sure some people won't get it in before the online app closes after being confused by the dated deadline... hopefully their apps will still be accepted.

I've read essentially no books outside of my course requirements and research projects. ("essentially" because I read a book the summer before my junior year that was not directly for anything, but I had finding a topic for my senior project in mind) We do use a lot of books in my classes, though I don't think I've ever read a philosophy book in its entirety in a class. I often read more of these books on my own. I do read a fair number of journal articles outside of my classes, though. (I also often read SEP articles for topics that are tangentially relevant to my classes) Most often, I find these articles from other articles' bibliographies, like catwoman said, or just searching for things on philpapers. I also really like the philpapers bibliographies for finding articles. It's a great way to browse if you have a general topic you're interested in but don't have a specific "conversation" you want to follow by going off a specific article's bibliography. I've never tried to do a survey of a sub-field on my own. If you want to, though, I think philhopeful's suggestion of doing the readings from the syllabi for a course you haven't taken is a great way to try to do it. My independent reading is pretty focused on my interests. I do wish there was an easy way to find exciting new articles regardless of field, but I don't know of one. Marcus Arvan at the philosopher's cocoon recently tried to get people to list what they thought were the best works of 2013 but there wasn't much participation. If anyone knows of a good resource for this I'd love to hear about it. I don't independently read things from sub-fields I'm not interested because, well, I'm not interested in them. (I'll sometimes read SEP articles for things that don't initially appeal to me to see what they're about, but that's really it.) There's only so much time in a day, and there's so much stuff I want to read that I am really interested in. As an undergrad, my independent reading has focused on getting more depth rather than breadth. I don't think this is a bad thing. Undergrad courses often give you a lot of breadth at the expense of depth. I think it helps me that I've always read a ton of shit all the time. Like non-philosophy stuff. When I'm not working, I'm usually reading online... long-form articles, blogs, etc. I've also been reading more non-phil books lately to get away from my computer. I think this is useful for two reasons. 1, reading philosophy exclusively can push me into always reading in a very detail-oriented way, very slowly and carefully. Reading long articles about light topics keeps up your quick reading skills, and sometimes you need to be able to skim. 2, philosophers are unfortunately not always the best writers. I think stepping away from that and reading really well-written literature helps with my writing, but who knows.

I agree with Matt. It varies a lot based on what I'm writing. I've found the typical writing advice people give—"writing first, edit later," "just let it flow, worry about word choice later," "get your thoughts on paper as quickly as possible and then edit"—useful when I'm writing something like a personal statement or a non-technical bit of a paper. If it's something really technical that I'm not totally confident about, though, trying to let it flow would just give me junk. There's often not really much of an"it" to flow at that point. The reason writing these things takes me so long is because I do a lot of thinking & figuring things out while I'm doing it, and that works for me. Like you, I felt like writing came easier when I was younger. I think that's largely because I was less aware of all the nuance I now need to hold onto. As I get more and more experience, I expect it to feel easier again. I think this is just an awkward point in our philosophy-writing lives: we're aware of many details we used to be oblivious to, but not completely comfortable with them yet.

You don't really need to "learn a language", though, in that for most requirements you don't need to be a proficient speaker or listener—you need to learn to translate. Still not a small commitment, of course, but significantly less. The language requirement has basically disappeared from the physical sciences, hasn't it? I would guess analytic philosophy will go the same way for the same reasons. A larger amount of continental work is still being produced in other languages, though, isn't it?

For my "subjects," I listed my phil and phil-relevant courses. Included the main books we used for all of the courses listed, because who knows. Maybe they want you to list all of your courses and only include texts for the philosophy & phil-relevant ones? It's a mystery to me.

Took me approx. 5 years to fill out. "Applicants to the Philosophy Program are required to list only relevant texts and authors in this section" What does that even mean?

Would you/did you actually include your savings information?

Another option would be to instead say something like "I'm very interested in X's research in blahblahblah."

To move this away from speculation about how similar expectations in various fields are: I spoke with two professors at my school that are regularly on its admissions committee about this. Both indicated they did not think it was particularly important to email people whose work you mention you are interested in it. And there are definitely times when it is genuinely too late to do it, ex. the night before the deadline. Deliberate, I would try to not mention only older professors (really probably not more than one per school). And I would frame it as "I am especially interested in X's work in Y" instead of "I want X to be my advisor."

There are few topics where there are genuinely no women doing any relevant work. There are very many topics where women's work is less widely known and acknowledged, but that's different. It's true that these are very standard definitions in academia. It's also true that ordinary uses of the terms do not involve a power requirement—I think the definitions you'd see in an average dictionary, something like "prejudice or discrimination based on race/gender; belief that certain traits are primarily determined by race/gender" are very close to how laypeople actually use the terms (use that predates the academic precisifications, but that's not enormously important). Saying things like "It's not sexist, sexism requires power" is not helpful, because there is a correct, genuine sense of 'sexism' on which it does not require power—the ordinary one. Saying something like "I prefer to use a technical sense of 'sexism' on which..." would make what's going on more transparent, but I suspect transparency is not actually the goal here. I'm really not involved enough in the area to know what rationale is given for defining 'sexism' and 'racism' in a technical way to refer to a subset of what falls under the ordinary senses of the terms. Maybe there's a good one. In casual discussion, though, it seems primarily used to treat people who disagree as though they're making a mistake. On BSG's original comment, though, I don't think using 'she' exclusively for gender-irrelevant examples in philosophy is sexist under the looser sense of the term either. Think about the reasons not to use 'he' exclusively. Which of those apply to using 'she' exclusively?

A 10 page limit would definitely be exceptionally short. A 10 page sample would probably be unusually short for most programs.

Two professors specifically told me to include an abstract in my writing sample. You just want to make the work you do in your sample obvious as quickly as possible, and an abstract helps do that. (& I agree with the preference for footnotes over endnotes as a reader. I almost always at least glance at footnotes, but I usually only look at endnotes if I have some question)

I found this somewhat helpful.

Thanks! The rest of my application is (I think and hope) fairly solid, though very far from perfect. I'll send you a message with more details... totally fine with sharing, but a little wary of it being public.

170V/170Q. I should have noted, though, that in 4 hrs a week x 2.5 months I'm including the class I took, which was 2.5 hrs/week for 8 weeks. So, on average, 1.5 hrs of studying time per week outside of my class. Like I said, I don't think the class was a great use of my time. I probably could have covered the same amount of material, without the hand holding, in about an hour on my own. So to cover the same material without the class, I would have studied for about 2.5 hrs/week for 2 months. In the weeks before and after my class I took a practice test. I don't really think it was is an enormous amount of studying. I really needed to review and practice the math especially. ex. before I started studying, I was not 100% sure about how to find the circumference of a circle, had no idea what negative exponents did, etc.

Yeah... Dfindley, unless you've contacted the programs you're applying to and they've agreed to look at an application with only one letter, you need to have the required amount. Not because they'll hold it against you otherwise, but because your file will be incomplete and they will just not look at it. If you absolutely cannot get any more philosophy professors to write letters for you, ask other professors. If you don't have any professors at all that will, ask employers, high school teachers, whatever. The content of a letter from a non-professor is not going to help you, but the existence of the letter will at least prevent your file from being thrown out as incomplete.