SelfHatingPhilosopher

You do realize your advice regarding the WS was mentioned as one example literally minutes ago?

Dude... you didn't just say "i think" and left it at that. You fought back when literally everyone was telling you that you were wrong.

This has nothing to do with academia. It has to do with graduate admissions in philosophy specifically. For what it's worth, I have been admitted to, and am at a graduate program in philosophy, and have observed some amount of the admission process at both my undergrad and graduate university. And for what it's worth, your advice has been bad, whereas bar_scene_gambler's has not.

Is this like some new trend, or has this happened all the time in previous years?

I'm sure philosophy departments across the world then would be relieved to know how to rank applicants when so, so many of them appear to be on perfectly equal grounds.

I can't speak for all programs, but two of my letter writer's letters never showed up to one of my programs. They were kind enough to email me and let me know. Since it was at or past deadline and needed the letters stat, they said it'd be perfectly fine if my professors scanned and emailed their letters to the department. I believe GRE scores are a bit flexible depending on how the application is set up. If you have to self-report your GRE scores, then the department can go forward with that information since the likelihood of the self-reported scores being falsified is practically zero since all applicants will have to have an official report sent in eventually.

Speak for yourself. As I've said before, you can hash out the definitions all you want, but it doesn't change anything. I'm not saying effort equals quality, just like I wasn't saying all equally qualified applicants are equally successful in communicating their qualifications.

Perhaps the top two picks for me are WashU and UC Berkeley. They're prestigious programs as far as placement rankings go, which have strengths in mathematical logic and have accommodations for those with such interests. Thankfully, or not, I'm not wedded to studying under any particular professor, so I'm not exactly looking to go anywhere in particular based on that narrow of a consideration as I was when I first applied. So that affords me some relative freedom.

1) It's only erroneous if I think that if some A's are B's then all A's are all B's, which I'm not. All I'm stating is that there are enough B's out there, and you can spell out what a B is however you want (equally qualified, equally successful at communication their qualifications, equally successful at φ-ing their ψ's...), A's are B's such that there are more B's than there are admission spots, and that the difference is not a trivial amount. 2a) What's wrong with demeaning yourself? So many facts about your life are the result of you being the effective winner of some sort of game of chance. You might have been required to put in the effort, but effort can only get you so far at times. Applicants need to realize that it is an empirical fact that the applicant cycle is a crap shoot because (1) they need to realize that getting shut out doesn't necessarily mean they're not a perfectly qualified candidate, and (2) they need to realize that even if they somehow knew they were a perfectly qualified candidate, they might still get shut out, and should therefore plan and act accordingly. They need to realize this for pragmatic reasons, as well as perhaps humbling reasons. Did you make it into graduate school? Congratulations. But don't think for a second that there aren't a line of people waiting outside who are as equally qualified as you and who put in as much effort as you. 2b) It's not even demeaning though when you think about it. You put in 110% of the work. You physically couldn't do anything more. Well guess what? So did a number of other applicants. As it turns out though, you have to at a bare minimum put in a 110% of the work in order to get admitted. It's not demeaning about your work to say that it's a crap shoot, because you still had to put in a 110% of the work in the first place.

I'm not saying it's a lottery for everybody. It's a lottery for all those applicants who are equally qualified to be admitted.

Of course not everyone is doing the right thing, but just because you're doing the right thing doesn't mean you get in. Therefore, it is a lottery.

No, not at all, given how competitive it is. There's a saying, I forget if a famous philosopher actually said this or if it's just a common thing now said by professors, but: "If I were an undergraduate looking to get into graduate school now, I wouldn't have even gotten in."

The advice on this is quite disparate, and I believe this is because members on an adcom will disagree on how to value it. Some professors I have talked to said they do not care about the SOP, so for them it doesn't matter whether you do or don't. I have had other professors tell me it's important for different reasons. 1) Programs want to know you're a good fit for the program, and that you actually want to attend. For instance, NYU, Rutgers, and Colorado receive a lot of applicants. The former two for the prestige, and the latter because of it's location. They want to know you're a good fit for the program, and that you are interested and want to attend the program, and won't just sit on your acceptance waiting for a better offer from elsewhere. By pointing out the professors you'd like to work with, you demonstrate this interest. 2) Programs will sometimes admit people based on their interests and expressed interest in philosophers, and will structure their waitlists accordingly. So if you get waitlisted at a program with an interest in Philosophy of Art, and you're first on that WL, you'll only get in if their current Phil of Art admit decides to commit elsewhere. Other times, programs will be specific to the professor. If the professor is currently full up with students he's advising and planning to advise, they won't want to admit anymore students under him. On the other hand, and I've only heard this vaguely online so I don't know if anyone actually operates this way, but if you single out professors, say Professor A who works in Phil Mind instead of Professor B who also works in Phil Mind, you may risk causing offense. But this seems a bit odd, because it's probable that Professor A is doing much different work in Phil Mind than Professor B and is no judgment on their quality. Personally, I think it's a good thing to do. It's something I did, for whatever that's worth. Although what I did, was not so much a paragraph listing the professors I wanted to work with. Instead, I had a paragraph for each of my interests, and at the end I mentioned the relevant professors I'd like to work with.

Wow, that's pretty solid advice, I've never heard that before.

" Finally: writing sample. This is in the end the most important piece of your application -- IF you make the first cut." Michael Kremer, from UChicago "Once again, I'll stress that the single most important factor is the writing sample." Alastair Norcross, from Rice University "My experience is that by the final rounds of deliberation, all the other stuff has receded to the background, and the writing sample is the focus of the admissions committee members." Mark Murphy, from Georgetown University "For example, when I visited U.C. Berkeley in 1991 after having been admitted, I discussed my writing sample in detail with one member of the admissions committee, who very convincingly assured me that the committee read all plausible applicants' writing samples. She said that they were the single most important part of the application. " Eric Schwitzgebel, from UC Riverside "The writing sample is perhaps the single most important part of the application. It, almost always, is what will decide an application's fate. An application with a poor writing sample, but stellar letters and grades, will gain acceptance almost nowhere, since the poor quality of the writing tends to undermine one's confidence in the letters; but one with middling letters and and an excellent writing sample might still stand a chance." Brown University's advice to applicants "The single most important credential in your application, however, is by far and away your writing sample. The reason for this is simple: All of the other credentials included in your application provide indirect indicators of your ability to do first-rate work in philosophy; your writing sample provides direct evidence of such an ability." U Chicago's advice to applicants.

Agreed. I am just not seeing any difference between the the MA's objectivity is describing and the MA's I've experienced and heard about from others.

Yeah, just nth-ing that the WS is bay far the most important piece of your application and is in no way overestimated.

During my first round, I applied to 6 programs. 3 MA's and 3 PhD's. Only had one outright rejection, the rest were a mix of acceptances and wait lists. All of them were finely chosen. Next year, I will definitely apply to more programs, probably around 10-15. While I don't think there is necessarily an upper bound, I do think students in general apply much too broadly and apply to programs with which they have no real interest.

I reported post #5 here, from dfindley. and I mentioned in my report that his other posts should be looked at. Hopefully he'll be banned shortly. Has anyone else here attempted to have the moderators made aware of him?

I have to take issue with this characterization. First of all, I don't understand this fetishization of "places where the student's of your philosophical heroes teach." You're not studying under your actual philosophical hero, but just a student of their's, which really doesn't mean much in itself. Second, someone took a D.Phil from Oxford? We have the same. As well as people from Harvard, Michigan, MIT, and Cambridge, A professor who was once a colleague of Habermas? Okay, well I have a professor who was a direct colleague of Habermas. Another one who was a colleague with Goodman. These are professors from my own programs, and I'm sure those from other MA programs can say equivalent things. More than just that though, I'm not concerned about if my professors have some sort of Erdos-number prestige status. What I care about is that my professors are active publishers and well recognized figures, which they are. So it seems false to say that these opportunities do not exist in the States (or Canada, I'm not sure if you were including them with the States or not). Add on to this that MA programs abroad do not publish their track records for MA placement, and seem to not be in the position as Canadian and American MA programs are to fund students, I just don't see any disadvantage to applying to CA/American based MA programs which have published track records of placing students into top-20 programs. That's not to say one shouldn't apply to European MA programs. I just find your post to be misleading.

This premise is false.

I'll be fourthing the reaction against: There are more qualified students out there than there are slots, and so inevitably students will get shut out. Many are able to apply the following year with zero change in their application to the same school, and have success, merely because they had better luck in various considerations. A few comments regarding: I don't think there's much point in making a distinction between "all of the MAs available" and those that offer funding (excluding the two exceptions of Tufts and Brandeis). MA's that don't fund are more or less cash cows, and are not set up to give focus to MA students and place them well. Secondly, I don't think it's fair to characterize those with funded MAs as "the best of the best." I certainly don't like it when people characterize MA's as safety schools because I think MA's can be just as competitive as certain PhD programs, but I think going to the other extreme isn't right either. Speaking at least personally, although I think there were a number of aspects of my application that helped me stand out, I was in general, a weak application and I am very blessed to be at my MA program. I had two friends from undergrad who ended up at Top-20 universities. I don't consider an MA as something that was forced onto me. Were there not funded MA's out there, I don't know where I would be now. Probably neck deep in debt picking up a master degree in something more marketable. Instead, I am taking very minimal student loans to supplement my stipend, and considering our track record, statistically am practically guaranteed to end up at a solid if not fantastic PhD program. While I do believe undergraduate education has gone downhill, I don't believe MA's are something that have popped up in order to fix this. This would imply that PhD programs would only accept students of a certain caliber, measurable to the caliber of students 40 years past, and this seems absurd. The growth of MA's aren't a symptom of a disease, but rather the fact that there exists a demand for the function that MA's serve. My undergraduate university had a strong, funded MA program, and now I am at another strong, funded MA program, so I have had experience with two different programs. In my experience, MA programs are not the place where philosophy becomes "a rich-man's field." If anything, they help to equalize that out. As for other concerns such as: I don't really have an argument. We just have two different pictures of what philosophy is and should be. I see the professionalization of philosophy as a good thing. Philosophy, for me, is a profession. I am pursuing it as a career path. I want it to be subject to the rigor that comes with the professionalization of a subject, as it happened to science in the 1600's with the founding of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. And so I look with great fondness on the 1800's where one sees academic journals for philosophers coming into existence in Germany and England. Also: I don't quite understand the context of this complaint. What I'm doing here at my MA program is what I would be doing at a PhD program. If you have a problem with what occurs at MA programs, you're going to have problems with what occurs at PhD programs. This seems more in line with the above point against the professionalization of philosophy, and not so much with there being a problem with the growth of MA's. As for: Admission committees have remarked that there has been an increase in proportional acceptance of MA students to BA students. I can't quite see how the actual dynamics would work out such that it would eventually become required to get an MA first in America though before pursuing a PhD, because there just isn't the infrastructure set up to support this. With that said though, other countries already have this model, and we are merely becoming a bit more in line with those models. For instance, it's completely customary in Canada that one gets an MA first before going onto the PhD. And I don't believe that the state of philosophy in Canada is an intellectual wasteland or apocalyptic nightmare as suggestions here might be wanting to propose will happen.