idol.chatter

And ecologaia, I remember seeing a few posts on Craigslist advertising "country" homes that are a little bit farther out from campus.

Woot, woot! Incoming Vanderbilt student here. I just managed to finalize my housing last week. I will say I had great success on the Vanderbilt off-campus referral service, and through checking craigslist at least once or twice a day. Housing is going really fast.

Yeah!! First philosophy acceptance. MA at Miami University in OH. Wait-listed for funding, though. I've also received an offer (but with funding, thankfully), from a religious studies MA program. I finally feel I can breathe a bit easier, now that there are at least some options on the table. (And with all the chatter about MA's on here lately, I feel compelled to defend myself and say that I don't possess an undergrad degree in philosophy, so having the MA as a stepping stone is pretty necessary for me.)

Grrr. I don't know how to respond to this except to express serious frustration. I find the disdain adcoms seem to have for unknown undergrads so irritating. For those of us who didn't even know what philosophy was as a discipline before selecting an undergrad, or for the tons of students who I'm sure change majors to philosophy in their sophomore or junior year, not even being able to get out of the gate because we went to a unknown undergrad seems so - to be trite - unfair.

I second that recommendation for a Kindle Fire. I got one for Christmas and have been very pleasantly surprised by it. I bought an inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard ($30) to go with it, and I can take notes during class, read pdfs and documents just fine, and am very pleased with the abilities to take notes/search within books. I don't think it does anything related to handwriting recognition, though. :/ Oops. I just read the conversation above more closely, and it looks like doodling notes in class is very important for you. I did a brief google search, and it seems there are some apps for that which people are very pleased with, but I don't personally have any experience there regarding the Fire.

I got kind of lucky with the writing statement process. There's an organization at my school for Honors students, and I basically had one faculty member who coached me through the process. I had to apply for a big scholarship that was due in October, and I had to have a SOP ready for that. Having that earlier deadline helped force me over the hurdle and be more prepared for applications. But for me, I think the best advice is just to look around all of those websites with advice about SOP's, and collect a list of questions from them (they often have lists of questions to kickstart your inspiration, like, "Why are you interested in religious studies?"). Start just writing out the answers to those questions, and see if any themes emerge. Keep in mind if there are any of your answers that you feel are particularly good, or relevant. Then tentatively organize those ideas into a kind of outline. Once you feel pretty comfortable with the general idea of what you might like to say, just start writing. Just write at least one draft, all the way through. Don't edit it, and if it sucks, just let it suck. Then go back, pick out the parts you liked, nix the parts you didn't, and then do it again. Once you have at least one draft, the process becomes so much more manageable. Eventually, when you have a draft you think is pretty good, take it to your advisor and let them edit the hell out of it.

I hear you, respect your post, and basically agree with all of it. But I wanted to say that I personally found this whole thread to be very lighthearted and even a little sarcastic. I thought the guy who mentioned Thales was hilarious, because it's comical now to think about everything being water, but I know, in my philosophy heart of hearts, that Thales is the man. I think we could probably all agree that none of those mentioned are sincerely overrated, if for no other reason than that only 2-3 of them would even register in the consciousness of the general public, and philosophy as a discipline is losing respect because of things like that. But, when one is in the company of lots of other philosophers, most of them students immersed in the study, I don't think it's inappropriate to have a lighthearted post about who we might be up for teasing a bit. Edit: I also want to say that, as a whole, I often find it hard to figure out what tone to take in these forums. Are we all joking? Are some of us very serious? Who among us is truly an expert in graduate admissions, and has the right to take the authoritative tone many of us do? A lot of us are in pretty (dare I say) sensitive places, considering the major anxiety involved in the application process, and we might do well to read everything as charitably as possible.

I'm from a really small program, and my advisor is fluent in, and a major advocate of, Kierkegaard, and most of the other faculty in the department have a decent knowledge of him. A good friend of mine, though, is pretty much obsessed with the guy, so with every conversation comes something about him. So it's not that I have a major problem with the guy - I actually really love some of this ideas (the religious sphere concept is the bomb) - it's just that I hear about him a lot where I am.

Haha. I would accept such a challenge! I see Plantiga as the king of poor arguments from analogy. But hey, I guess when someone's grasping at straws just to prove nothing more than that theism isn't irrational, one can't expect too much...

I kind of despise Plantiga, and I find Kierkegaard to be a bit overrated.

Gotcha. It's certainly understandable, and I appreciate the advice.

Though, to be honest, I'm a little curious about the severity which with you told us not to do it. What exactly is the reason? While I get that you could still be in the running and therefore such an e-mail would be unproductive, would sending such an e-mail ruin your chances or something? Are adcoms so spiteful that they would drop you from a waiting list for being insatiably curious?

Haha. I love your formatting on the request not to e-mail them. I agree that it seems crazy, and I wasn't even really considering it, except my advisor actually suggested it to me. I was trusting, albeit hesitantly, in his recommendation.

Oh my word. The torture, indeed. I don't know if I would be able to help myself having some choice words for that unfortunate toddler.

I feel like an idiot asking this, but what's a CJA list? UVA's my top choice right now, and I'm kind of dying waiting to hear from them.

I know it's still really early in the game, but I wanted to go ahead and and ask for a heads-up regarding e-mailing a specific department to request your admission status. I'm assuming one would be doing this because they know that folks have been accepted or waitlisted, and they haven't heard anything yet. What's the protocol for this? Do I e-mail the department generally? Do I e-mail a professor with whom I had previous contact? What exactly would that e-mail say?

Hey, I know I'm a bit behind on this, but my desperation is growing and I figured I would ask - but has anyone claimed the Vanderbilt acceptances, and if so, did they say anything in the e-mail/phone call about wait lists, number of applicants, future acceptance notification, etc?

Seriously. My job from last summer picked this week to send me my last paycheck and my W2's. Two e-mails from my school saying, "You have personal mail" almost sent me in anaphylactic shock - only to disappoint.

Gahh. Just noticed there's acceptances from Vanderbilt posted. The sinking feeling in my gut is coming on. Congrats, though, to the folks who made it in.

I've got a lot of plates in the air, just in case nothing philosophy-related pans out. One option is just to get whatever job I can manage, preferably at a college or museum. Another option is to go super practical and shift to getting a basic med degree and become a medical technician. A third option is to travel, bum around on couchsurfing, and reapply next semester.

And I totally second the yoga suggestion. It's probably my favorite activity for relaxing and feeling as if everything is back in order.

Meditation is great. I'll admit that sometimes it's not exactly relaxing, but it provides a sense of... centered-ness? The goal of meditation (or at least what I've studied, which is Soto Zen meditation), is not to clear your mind of all thoughts, or think of absolute nothingness, but to observe your own thoughts without judgment or attachment. So you're not observing your "pure mind," or something impossible like that, but you're just letting thoughts come up, and then letting them go. I think of it like watching a movie reel. You have a thought, you recognize it, and then you just let it pass by. I've often heard to "just notice," if you find yourself clinging to any one idea or thing. Sometimes it's helpful to count to ten, and start over each time a new thought enters your mind - you just can't get compulsive or goal oriented about it. Is that of any help?

Kesha. I mean... Ke$ha. My bad.

I'm going to avoid this Hegel debate and remark that I'm surprise by all the mentions of Kierkegaard. I took an independent study on Kierkegaard right after my freshman year, and was basically repulsed by his uber-Christian context. Reading all of these positive responses, though, I wonder if I should give the guy another shot. (Though, to be fair, I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, and still had some serious baggage at the time of the independent study.) [Edited for the parenthetical remark above.]

Btw, that response to the Hegel commented listed above is gold.