MeonticDodals

Go to Tufts -- from people I've talked to in my PhD program, the Tufts MA is an excellent launch pad.

LogicalForm, you should be careful with 1yr graduate programs like Toronto's or St Andrews'. I think there's a tendency amongst applicants to overvalue the credential's contribution to your PhD application. The main value of such programs is to make you a better philosopher. Admissions committees will not be impressed by the fact that you graduated from Toronto's MA -- barring game-changers like the Rhodes and the like, the only thing that truly impresses ad. coms. is good work and good letters. So you should attend Toronto only if you think it will help you to produce a better writing sample and net you some nice letters. If you apply next fall, you will have had little time to fully benefit from you classes at Toronto and to form relationships with professors. So if you do opt for the MA, you should be prepared for the possibility that you'll only start your PhD in two years. EDIT: Original post was missing a few crucial words.

My institution is actively looking to recruit more female grad students, and, as such, their files tend to get more attention. I don't know whether this translates to higher acceptance rates, like what Duke's statistics indicate.

Hegel.

I would like to contrast Loric's advice with something USC DGS Mark Schroeder said on a Leiter thread awhile back (comment #56 at http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/are-some-schools-using-undisclosed-gre-cut-offs-in-admissions-decisions.html): "This year at USC we had just over 130 applications. Of those, no more than five were weak enough to be "not serious candidates". For the rest, I had to spend time reading every letter carefully, reading the personal statement and comparing to the applicant's history and record, and have two colleagues do the same, before we could judge whether the total level of promise merited further review. Since we admitted 13 this year, we needed all three rounds of review just to get to the top 10% that you assume could be skimmed to with little effort. When we say that admissions are "competitive", we mean that they are competitive - i.e., not just that there are a large number of applicants, but that decisions are very difficult and there are many excellent candidates, most of whom won't get in." I'll let you decide who's better informed: Loric or a T20 DGS.

Stockholm syndrome. Or the belief that some useful insight must have been gained from that stressful time.

My writing samples kept improving. The last one was incomparably better than the first.

I was shut out twice and now at a top-10. True story.