dgswaim

WashU would be nice... I mean, assuming they'd admit me, of course

Slow day so far........ Calm before the storm, or just a slow day? Bets? Anyone?

I just received a very positive post-interview email from the director of the program. Not an acceptance at this point, but prospects are good.

have to say, based on the interview, if I got into ASU HPS, I'd probably take my name off of the Indiana HPS waiting list. They seem to mirror my interests and general academic attitude more closely. So root for me to get into ASU, Indiana wait-listees!!!

Went well, I think. Was quite a loooong interview, which is hopefully a good sign. They still have more interviews to do. Hopefully I'll hear back soon.

T minus 25 minutes to my ASU HPS interview. Ahhh!!!!!!!

Feelin' like UC Davis is a borderline presumed rejection at this point.

Crud. Nothing here... one of my top-ish choices...

I would have used a thesis chapter, but I only had one chapter complete and it's 32 pages long, and I didn't like the idea of breaking it up. I went with a paper on models and the intersection of pragmatism and realism in their deployment.

I'm starting to wish I'd selected a different writing sample for Indiana HPS. I decided to use the same paper for all my apps, which is not very historical in character.

Nice. Congrats! I know a guy there, and he seems to be enjoying his time in the department.

This just reminded me that I'm waaaayyy behind on grading. Fuck.

Really hoping to see some news out of Wisconsin and Minnesota this coming week (Wisconsin, especially).

Just landed a Skype interview with Arizona State HPS. Will be with Richard Creath and Beckett Sterner. I'm excited and nervous. Hopefully I do better than I did in my interview with Notre Dame HPS!

Congrats to all the Chicago acceptances!!

"Penalty drinks"? I call those "rewards."

I don't take Adrian Moore's definition to be very helpful. It just happens that I took a seminar in metaphysics that used his book. I think he means that metaphysicians want to know how the world "hangs together" in the most general sense. There's some sense to that, but it's pretty vague (His expertise is actually Wittgenstein, and his bias toward language really shines through in his approach to metaphysics). My thesis research has to do with the metaphysical foundations of evolutionary biology. More specifically, I'm arguing that we need a metaphysically realist interpretation of dispositions in order to make any good sense of fitness and evolvability. I'm also arguing that one of the "hot" views (Ontic Structural Realism) in the metaphysics of sciencedoesn't make any sense in biological contexts. Instead, we need a metaphysical view that supports a disunified ontology, a la the Stanford School (Cartwright, Dupre, Galison), and dispositional realism (a la Anjan Chakravartty) does just the trick.

Per Adrian Moore: Metaphysicians are undertaking the task of making the most general attempts at making sense of things. My own metaphysical ambitions are somewhat narrower: I want to know how much metaphysics is necessary for making sense of the success of science.

Pretend to write my MA thesis. Pretend to teach. Drink a lot. Work out. Also, be a parent to my 9 month old daughter (usually).

I hasten to add that she said there are people ahead of me, but she did not say how many. She did say that people from approx. my rank have been admitted before... so that's coolish, I guess.

At this point the only open applications that I would choose over Indiana, were I accepted, are Princeton and Penn. Or, I should say that those are the only two I have left that I can say definitively that I would choose them over Indiana. Some of the others are closer calls. But, I'm very sure I won't get into Princeton. That was my YOLO application.

I had a brief email exchange with the DGS, and she seemed to indicate that they indeed have not accepted anyone yet. She said that they had identified a "pool of applicants" that they deemed fit for their program, and that the waiting list consists of all and only such applicants, but that it's unclear how many will be admitted at this point (because da monies).

I dunno. Any claim one might make as to its legitimacy seems underdetermined by the evidence. Anyway, g'night forum. May we all wake up tomorrow morning with many acceptances awaiting us in our email inboxes, and may they all be well-funded and each of them from the respective hopeful's top-choice programs.

Noyce.

Why can't like, all of them just post results like, now? Right now. This very instant. Don't they understand that our generation has problems with delayed gratification?