dgswaim

Something to consider, just as regards time investment, is to stick mainly to more specialized journals. I don't know what your area is, but in philosophy of science, for instance, the top philosophy of science journals (e.g. Philosophy of Science, BJPS, Studies A, Synthese, etc.) are much faster than the top "generalist" journals. I have a paper under review right now that started out at Phil Sci. It was 3 weeks from editors desk, to peer review, back to editor, to rejection ("bad fit" ). But that quick turnaround is nice, especially as a grad student with limited time resources. It's back out for review at European Journal of Philosophy of Science, which should also be relatively quick.

This. I don't do phil mind, but my very strong impression when visiting was that the phil mind work that's going on there is super cool. Plus, it's all very empirically informed, and empirically informed philosophy is the best philosophy. Plus, Tony Chemero is a ridiculously nice and supportive guy, and very well respected in phil mind/psychology/cog sci circles. Also, the program has been placing very well over the last 5-6 years.

I don't think they've necessarily done this in past years.

Mathematicians are worse.

When I took visits last year the only conversations with any philosophical content were ones in which I was asking faculty/students about what they're doing. Nobody expects you to put on a show. The visits are really about trying to sell the program to you, not the other way around. Visits are (and should be) a lot of fun!

I know that they had a new hire they were executing these last few weeks. May have delayed things?

This is about the same time Penn notifications went out last year.

Yeah, I know that folks do the double PhD thing, like Massimo. For a minute I thought maybe you were getting an HPS PhD and also wanting to get a straight phil PhD, which would be novel lol.

So, are you getting a PhD and applying to get another PhD?

Sweet. Angela Potochnik is right up your alley then. She's super friendly. Skipper and Richardson too. Cincy was a tough one to turn down for me. Such a cool place! Also, definitely go to the recruitment weekend if you can. Theirs was the most fun of the ones I went to.

Really cool department. Are you a phil bio person? Your overall list suggests you might be.

I just wanted to point out that your handle is my favorite Townes song.

I've applied to UMN twice and been rejected twice. Sucks, because Alan Love is so good and works on the exact stuff I work on. It's a cool department. Hope you hear back with some good news!

Just fyi, I know someone who was admitted to Minnesota today. So folks that applied there may want to be on the lookout.

Totes Anjan. Dude is a beast.

Thanks! This is awesome. If you could get Nancy Cartwright or Bill Wimsatt on there that would be pretty sweet...

The only top 10 program I applied to was Princeton, and I'm sure I didn't even come within a whiff of getting in.

There was a chap on here during the 2014 (don't remember his handle) admissions cycle that submitted 10 applications, all to the top 10 PGR programs. He was admitted to all 10.

Sure, but this is all relative to the epistemic situation of the applicant. If I'm an applicant and I want to perform a calculation of my odds of being admitted, then it might be reasonable to make some simplifying assumptions about the process given my limited knowledge of what precisely is being considered. That said, we all certainly know enough about the admissions process in general to be reasonably certain that ceteris peribus clauses like these don't accurately capture what's happening.

I don't need to know what criteria condition the probability of admission, however labyrinthine. I merely need to know that these criteria are in play, whatever they are. This is enough to see that admissions is not like a lottery.

So you're saying I should buy lots of lottery tickets. Got it. Will do.

There are a lot of problems with thinking about "chances" in terms of raw probability calculus. For instance, a 6% admission rate does not imply that some person s has a 6/100 chance of being admitted. That would be true if admissions just involved random selections of 6 individuals from a 100 person sample space, which is not the case. S's likelihood of being admitted is conditioned by the results for applicants whose pool of applications overlap with that of s, whether or not schools divide applicants by area, whether s's advisor is taking new students, considerations of diversity and general department make-up, etc.

BOOM

Probably in several senses, but the clearest of them is that applicant pools overlap, so the probability of your being admitted to school s is conditioned on whether other students that applied to s have accepted other offers. When they do, it alters the probability of your being admitted to s.

This only holds if each trial is independent of the others, which doesn't seem likely.