Establishment

Milwaukee's placement is up: http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/philosophy/graduate/placement.cfm

That was last year before they got audited by the university.

I believe they're at the philosophy department in Tempe, Arizona, where they're handling offers.

Sounds like it's time to dive into some mathematical logic, explore the areas of set theory, model theory, recursion theory, and proof theory. For the latter, you can get a nice historical introduction by the classics. Pick up the Collected Papers of Gentzen and read his dissertation, Investigations into Logical Deduction, and his later papers The Consistency of Elementary Number Theory, New Version of the Consistency Proof for Elementary Number Theory, and Provability and Nonprovability of Restricted Transfinite Induction in Elementary Number Theory. This will introduce you to some aspects of proof theory. Some of it may require some prerequisite knowledge of set theory, particularly of ordinals. But you'll be able to branch off from here into the different areas that interest you. For the other areas, I recommend looking at: http://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/ for recommendations. (I'm not deep enough into the other areas to have my own opinions on which materials I prefer over the others.) EDIT: It also depends on what you mean by first-order logic. If you've just done propositional logic and then extended to predicate logic, you'll want to check out some of the "Big Books of Mathematical Logic" listed on that above link. You'll want to explore some of the big meta-logical results of the past century. Completeness, soundness, compactness, etc. I prefer van Dalen's Logic and Structure by a lot, but the main classics seem to be either Mendelson, Kleene, or Boolos and Jeffrey.

I've added a few of y'all on Facebook already. Feel free to PM me if anyone else is interested. I'll still be sticking around though, giving out my worthless advice for next season's applicants as well as venting my own frustrations as I go through the application cycle again. Congrats to all of you who had success this year, and many best wishes for you as you move onto the next stage in your careers as well as for all you others who are either moving onto a different career path or will be trying again next time.

Are you the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?

Woohoo! Congrats!

I've seen the "systems" mentality advocated by literally everyone as the source of their success, from people like Sellars to bloggers on Philosopher's Cocoon. So, yeah. Very good advice there.

I kept a running list of where I wanted to apply since day 1 of entering the program, and adding and taking away from it as I'd randomly look at programs and re-examine programs. As for sample, I knew going in I wanted my sample to be in a particular area, so I continued to do some reading and work in that area on my own throughout my first fall and spring semester. None of my seminar papers are in this area, so I plan on, once finishing with this semester, putting together a writing sample and getting feedback on it over the summer.

Oh. It's not the latter, so I imagine, though I could be wrong, it would depend on the phrasing of your email on whether you were waitlisted for admissions or for funding.

The website tells you how much they fund.

Sounds like someone should send a thank you card to zblaesi

This is exactly why I'm taking the LSAT this fall, in case my own PhD applications from my MA go south. Of course, it can do wonders just to apply the next year; but best of luck to you either way, I wish you the most success--you deserve it.

Just to give you a way to see this stuff relative to the courses you've taken already: from my experience at taking graduate courses at my undergrad university which was MA/PhD and graduate courses at my current terminal MA program... the former courses tend to be good because they are strictly limited to graduate students (or at least undergrads need permission to enter). The latter come in two types. Most terminal MA programs I've seen allow open registration into their MA courses by undergrads. These courses tend to be a bit weak. Sure, the assignments are larger for graduate students, but the reading is the same material. Some MA's have some upper division graduate courses that are more or less off limits to undergrads, and these will be closer to the foremost described courses.

Yeah, (2) is probably the most important, deciding factor. Forget the general placement records and the PGR ranking. Look at potential advisers and compare their placements.

From what I could tell, only (4) and (7) were the real negative's about Texas. And regarding (7), although I have heard of Madison's great placement record, insofar as the link you posted is concerned, UT is only a few spots below Madison. So it doesn't seem to me that UW has a distinct advantage. It looks to me, from your perspective, that the benefits of UT are greater than the benefits of UW. My intuition is to say UT, but this is definitely a complicated and important decision to think about carefully for your own self.

Just a note: PhD programs aren't out to fuck you over. Let UW-M know your status, that you'd like to accept, but that you'd like to withdraw your acceptance (whatever the university procedure for that is) if you do find yourself admitted to UT in the next day or so.

Remember to wave this in Virginia Tech's face and tell them to suck it.

I don't get existentialism either. A bunch of hogwash if you ask me. But Kierkegaard is exactly my kind of heroin.

In the wise words of Kierkegaard qua Johannes Climacus, In any case, I'm not sure who Wait For It...'s post was directed at, but just to explain myself: I grew up in Texas and so I'm rather familiar with Southern Baptists, and I've had some interaction with Baylor's PhD program. I'd frankly be surprised to see Baylor's program make it into the top-50, but I'm willing to stand corrected if the time comes. But that's neither here nor there. I just wanted to clarify. I'm not religion-bashing, or bashing religiously inclined individuals. I'd be in an awful predicament, as someone with a faith, to do so. What I am doing however, is having some fun at the expense of the Baptists; for hopefully obvious reasons, much as I'd poke fun at Intelligent Design advocates without any concern for presenting "professional arguments." So, my apologies to stressedout, who is apparently still rustled from the other thread. Which by the way, is terrifying to read. Intelligent Design (as a self-purported evidence-based scientific theory) is uncontroversially laughable, and the suggestion that one must "reckon with the work of ID theorists" just baffles me.

Why should women be ordained or be professors when God and Jesus themselves are men? Checkmate, women.

So take any school. They have x amount of spots per year to fill, and will send out an initial round of x admittances and waitlist a number of others. They'll naturally receive rejections by admitted students before April 15 as those students find out they've been admitted to their high pick schools. Usually by the time April 15th will come around, a number of schools will still be looking to fill all their spots. So let's say this year some school funds eight students, and have only had four people accept by the morning of April 15th. So they send out emails to the next four people on the waitlist at 10 AM, informing them that they've been admitted. Emails will come in through the rest of the day, as students find the time to check and reply back in their emails during breaks in class on Tuesday or once they're done for the day. Let's say then that two of those four students accept. The school still has two funded slots to fill. So, that evening on Tuesday or Wednesday morning, they'll send out emails to the next two students on the waitlist informing them that they've been accepted. Same thing happens. One accepts. The other doesn't. Emails don't come in until later that day on the 16th. So the school then sends out an email to the next student on the waitlist either late on the 16th or early on the 17th. All this is illustrating is the natural lag there is in moving down a waitlist. I've even seen students be informed that they've been admitted off the waitlist in May or later, although this isn't because of the natural lag in moving down a waitlist as detailed above, but because someone who had accepted has pulled out for one reason or another. edit: yeah, what humean_skeptic said.

On the 15th or later as decisions come in.

Vineyard has a point. It's possible to interpret their reaction's as a sign that they're not interested in you.

I kind of want to disagree with aduh. Although it's not that taking classes with certain professors will get you into a good PhD program, but it is definitely the case that working under the guidance of certain professors will. I don't know if GSU lists this information online, so you may have to wait until you're on campus and dig through the thesis archives (if GSU students do a thesis) and try to correlate placement with advisors and committees. One of the biggest mistakes I committed at my undergraduate university was not identifying the professors who were well known. Professors are well known for a reason, they produce good work. So not only will their letter count for something, but most importantly they'll be able to critique your work. I instead worked with professors who weren't well known, weren't producing good work, and therefore weren't able to help me improve my writing. This is absolutely advice that people are given when entering PhD programs. That prospective students should look at the placement records of individual professors rather than of just the PhD program in general. I don't see why the same advice doesn't apply for MA and BA programs in principle, even though it may not be as important or necessary to do so.