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turambar85

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Everything posted by turambar85

  1. Thanks! I've been a wreck since the status checker went to "Decision Made" on Saturday morning. I have been checking at least 15-20 times per hour. The best part of admission might not be that I get to continue on in philosophy, but that I get to free myself from neurotic e-mail and status checking!
  2. Family health issues. UTK was really the only option I had, then. So it was fortunate that they have not only improved so much over the past few years, but that I got in.
  3. I was just offered admission by the University of Tennessee! It was my only application, so I will (assuming there is funding involved) be accepting. I haven't received a departmental e-mail yet, but found the "decision letter" on the application page. This is a huge weight off of my shoulders. Admission cycles with one application are soooo much more stressful!
  4. Well, I think that they are referring to fellowships. Not every program puts as much emphasis on the cheap, TA labor.
  5. It's your signature. You can edit it on your profile page.
  6. Do we only have one known rejection from the University of Tennessee? And has anybody claimed it?
  7. turambar85

    Seattle, WA

    Seattle is decently pet friendly, but not as much as you would hope (or expect, given the tendencies of the city itself). You will find a solid number of apartment complexes that are reasonably "pet friendly", but you will have better luck sticking to condos. My partner and I have lived in three buildings since moving here in 2011, and two of those have been condos (for the pet reason alone).
  8. Yeah, partly I was just curious but I also was hoping that this could develop into something that helped future students craft a better list based on the failures of their predecessors. My failure (the first time) was not realizing what a "good" school or a "safety net" actually meant, relative to me and my abilities. I ended up getting lucky and getting a few acceptances, and one with funding (UW), but it could have easily gone a different direction. Students get obsessed (I did) with the PGR, and the top 50 schools, and end up building a list that it unrealistic and that may not even be best for them anyway. It's a shame really. We spend countless hours fretting over admissions, crafting a personal statement, revising a writing sample, etc. But, when it comes to deciding which schools to put on the list, I think that most of us (myself included, again) don't spend enough time "shopping around". We miss out on some real gems that way, and end up with stressful cycles full of rejections.
  9. I know that I'm not Green, but I thought I'd share my experience. My mentor had a large role in my choices in schools. He actually came up with a list himself, broken down into the different categories. I ended up changing much of his list - it was WAY too optimistic. It's a good thing I did, too, or I would be doing something else right now.
  10. There is some work being done on him...but I meant more "philosophy in general" and then "political philosophy". And, even in modern, it isn't anything like Kant. And, even the popularity that Spinoza does have is more about his M & E anyway.
  11. What did you see as a good breakdown of reach, good-shot, and safety net schools? And what (assumed) odds of admission did you have in mind when determining where schools went on that list? My first time around, I probably had (what I thought was) 2 complete reaches, 3-5 reaches, 2-3 okay shots, 1-2 good shots, and 2 safety nets. I took each category to be, by percentage: 0-2, 2-5, 5-10, 10-25, and 25-50. I think that I was wrong on a lot of those, and I believe that I would take 2 reaches and put them in the "good shot" category.
  12. I am interested in social and political philosophy and used a paper on Spinoza's TTP for my writing sample. It brushes up against my interests (it *is* his political writing, after all), but I am not planning on focusing on Spinoza long-term. Moreover, Spinoza is not exactly in vogue right now, so it might look doubly strange. I guess I'll find out soon whether or not the topic was "toxic".
  13. I skimmed through the posts and tried a couple of things in the search function and didn't see a comparable thread. So, since we are all sitting here panicking while schools either don't respond, or respond in a way that makes us wish that they never had, I thought it would be nice to step back and look at why people chose to apply where they did. So, why did you pick your schools? How many were "safety nets"? Did you have a specific strategy in mind? Edit: Did your undergraduate advisor (or MA advisor) assist you very much in crafting your list? Did you take their advice? And are there any things that you would do differently if you could redo this cycle?
  14. What do I do when I'm stressed? I sit in front of the computer, cycling between grad cafe forums, grad cafe admission results, my e-mail, and the status checker. I cycle through these every 30-40 seconds. When am I stressed? I checked grad cafe and found that decisions for the one school that I applied to are made between the 21st and the 28th. So, from the 21st until now. I haven't done a bloody thing other than refresh the previously mentioned four pages over and over like the broken neurotic that I am. Help. Please help. PS: It has become considerably worse since they cruelly changed the status checker from "In Review" to "Decision Made" on Saturday morning. I had originally hoped to have broken the spell over the weekend and to have either been productive or had fun. That has tightened the chain, and I won't be moving from my computer until a decision has been made.
  15. The exclamation marks are confusing me. Are we happy about our rejections?
  16. Have we started referring to definite people as him/her now?
  17. Right...I saw that, but I wasn't sure if it meant that we wouldn't hear anything back until then (no e-mail?), or if the details would not be posted there officially until after three business days. I think it might just be wishful thinking, but who knows.
  18. Right. And funding is relatively constant. While there is the worry that anonymity will lead to falsifying when it comes to non-verifiable information, it is less of a problem when public materials can be checked by others. If somebody submits information saying that Penn State only offers a 13K stipend, and this is published on the list, then another student (or faculty) who knows what the actual funding offered is would be easily able to fix this for us.
  19. That would be incredibly helpful. It is an unfortunate truth that most programs do not provide enough support for students to live on. Some programs just offer an impossibly small amount, and others do not adjust for exorbitant costs of living. As much as a few thousand dollar gap in funding can mean during graduate school, it would be nice to have this knowledge in hand before sending out applications. That said...I have looked everywhere for this (grad cafe and otherwise), and have not found anything very helpful. Some programs are very forthright about funding offers on their websites, but others are (for good reason) a bit less forthright.
  20. This isn't an acceptance notice, but I just wanted to give the heads up to anybody that applied to the University of Tennessee. In the past hour or so the status checker has changed from In Review to Decision Made. Unfortunately, the status checker does not say what that decision actually is. I would imagine, though, that messages will start rolling out soon.
  21. Personally, I'd rather see departments shift over to the LSAT. It's an accessible standardized test that can provide the same measure of objectivity that they get from the GRE. But, instead of high school math and vocabulary, you would have logical reasoning and logic games. And, instead of an easily learnable test that somebody can study for one month on (or get Kaplan tutors for), and increase their score by 20-30 percentile points, you have a test where one's scores are much more firmly rooted to a particular skill.
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