PhiPhiPhi

UConn has admitted two people from NIU's MA program this year and the one I've spoken to so far said she enjoyed it a lot. I visited once years ago and it seemed a fine place if the area is a bit..meh.

Ah, so you're one of Keith's students. Well I feel like given your interests this would be the best place for you (even over other very highly ranked places). UConn is without a doubt one of the best places in the world for logic, if not the best. We have more faculty working in logic than pretty much every other department (and all working on cool stuff), some fairly famous people (e.g. Beall) and the UConn Logic Group kicks ass. Damir Dzhafarov, a logician in the math department, told me that the UConn Logic Group is better than both Notre Dame and Berkeley's, where he did post doc's. I think people would be hard pressed to find a better school for logic on the whole than UConn (although there are certainly schools with individual better/more famous logicians). If you do get into UConn we should certainly talk. I turned down a Top20 school to come here a couple years ago, and that was before we hired Keith and Dorit. Storrs does suck a ton though.

Good question. That wasn't the case during the year I applied (a few years back) or last year from what I hear. I don't really have an answer, no. I suspected that they would be out by now, and wasn't able to get any info by phishing for it unfortunately. Honestly I'd suggest emailing them. The (officially unofficial but still pretty respected) deadline is past now and they owe you an update.

Sorry, I never saw this thread before. I'm a PhD student at UConn. Feel free to post questions here or PM them.

As Zizeksucks points out, no. I only know of a single case of someone publishing as an undergraduate - Dave Ripley, and that was co-written with his professor. Also Dave is crazy smart and has more publications already than his PhD advisor with only 3 years out of grad school..so don't take him as an average guy.

I linked to Peter Smith's blog earlier, which has books listed for second-order logic as well. The only resource you really need is Stu Shapiro's Foundations Without Foundationalism, which goes by the loving name of 'The Bible' in many philosophy of math and logic circles. As to the ontological commitment - I wouldn't count it out so fast. Free logics are fairly successful, albeit weaker than their non-free counterparts. Likewise, if plural quantification works (not taking a stance there), it would nominalize second-order logic. As to Frege - he certainly wasn't concerned about ontological commitment at all. He was a dedicated platonist, with many, many abstract objects. I wouldn't even say he tried to avoid it - in fact certain things he says in the Grundlagen make him appear to say that any good theory of math will have abstract objects that exist (independently of us).

You might check out Calgary for biology. See this Leiter Reports post: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2013/02/waters-from-minnesota-to-calgary.html .

I think 20L is pretty decently characterised as weird; I do logic and philosophy of math and its used as sparingly as possible. I'm fairly comfortable with it (you need it do to neologicism), but many people still are careful because of the ontological commitments involved. I've never used it used in metaethics. What kind of stuff do you use it for?

It's not too hard on the analytic side (can't speak for continentals). The rules are basically this: 1. Publishing in a general journal only really counts if it's in the top 20: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/04/the-top-20-general-philosophy-journals.html. 2. Publishing in a specialist journal only counts if its in the top 3 journals in that area (roughly), see this for an example: http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2005/10/ethics_journals.html .

Is there a reason you need second-order logic? It's not used often in your areas of interest.

If it helps, I can offer my anecdotal confirmation as well. They're flying a Kiwi out in two weeks (a friend of someone in my department, which is why I know).

Peter Smith has an excellent intro to logic list available here: http://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/ . It all depends on what exactly it is you want to do. If you just need to catch up on classical first order logic, there are a lot of decent options. If you want to do more, then it will vary widely. If you tell me what you want to know I can help a bit more, but as it stands it's a bit too undefined.

If anyone has questions for an already established PhD student feel free to send them my way. I'm just hanging out here avoiding work on my dissertation..

Right, but there's been an insane amount of work done post-Austin, much of which is more technically difficult.

I agree that you should expect more offers. UConn historically takes their time, but I expect they will send out their acceptances/waitlists/rejections by the 15th.

I've never seen any evidence to suggest that they don't respond before April 15th. Do you have a link to that? They certainly are later in the game, but I imagine their acceptances will go out soon, and everyone will have until the 15th of April to decide (including those on waitlists), like every other school.

May I ask why you've written off UConn?

If you don't already have a ton of loans from undergrad and don't mind delaying your career by two years, I'd seriously consider Tufts. I sometimes wish that I had done an MA after undergrad, despite being somewhat successful at the PhD route.

In addition to this, which is spot on: make sure you ask students as many questions as possible. They're a lot more likely to give you straight answers, and will obviously have a more relevant outlook on the program than faculty.

That's contrary to what I've heard, although I believe this has become more and more common since the economy has gone to shit.

I did it. You could use the time to look at possible places to live, which is always difficult.

I don't have any detailed info on the applications, sorry. I'd be very surprised if we only accepted just a few though. I think they're going through and picking their favorite students, then extending the rest of the offers by the 15th. I don't have any inside info, so there may well have been four by now. I explicitly know of three - one from the Cal State MA program and two from the NIU MA program. As to the waitlist - UConn certainly does do a waitlist, because many of the students currently enrolled were on it during their graduate admissions run. Not being one of those people, I don't know whether they were explicitly told they were on a waitlist, but I imagine so, given previous conversations.

My school has accepted two students from NIU this season (out of the three offers that I know we've extended), so I'd agree that their placement is pretty good.

Can you defer those? Typically schools won't let you unless you have a family emergency or something.

Do you have in mind before you go there, or after? If the former you should visit (even if they're not offering you funding to visit) and make sure you have lunch with them and/or sit in on one of their seminars if possible. If the latter, you should be sure to take a class as soon as possible and get near to them. Without meeting someone, you definitely should not accept an offer to a school on the basis of wanting to work with that person. There are lots of reasons, both personally and professionally, that you may not want to work with someone, and you should make sure you find out as much info as possible before making decisions. I suggest visiting and emailing graduate students for info, for example.