Glasperlenspieler

It's only 2 days early.
Aye.
I have unwarranted (and unprecedented) hope that the department has, unbeknownst to me, submitted my results on the Grad Cafe's database on my behalf and will notify me later in the manner stated. It would certainly be a favorable situation given that I did not hear anything from them and I would much desire to have such an offer.

Commenting here because it doesn't really fit with any other threads, but...

Would the person or persons who are creating "other" entries on the results page to ask questions of other results posters please stop doing that? The results page is just a results page...it's not really conducive to having back and forth questions and answers.

Sorry to sound like a net nanny, but it really misleads the eye when looking at the results page...

I know this subforum is kind of dead, but did anyone else apply for German PhD programs?

hahahaha this is like one of my greatest (and most irrational, I'm sure) fears. When I got my call from Davis, I barely said two words, and my POI was like "Well, I'll let you go and digest the news, here's my contact info if you need anything."
I emailed her like an hour later and thanked her profusely and apologized for being so awkward. She was fantastic about it in her reply. I think she was worried my inability to respond meant I wasn't interested. I was like...NOOOOOOO
Introverts + phones = the worst combination

Ah, right! Sven Nykvist had an amazing eye. And Max von Sydow is unmistakable.

This is a very unusual question, quite frankly. Collaboration is key in professional writing. You certainly can write in a vacuum, but when you think about the entirety of the academic process, it's clear that your work will always be passing through revisions or other forms of review -- formal or otherwise. The same should be true of your writing materials when applying to graduate schools. In other words, getting external feedback is not only not "cheating"...it's almost essential!
 

I think it would depend. In my case, I had a workshop with two other students from my undergrad. We all read each others' drafts and gave verbal feedback. We were also all getting feedback from the two professors who put the workshop together (generally written feedback). I would say that you should get as much conceptual and compositional feedback as you possibly can. But I think the important distinction to make here is that all the work has to be your own. Having professional researchers and editors look at it and give suggestions is valuable, as long as it's still all your work (I'm not quite sure what 'pimping' implies, but to me it evoked pay-for services where professionals rewrite your essay to improve it. I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but I'm just distinguishing for others). TLDR: solicit any and all suggestions from people you respect who have done academic work at or near this level (taking the useful suggestions and discarding the ones that aren't useful). But the implementation should be all you.
 

Taylor Swift. 
Can anyone explain her popularity to me? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way. By no means should you engage a conversation with me about Taylor Swift.)

Now you all are making me feel homesick.

That's hilarious--same here! Henderson and Powell's (in Portland) are my favorite bookstores. I miss the PNW.
Edit: Elliott Bay and Mercer Street in Seattle are nice too! 

If I lived in Bellingham, every waking second would be spent in Henderson Books! One of my favorite places on earth, and that's not hyperbole...

Excellent- congratulations! I'm the Loyola-Chicago acceptance, so we might be neighbors

Yeah, I'm also wondering if more Brown acceptances are coming (hopefully!). Chicago seems like they've been pretty consistent the last few years so it should be this week. It looks like they've sent out acceptances on Saturdays a couple times though, so I would rule that out.

Meanwhile, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so if my data are correct, we're in for six more weeks of waiting for decisions. 

When I got my first acceptance I thought I'd relax; at least I'd be going somewhere y'know? Whats actually happened is its like now I'm hooked on offers and waiting for my next fix. I want more... nomnomnomoffers
Edit: And cake, also hooked on the celebratory cake.

Second semester junior year is prime time to start preparing your thesis proposal, fyi, so I'd be going beyond the strong intimation stage with that prof if I were you. I would also talk to your professors about grad school. Ask your questions here, browse this site (on this board, I recommend "Graduate School Ponzi Scheme" and like 10 threads riffing off of that, but on all the humanities boards as well as the frou frou social science ones, there is at least topic about how miserable the TT market is and how people getting PhDs are idiots, so read those), go on the internet, read the Thomas Benton articles and the rest of that fodder, read the MLA job reports, The Professor Is In, familiarize yourself not only with the grad school application process and its Law counterpart, but with the process that happens during grad school (comps, ABD, dissertation committee, publications, conferences, teaching) and what you can expect afterwards on the job market, and then go to your professors with all this information in mind. The idea is to both to be able to ask more pertinent questions than "lol what is an SOP", and to be able to focus your attention less on the technical aspects and more on gauging what these professors think about your potential specifically. Few people even today will outright tell you not to go even if they think that you can't crack it - instead they'll tell you about the job market and how hard it is and so on and so forth, which will do nothing to deter you. Likewise, few people, if they are responsible, will tell you outright to go, even if they think you're the best student they ever had (which should be taken with a grain of salt proportional to how many undergrads this professor has successfully sent to grad school). In the end, academia is pretty solitary and can be a shark tank, so you need to rely on your own judgment, and inform your judgment to the best of your ability. 

January isn't over yet! Judging by results from the last few years, it looks like they typically send out acceptances in the last week of January or first week of February.

Can we get a mod to rename the thread and/or split the thread?

I mean they also know that what's being tested in the AW section of the GRE (whatever it is that it actually does test) has nothing to do with academic philosophy. Also, every published philosophy article these days is heavily edited with lots of feedback. So being able to do that well may actually be a sign of professionalization. 
Everything I've read indicates the the verbal and quantitative sections of the GRE are of some value to admissions committees (how much varies), but the the AW is pretty much useless unless perhaps it's alarmingly low.

I just checked OSU's website.


I GOT IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Congratulations - you have been offered admission! Use the link on the main page of the Applicant Center to accept or decline. Please click the Application Requirements tab above to see what items, if any, are still needed. Items with a status of 'Incomplete' are still required, 'Received' are currently being processed, and 'Completed' have fulfilled the requirement."

I can't believe it. Utter shock and joy right now.

I keep worrying that I'm going to refresh and it's going to go away...

 

Shoutout to the other international students counting down to 9am EST every day...
 

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.

I've been meaning to reply to this post for about a week. So, here goes in a nutshell. (TLDR version is to relax, don't panic, you're right where you should be.)
I would NOT worry too much about not knowing what your specialization is going to be just yet. You're a first semester MA student! You'll figure it out more as you take more classes, begin doing more research on your own, and work on your MA thesis. My own story is that I actually studied two pretty different things (think apples and orangutans) for my MA and PhD and it was fine. The background theory I learned during my MA served me well when I did my PhD even though the topics (and really, the subfield) were different. 
As for whether or not something matters, some of that might be up to you. There are people in my discipline who don't think that my topic "orangutans" really matters but, I see it as part of my job as a researcher to show them how and why it matters through the research I do. Some of that comes from the specific things I highlight in my research and some of it comes from placing my research in the appropriate broader context. Learning the big(ger) picture now as a MA student will help you do that in the future, regardless of the topic you choose. 
And, can I just be honest for a minute? If all of the "hot topic" convos in your discipline aren't ones you're super interested in, don't force yourself to do a project involving them. A PhD is enough of a slog that you shouldn't also do it on a topic you aren't passionate about. If you're passionate about multiple things, then you have options. You can try to do several and link them with some sort of connecting thread (theoretical, topical, temporal, etc.). Alternately, you can make one the focus of your thesis/dissertation and leave the other ideas for class/conference papers (or, as you advance in your thinking in these areas, for collaboration with other grad students or faculty with similar interests). That said, it does make sense to stay abreast of the current trends/discussions in the field (which you can do by skimming ToC and abstracts of journals) so that you can find ways to connect what you are doing to these bigger and broader discussions.
Finally, don't compare yourself to the PhD students. Assuming they've done a master's, they've got at least a couple of years of graduate training on you! You're not in the same place in terms of your intellectual development in the discipline so you shouldn't be expected or expect yourself to be doing whatever groundbreaking thing they're doing. And, newsflash: most of them have had the same concerns and struggles, likely when they were where you are right now. Comparing yourself to others is really a path to frustration in grad school so I strongly advise you against it. If you insist upon it, I'd say that you should have one-on-one conversations with some grad students to see how they developed their topics/interests, what led them to where they are, etc. You may be surprised by the answers. 
Good luck! Keep us posted on how things are going.

I think it's a bit obsessive and pointless to try to work out one's "odds".
The biggest point to be made here is that the process is far from cut and dry. Stats really don't mean shit. Nobody cares about your GRE and GPA if other applicants are a much better fit for the program. Nobody cares about how famous your letter writers are if they consider your writing sample to be uninteresting and/or underdeveloped. Nobody cares about your publications/institutional prestige if your statement of purpose is blunderous or you don't seem like a good match for the people in the department, both in terms of research and personality (I've talked to people on hiring committees who swore up and down that the person who eventually gets the job is often the person, of the finalists, who got on with the current faculty best -- they're building an intellectual community, and they want people who seem like they'd get along great).
Moreover, I think this obsession about an applicant's "stats" has grown out of the "How exactly does this process work and what exactly do I need to be successful?" mentality, which is, in many aspects, absurd and dangerously obsessive. GPA/GRE/University prestige (and even publications!) give very little, if any, indication that one is a good philosopher; one shows their competency as a philosopher through their writing sample, a well-written statement of purpose, and writing interesting papers and making interesting contributions in classes that your letter-writers will mention. There are too many very gray aspects of consideration that hugely weigh in on the determination of admissions decisions to say that "one is likely or more likely than most to be successful with x, y, and z." As in myriad situations, the attempt to quantify things is not only unhelpful, but also serves to cover up other aspects of the situation that matter quite a lot.
In the fictional words of Albert Camus (taken from my favorite edition of Existential Comics, "The Analytics at the Bar"), "It's more of an art than a science, old boy."