Glasperlenspieler

I own a hand-crank coffee grinder that was purchased in Germany by one of the world's leading Kant scholars.  I use this grinder to make delicious (fair trade, of course) coffee.  And for me, nothing satisfies like coffee.  My life is probably five or ten percent better because of coffee.  Sometimes I worry about my future, and then I remind myself that coffee is a part of my future.  And then those worries fly away.  Like right now, for instance.  In this world of uncertainty, one thing is certain.  On April 16, I may have no good offers of admission. I may have wasted years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars on this quixotic pursuit of ideals in Massachusetts.  But this I will have: I will have my coffee.

Philstudent22, I mean this with all due respect (truly, I do):
 
When I read your description, I can't help but wonder whether your scores really did hurt you at all. You had a stellar app, and you were admitted to a top-20 department, despite your relatively low scores. Right? What more could you expect? Do you think that with better scores, you would have done better than this? I mean, frankly, you did very, very well. I know this is a sensitive subject, because not everyone has the same idea about what it means to "do well." But I think you did very well, and I think you did it with fairly low scores. This lends some credibility to my view that the optics of a 160-ish plus score is typically enough.
 
You had to have a stellar app to be admitted to a top-20 school.
 
Now listen, I think I had a stellar application. I think it's a damn good application. People in my high-ranked MA program thought so (or pretended to think so, perhaps out of sympathy for me). A good friend of mine was admitted to like seven top-30 departments or something crazy, including a few top-10s (if I recall correctly). She said that my application wasn't much different from hers, in terms of overall quality.
 
My verbal is 169 (99%), my quant is 157 (69%), and my writing is 6.0 (99%). These scores are from a test I took prior to my working for a major test prep company. My quant is now around 167 (my last diagnostic test).
 
We can't really conclude anything from this, except that there appear to be examples of weak scores among successful applicants (you) and strong scores among failed applicants (me).
 
I'm sure your application is stellar. But I don't think that the difference between you and the person who is admitted to NYU and Rutgers is the GRE score. (I don't think you mean to say this, either.) More likely, the person admitted to Rutgers and NYU is lucky and ridiculously talented and connected to the right people.
 
After this application season, I am convinced that philosophy admissions is less predictable (in terms of who will be successful) than what many would like to believe. We can shape a lot of what happens, and then some of it is like playing the lottery. Hence great applicants often fail.
 
Frankly, I'm warming up to law admissions. You plug in your numbers, and out comes your result!

You're missing a few goodies, but overall it's a solid list. Though, as a Nietzsche guy, I would never advise someone to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra without having read several of his other works thoroughly first. It's probably one of the most difficult books I've ever read (for various reasons), and this is coming from someone doing his thesis on the work. 

Whatever you do, make sure to be underdrag and you'll be just fine. Otherwise it's really a bit dicey. 

4 BU acceptances with the posters saying they will most likely decline; for the love of casserole could some one claim one of these?

I have a complex love/hate relationship with you.

BPhil puts me at 10/10. What the actual fuck.

That seems a little unfair.  Certainly I wasn't intending to use this as my only means of research on schools (that would be silly).  I have already identified a number of programs/people I would be interested in working with in my area (Peter Gordon at Harvard, Warren Breckman at Penn, Martin Jay at UCB, Alan Megill at UVA, Samuel Moyn at Columbia, etc.)  But it's a little scary that many of these places have only one person in my area of interest, since you never know what can happen with faculty movement, especially since some of them are nearing retirement age.  Also, since I'm coming from a BA in philosophy, I know less about how things stand in history, so I was looking to see if I could maybe learn a thing or two from people who may be more informed about the topic than I am.  This was not meant to be in replacement of actually doing my own research, but in addition to it, since there may very well be programs that I haven't heard of that do have strengths in this area, especially since most of the programs I have identified are very, very competitive.  Additionally, intellectual history is kind of an odd field even within history and is not discussed much in these boards, so I thought it couldn't hurt to bring it up.  Sorry if that was a mistake.

That seems a little unfair.  Certainly I wasn't intending to use this as my only means of research on schools (that would be silly).  I have already identified a number of programs/people I would be interested in working with in my area (Peter Gordon at Harvard, Warren Breckman at Penn, Martin Jay at UCB, Alan Megill at UVA, Samuel Moyn at Columbia, etc.)  But it's a little scary that many of these places have only one person in my area of interest, since you never know what can happen with faculty movement, especially since some of them are nearing retirement age.  Also, since I'm coming from a BA in philosophy, I know less about how things stand in history, so I was looking to see if I could maybe learn a thing or two from people who may be more informed about the topic than I am.  This was not meant to be in replacement of actually doing my own research, but in addition to it, since there may very well be programs that I haven't heard of that do have strengths in this area, especially since most of the programs I have identified are very, very competitive.  Additionally, intellectual history is kind of an odd field even within history and is not discussed much in these boards, so I thought it couldn't hurt to bring it up.  Sorry if that was a mistake.

Fair enough. Sorry about my vague initial post. In hindsight, that was not the best approach. Thanks for getting me to clarify myself.

That seems a little unfair.  Certainly I wasn't intending to use this as my only means of research on schools (that would be silly).  I have already identified a number of programs/people I would be interested in working with in my area (Peter Gordon at Harvard, Warren Breckman at Penn, Martin Jay at UCB, Alan Megill at UVA, Samuel Moyn at Columbia, etc.)  But it's a little scary that many of these places have only one person in my area of interest, since you never know what can happen with faculty movement, especially since some of them are nearing retirement age.  Also, since I'm coming from a BA in philosophy, I know less about how things stand in history, so I was looking to see if I could maybe learn a thing or two from people who may be more informed about the topic than I am.  This was not meant to be in replacement of actually doing my own research, but in addition to it, since there may very well be programs that I haven't heard of that do have strengths in this area, especially since most of the programs I have identified are very, very competitive.  Additionally, intellectual history is kind of an odd field even within history and is not discussed much in these boards, so I thought it couldn't hurt to bring it up.  Sorry if that was a mistake.

Fair enough. Sorry about my vague initial post. In hindsight, that was not the best approach. Thanks for getting me to clarify myself.

So just to be clear: you came to a message board full of people applying to English/Rhetoric/Comparative Literature PhD programs and decided that, now, in March, 5 months after applying, you will remind us of the news no one doesn't know and repeat to us the websites and stats our loved ones, family members, and friends harp to us constantly?
 
Do you have a Kickstarter page so I can fund you to push kids off swings while telling them Santa doesn't exist?

WLC is incredibly annoying, as well as utterly confused.  Sorry to be so harsh, but no one really listens to him except impressionable undergraduates who already believe the gibberish spewing from his football coach-esque mouth.