Same experience here, although situation might be slightly different next year without Stanworth and Butler and with Lakeside. In any case, you should be able to get into Lawrence assuming, as Bleep_Bloop said, that you are flexible on the type of apartment.
I don't think there's an official answer on this, but someone on http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/914031-child-of-graduate-school-graduates-a-legacy.html says probably not.
I was able to get an apartment in my first year without a problem, as was everyone else in my cohort that applied for one. You don't have too many options for the type of apartment (you probably won't get a studio or 1 BR in your first year unless you're married, and you have very slim chances of getting a pet-friendly unit), but as long as you're flexible and willing to live with a roommate then you should be able to get something. From my experience it's not that difficult to get an apartment in your first year, I don't know why this thread makes it sound impossible.
Thank you for the confirmation. Have any Theory people heard from Yale? I figure that I have hope until the Theory member of the Committee sends out emails.
I wish it was socially acceptable to drink whisky in class at 12pm.
Hi, I heard in early Feb, but that may be because they were nominating me to compete for the Jefferson Fellowship, and the Selection takes place very soon (late Feb). The official letter came last week.
In any case I've declined, so hopefully that means one of you will hear soon from them. Good luck!
Just went to my inbox and saw an email from the University of Chicago. I applied there and am expecting to hear good or bad news from them any day. Heart skipped (several) beats. Then I realized that it's some perfunctory email form the graduate school about "choosing the right graduate program"...
...I think I'm gonna choose the graduate program which makes me an offer.
I just posted on the blog about this, but I've heard that Chicago decisions are finalized and awaiting approval from the administration. Meaning there will likely be no news before the weekend, but they should release next week.
A few nights ago (waiting for Chicago to release decisions), I rewatched Apocalypse Now. Somehow, I never realized that it's fundamentally an allegory about graduate admissions in philosophy. So I thought I'd write up some notes on the more interesting points of comparison to learn what this film can tell us about the experience.
Background: On its surface level, Francis Ford Coppola's film is set in the Vietnam War, and shows Captain Ben Willard's (Martin Sheen) journey up the Nung River, on orders to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a decorated American military leader who has gone rogue. The farther up the river Captain Willard goes, the more we see the devastating effects of the war, not least in terms of the psychological effects on Willard and other soldiers. The war isn't intelligible as a conflict between good and bad; neither the North Vietnamese nor Colonel Kurtz can be simply understood as the enemy.
Basic lines of the allegory: Captain Willard's journey is representative of an applicant's journey through graduate admissions, from his initial orders as the decision to apply, through his journey up the river on a boat of psychologically distressed fellow applicants, to his final assassination of Colonel Kurtz, as the "successful" completion of his mission (one in which the very idea of success is questioned). The military leaders who give Captain Willard his assignment exhibit striking similarities with the status quo of established philosophy professors: they ask him to take the mission, noting that he's highly capable and they need someone like him, but provide him dreadfully little resources, making him fend for himself. And they're fully aware that he likely won't make it through the mission alive, much less psychologically sound.
The question of what element of the application process Colonel Kurtz represents is both one of the most interesting and difficult questions in analyzing the movie. In one sense, he represents an admissions committee: by defeating him, Captain Willard would succeed in his mission, just as surviving the gauntlet of an adcom's scrutiny would result in a successful offer of admission. But it's not quite that simple. Colonel Kurtz isn't just a player in the war, but someone who also occupies a space outside the war. After witnessing the perils of the war (the application process) first hand, he tries to remove himself from the process by taking his unit far up the river into Cambodia. He discovers double agents (i.e. defenders of the status quo of the philosophy profession) in his ranks, and executes them. The American brass concludes that his "methods are unsound," and thus that he must be eliminated. Colonel Kurtz is thus something like a professor who, after being groomed for a tenured job at an R1 university, recognizes the failings of the system and adopts radically different methods for advancing the professor. Kurtz leads a contradictory existence, not wanting to contribute to the injustices of the status quo but being unable to change the process without himself occupying a type of hegemonic position.
Psychological perils of the process: "Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon." The film opens with Captain Willard lying in a hotel room, waiting for orders. He spends an alcohol-fueled night thinking about his previous tours (this is clearly not his first round of applications), noting that when he's here (applying) he only thinks about home ("real life"), but while he's home, he only thinks about the war. Life is never happy for an applicant, especially during the initial waiting game. Soon into his mission, he encounters Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, for whom the war is merely a game, and who thinks nothing of the innocent people he gleefully kills. (His line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" is perhaps as clear a metaphor as we receive in the movie, though I'm still struggling to make sense of what his now-infamous expression "Charlie don't surf!" means for the application process.) Captain Willard is horrified by Kilgore's approach to the war, but begins to see that it's all too common among the American soldiers. He notes, "If that's how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone."
The American bases which Captain Willard and company visit as they travel farther up the river show the devastating effects of the application process, with each being more and more depraved, and losing any sense of order. At the last American base, a messenger tells Willard, "You're in the asshole of the world, Captain!" The messenger is glad to finally give Willard his new information, since the messenger is now free to leave, if only he can find a way out.
In a scene that was cut from the theatrical release, Captain Willard and his crew encounter a French plantation in the jungle, a solitary hold-out from the days of the French occupation of Indo-China. Willard asks them why they don't leave, and they claim that they would never leave, that this is now their home. A young woman observes Willard, noting his weariness of the war (despite Willard's stoic resolve throughout the film). She tells him that he's a doubled man, a walking contradiction. "There's one of you that fights, and one of you that loves." As applicants, we're engaged in a contradictory enterprise, fighting fellow students for a spot in the discipline, but loving each other and the field of philosophy nonetheless. The plantation is clearly a metaphor for the isolation of continental departments in the US, the lone holdouts. One wonders whether it further demonstrates the status quo of analytic philosophy that this scene was cut from the movie. To get a sense of Coppola's pluralist vision of the field, we must watch the Redux version in which it's included.
When he finally arrives at Colonel Kurtz's fort, Willard doesn't know what to make of him. The man appears at once evil, unhesitatingly executing those with whom he disagrees, and wise beyond measure, clearly distraught by the the war and even the operation he runs. Willard sympathizes with Kurtz's distress, but ultimately must kill him because of the atrocities the Colonel commits. As the two converse about the war, Willard tells Kurtz, "They told me you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound." Kurtz replies, "Are my methods unsound?" With clarity, Willard informs him, "I don't see any methods at all, sir." The eventual assassination scene cuts back and forth between Willard slaying Kurtz with a machete, and the native Cambodians' ritual slaughter of a cow. This symbolizes how Willard does not kill Kurtz out of hate, but out of respect. Similarly, only by destroying the hegemony in the application process, even those who recognize its deep inadequacies.
The film ends with Kurtz whispering lines from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and from the epigraph of Eliot's "The Wasteland"), repeatedly saying "The horror... the horror..." The picture we ultimately receive is one of a necessary fight, but in a terrible war.
Takeaway: The only emotionally uplifting scenes in the film, which are few and far between, are those of camaraderie between Captain Willard and his fellow soldiers on the boat. The only solace to be received from the process is by bonding with those on a similar mission. But Coppola's lasting vision is not one in which a correct approach to the application process can resolve its internal problems. One can only mitigate damages, never eliminate them. Coming to a state of self-consciousness about the terrible contradictions of the process is admirable, but not enough. After the end of the film, we are left in a state of shock, appreciated that the mission has been completed, but mourning the deaths of those who did not survive and lamenting the state of the process more generally. The film does not imply that the problems with the application process are contingent upon problems with current leadership (though these problems are certainly exacerbated by such leadership); rather, the application process is an inherently horrible, but perhaps necessary, state.
I'll end with one of Captain Willard's voice-over observations on the war: "Some day this war's gonna end. That'd be just fine with the boys on the boat. They weren't looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I'd been back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore."
I posted on Jan 1 that I felt like we'd hear any day now because it was 2015. I take it back, this month has been excruciatingly long. But tomorrow is February 1, so we'll all hear any day now!
oh lord i know right- i got two emails confirming my app was complete- and i knew it was! And then the worst- I got a call- the location said RIVERSIDE CALIFORNIA- my heart started pounding -- IT WAS A FREAKING TELEMARKETER. Oh god the cruelty!
kosmo got a reaction from Brandon263 in Welcome to the 2014-15 Cycle
kosmo got a reaction from simonluo in Welcome to the 2014-15 Cycle
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kosmo got a reaction from B. Blumenstrauss in The Long Wait
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kosmo got a reaction from Hcarp in The Long Wait