sidebysondheim

I had a 152 quant and a 159 verbal and got into some great picks for me, especially considering other factors like coming from an unfamiliar/low-quality state school. If you're applying this round there's absolutely nothing you can do about it at this point so don't worry about it. If you get shut out, then the GRE may be one thing you can revisit (if you have the money).

I've met far more people who either do not like Leiter or take everything he says with lots of salt in the discipline than the opposite. Therefore, I don't think you can take his website as any indicator of the ambience of philosophy in the US. It is after all one man who has found himself in the position of having many people in the discipline frequent his blog, despite the fact that (as you pointed out) he isn't housed in a philosophy department anymore. "The reason why one tries to study the postgraduate degree at other university is to get a broader vision of philosophy." This seems most likely false for most people. You study a postgraduate degree at a different university because it looks better (i.e., it will make you more appealing on the job market, etc.) and in many cases your undergrad university isn't suited to train you at the level that an MA/BPhil/PhD program will. My guess why no one considers other rankings is because the Gourmet Report for better or worse is the discipline standard here. I also don't think it at all tries to hide the fact that it is US centered, or the fact that it is pretty Analytic centered.

UNC has about 30 (38 to be exact), and based off of a quick glance at the placement page it looks like since 2010 it is as few as 2 and as many as 9.

Ah, yes. Read too quickly (indeed, right over the part where you said "and fewer admitted students").

Why would it make it harder for people to get into a decent place? If one somehow came up with a way to quantify what decent is, then the programs that weren't decent would be the ones closed down. Any students who would go to these places would likely go to them because they didn't get into one of the decent ones, so would it really change anything? I am not for shutting programs down, but I'm just seeing not seeing how what you said would be accurate. I think the major issue with requiring a terminal MA is that it requires more moving, which starts making it more difficult for people who are lower-income/first generation/etc. I literally spent my entire savings (plus a credit card) to move across the country. I couldn't imagine having to do that process a second time two years from now.

I have a hard time thinking about this because I also would really like a job at the end of 5-6 years of work. But at the moment, even just a term into my program, it's one of the most fulfilling things I've done with my life. It's been tough, but the people (grad students, faculty, and staff) and work make it well worth it. I can honestly say that I'll be happy to find something else to do with my life if I spend two years or so on the job market with nothing. Of course, there are a couple of things to put into perspective here: I'm at a program with a good climate and some amazing people. If I was at another program that didn't have the social ties, good grad and faculty interactions, etc. then I'd probably be significantly less enthused. It's also something you can't really know until you spend time in your program. If these aspects weren't here then I'd probably be significantly less enthused by the whole thing. One program I visited (no names) seemed to have a significantly different atmosphere and part of it was because a lot of the grads were concerned about jobs and carried that with them it seems. I can only imagine this is the case the worse your program's placement record is. I'm not advocating for either position (too many programs or not), I'm just not sure it's something that even you as an applicant can know until you spend time in a program. (Trying very hard here to not call it a transformative experience).

If I was on an adcom and had to read a couple hundred statements of purpose, I'd probably unconsciously hate anyone who went over the limit and made me read more. Take that for whatever it's worth.

I should have been more clear: I'd look at a strong philosophy terminal MA with a recorded history of getting people into a top program (e.g., UW Milwaukee, Brandeis, Georgia State, Tufts, etc). Brown, I suppose, is not high on the list (gourmet report), but still in top 25, which are very hard to get into. I think it's worth reiterating that philosophy PhD programs are ridiculously competitive overall. Many qualified students get shut out and while you may be very good, your complete lack of formal philosophy background will probably be a major barrier. The way to circumvent that, IMO, is to go to a top philosophy terminal MA. One way of viewing this is not necessarily to focus on the research you're ultimately interested in doing, but playing catch up learning philosophical methodology, major texts, etc. and generally filling any holes in your philosophical background. Sorry if any of that came off rude, just trying to be as clear as possible.

If your goal is to get into a top philosophy PhD I'd look at a terminal MA program. I can never remember the list of all the good ones, but it's probably in this thread.

Thought this list of funded MAs would be relevant here.

Takeruk's advice I think probably best fits CV for undergrad philosophy applicants. I'd also be willing to share the CV I used for applications over a private message, though I have no clue if the amount of work I did is average or not.

I thought of something else that might be helpful: Your ability to write a well structured paper is incredibly important. One of the things my undergrad advisor told me is that someone will likely read your introduction to get your thesis and general roadmap. From there they'll flip through the pages to see if the argument progresses in the way you stated and that things aren't taking longer or shorter than they need to. If everything is organized as such, they'll actually read the whole thing. Now, there's no reason to think this is the way every person who will read your writing sample is going to approach it, but it does make sense and she does know of adcoms (and journal/conference referees) that do approach reading in this way. To piggyback on gughok, tone is incredibly important too. My advisor and I went over my writing sample sentence by sentence to make sure nothing was too flippant, exaggerated, or essentially: that nothing I was going to say would piss anyone off. There's a difference between disagreeing with a position, while respecting it and giving it fair treatment, and a rude dismissal. In this particular case, it's important (or at least helpful) to have an advisor who knows how their colleagues at other universities (and potentially your adcom) will respond to certain types of locutions.

I don't see how it could as long as you do it well. There are definitely going to be some topics that will be harder, but that's only because it's harder to say something new/original and insightful about some topics and to do it well without overstepping what your argument warrants. I don't know if taking a strong stance in an unpopular direction is chancy, if you are able to argue for it in a compelling way. If you take a strong stance that's unwarranted, then that won't work. But then it doesn't matter if what you're arguing for is unpopular or not. Hopefully that was of some help.

I don't see how this would be in anyway different than just anyone dropping out of one program and applying for a new program.

Why not UNC for philosophy? Alan Nelson is a really fantastic early modern scholar, we also have great people for metaphysics and epistemology. Philosophy of mind isn't super strong but we have jr faculty who are doing work in it. Mostly saying just because you have UNC for both Psych fields.

I've never heard that before, but to me it seems unlikely because an obvious solution to that problem is do exactly what many PhD programs do and make you start from the beginning and earn their MA/fulfill their distribution requirements.

Adjuncts, my friend. They all come from somewhere.

Other people than me can probably say more about this, but my intuition is that prestige plays a lot bigger role than work, solely because of how bad the job market is, hiring departments can be more picky. Are you even going to look at unranked university X graduate seriously enough to factor in work if you can instead look at these 15 top-25 university graduates? Again, this is my intuition, but it seems like in order for your work to even shine, you need to catch a hiring committees eye, and prestige does that.

Gap years are fine, don't sweat it. If you want more in-depth discussion, do a search on this forum (it's been discussed a lot).

Here is a good, recent post on GRE: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/68262-fall-2016-applicants-introduce-yourselves/?do=findComment&comment=1058296522 If I were you, I'd definitely consider retaking it. The quantitative or analytic (I guess people in philosophy don't care about the analytic writing? I've never heard anyone on an ad com. say that, but it seems to be commonly believed on here) can't "make up for" or "balance" your poorer score, since your poorer score is the one considered "more important" for philosophy.

My ug program is definitely non-elite, and I did well. I'd say that if you do enough you can offset lack of pedigree.

I don't think this is a perfectly analogous case to philosophy, but ultimately I think this is good advice in your case. If these two analytic philosophers are as well known as you claim then the adcoms will know that having two letters from analytic philosophers is just because of the department you were in. Probably more importantly, your writing sample is going to tell them that you can do continental at a high level, not having an extra continental philosopher writing you a letter.

I think everything jjb919 said is good advice. But I will add that while basically everyone requires GRE scores, there are definitely some places that do not care about them or at least weight them significantly lower than comparable institutions.

I'd probably wait a year, solely because of wanting to have a stronger writing sample. I also don't think any adcoms will think it's weird that you're taking a year off. Anecdotally, a lot of people seem to be surprised that I'm continuing straight from undergrad.

I don't know if any of those will help because I started early and kind of led a "traditional" path. The advice I received as a sophomore, being interested in going to grad school, was to see if I kept having reason to go further. I got good grades, so I started talking with professors. They encouraged me and gave me opportunities to research with them or TA for them. That worked out well, so I started sending papers to UG conferences, I got accepted to those, so I started applying for academic programs within my university, sending to UG journals, etc. That worked out so my professors were inclined to nominate me for university wide awards, and so on. I took it one step at a time, and every time something worked out I saw that as a reason to take it another step forward. The same professors also advised me that I need to figure when my quit date is before I started applying to graduate schools and I decided two years. I'd apply the first year, if I didn't get in anywhere, I'd tweak some aspects of my application and apply a second year. Shut out again? Then that's it. If I make it through my program, I'll have the same two year cut off for jobs. I think it's important to know when you're going to quit and move on with your life.