sidebysondheim

I'd say that a post-bacc might be necessary to get into a good terminal MA.

I don't think you should let it go if you genuinely want to pursue it. Padding your grades in a post-bacc would definitely be a good idea, probably more so for creating better relationships with letter writers and developing a strong writing sample. Grades are important, but you can always have a letter writer explain your situation and why your GPA is the way it is. Though I'd suspect you'd want very high GREs to balance that out. Furthermore, given your history and your (apparent) openness with sharing it, and that it turned into a positive research interest, you likely would have a great statement of purpose as well.

@TakeruK I definitely didn't mean to imply anything negative against you! It's been my (so-far-limited) experience that philosophy construes morality more often as authoritative than not, hence making something morally permissible (in the way Eigen has defined). On Eigen's later comment, I also immediately read the original post in terms of standard permissibility and not as moral permissibility (like Ian). I mostly just responded because moral permissibility is a "major player" when talking about moral philosophy/ethics.

I know it's probably because I study philosophy, but this just seems like such an odd statement.

Congrats!

Definitely what I meant.

I agree with herenowagain. It makes me think that there should be a deadline for accepting PhD offers and then a deadline a week later for accepting MA offers. I guess that assumes that one values PhD offers over MA ones, which might not hold in every particular case.

I'd say better than I had hoped.

I'm at a university with a graduate education program that does everything it can to avoid philosophy of education. They hold certain ideological commitments that they do not believe should be questioned (they are somewhat explicit about this) and thus discourage students from taking any of the philosophy of education classes the philosophy department offers. There are either two or three faculty here who work in philosophy of education and have given me the impression that this is not an isolated case. I'd make sure to research which education program you're looking at to see if they hold this type of bias.

Looks like this topic was brought up at Leiter.

My undergraduate advisor's PhD advisor wrote a seminal work in Hume scholarship while at Univ. of Utah. He gave my professor this advice: you can do good philosophy anywhere. Granted he got his PhD at Yale and is now the chair at NYU, the advice is still good advice to remember.

Yeah, i believe their website says 6-8 cohort size.

I'm pretty sure 1Q84 is completely wrong about this with regards to philosophy programs. Perhaps in other disciplines they allow transfer credits, but all of the PhD programs I looked at want you to do the full coursework in their department.

Your GRE scores are fine. Mine are lower across the board: 159/152/5.0. Granted, UNC is probably the most blatant with regards to not caring about GRE scores.

Usually I'd say take the funded PhD, but it really does seem like you'd be able to do better than an unranked PhD with the MA.

To me, that doesn't say you shouldn't analyze, but should be doing value-focused decision making. (Like using a weighted decision table—sorry I took an applied psych class on decision making last term and it definitely came in handy making my grad decision.)

I think you should analyze it, but use something better than pro/con lists. Something like a weighted decision table/extremes table would be better. That way you can recognize all relevant values at once and how much weight they hold for each fact. Also allows for focused research.

If you have any questions feel free to PM me for the prospectives POV. But also, all the grad students are super nice and will probably answer any questions you have via email.

I will say, in case this changes anything, there were about 20 perspectives at the UNC visit and I believe all of them were accepted. While many of them had other really great offers they were considering I know of at least 3 people (including myself) who planned on or already accepted. That's about half their normal cohort size, iirc.

I did at UNC. I had a fantastic time at WashU and had I not gotten into UNC would happily go there, but there was something extra about the grad student/faculty community that just made it feel perfect for me.

I've made my final decision. (Following DontFly's format:) Will attend: UNC Chapel Hill Total programs applied: 12 Declined offer/wait list (WL): UW Madison (WL); Georgetown (WL-funding); UW Milwaukee; Tufts; WashU. Visited: UNC Chapel Hill and WashU AOI: Hume, ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and epistemology GRE (taken in 2014): verbal (159/ 81%); quantitative (152/ 53%); writing (5.0/ 92(?)%) Background: Undergraduate degree form a large state university and McNair Scholars Program

I definitely think trying to start some philosophical conversation is worth it. I know, for me at least, I do a lot of my thinking by talking through philosophy with my UG advisor, so I wanted to see how easy it is to talk to them about philosophy/what kind of conversational style they have.

Just finished a visit at WashU. Fantastic department, incredibly supportive and fun group of grad students. Beautiful campus and they emphasized how good the quality of the undergraduates are, which should make TAing nice(r ). Will be visiting UNC as well.

First off, you should definitely apply to some PhDs, I think. Just make sure to apply to MAs as well (someone else should give advice on which ones). The number of schools you apply to, however, depends entirely on how much money you have to spend or if you can get some form of fee waiver.

It seems like you're using a very wide definition of 'philosopher' where your professor is using a narrower one such as, those formally trained in the discipline of academic philosophy and publish as such.