philstudent1992

Will be turning down offers from Georgetown and Miami and removing myself from the waitlist at UCR today.

Can you squanch? Right under his squanch it says that he's from Canada.

Hi: I've also been waitlisted at UCR. I also sent an email to the person who contacted me, but did not hear anything (it's been some time now). I think it's also the case that some people have tried soliciting their status but not received emails back. I don't know anything about why we haven't received responses, though.

Graduate students are not bound by any resolution to decide by the 15th. Instead, most programs have agreed not to require their admitted students to respond to offers of admission before April 15. So April 15th is the deadline because that's the earliest date that most programs could require their students to respond, without violating their commitments. That being the case, there's no "official" deadline for graduate students; it's decided by each school in each case. But I think you're right about what schools will actually do (some will give you a few extra days, some won't).

I don't think this kind of strained attempt to be cute is productive, so I'm not going to rebut you.

This is a pretty transparent rationalization, if you ask me. Surely you don't think it's the case that for every possible thing you could do that would increase the good more than doing philosophy would, there's someone else who will do that thing if you don't. For it is patently the case that there's more than enough suffering for you to contribute positively to reducing it. Surely you don't take this attitude toward small acts of charity. For instance, suppose that the next time you pass a homeless person you give him or her $5. Do you think that if you hadn't given them that money, someone else (who wouldn't have given them the money had you given it to them) would have, so their life would be qualitatively the same? In the same way, it's ridiculous to think that, for whatever more good-furthering career path you choose, if you hadn't chosen that, someone else would have done the same thing. For instance, suppose that you become an investment banker and donate oodles of money to various highly specific good causes, like buying malaria nets for some affected areas or funding projects to get clean water to villages that lack it. Do you really think that if you hadn't become an investment banker, someone else (who wouldn't have done those good-furthering things if you had done them) would have done those exact things, or would have done something equally as good with the money?

I mean, I don't know. I don't want to toot my own horn or whatever, but I think I have a very strong application (1 point from a perfect GRE, 4.0 grad gpa, very strong letters, a sample that I think is pretty good, clear interests and good fit with the schools I applied to), but I was rejected from around 8 or 9 schools that I thought I had a good chance at. Now it's certainly possible that my estimation of myself is just too high. In fact, I'm sure it is. But the explanation that my pedigree is just not good enough is also rather compelling; it helps explain, I think, my pattern of rejections/admissions/waitlists, but it also helps explain broader patterns of people's success depending on the institutions they're coming from. And, of course, it doesn't undermine the claim that pedigree counts if there are some schools for whom pedigree is irrelevant. It's possible that the schools you mention are like this (and I don't know whether HPS programs are any different on this score than philosophy programs). I was claiming that top 10 or top 20 PGR schools care a lot about pedigree. And note that it isn't a zero-sum game here, anyway. If having good pedigree helps you get into schools, that means that you're taking a spot away from someone else. So even if bad pedigree didn't actively hurt you (by making your app look directly worse), pedigree is still important (since it still plays a big role in who gets in). That being the case, I don't know if there's much of a distinction between lack of pedigree counting against you and strong pedigree counting in your favor. Oh, and so I guess my case sort of bears on the actual question of the thread: my own experience does not suggest that a good GRE score is a sufficient condition for getting into top PhD programs.

Why don't you think so? Look at the BA or MA granting institutions of the students at top-10 Leiter ranked programs (I assume these are the sort of program philstudent1991 had in mind). Schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford are grossly overrepresented (Berkeley, for instance, is particularly bad about this). It's certainly not the case that pedigree is all that matters, or anything like that, but I think you need very good reasons to deny the value of the prima facie evidence that pedigree is very important.

Thanks, and sorry for being the bearer of in-all-likelihood-bad news.

I'm waitlisted at UCR, and I know one person who was accepted. If you haven't gotten news, I would expect that you are rejected, although I don't know for sure.

I know definitely that Stanford has done a waitlist in the past. I don't know how long it was or whether they'll do one this year, though.

Claiming the UCR waitlist. Perhaps of interest to others: I was told that the adcom has "completed its review of applications for admission." Not sure if that means everything positive has gone out yet, though.

I also only see "under review" for Texas. Looking back at past years, apparently some people who asked about their status were told that they weren't accepted or on the waitlist, but they also weren't officially rejected yet, either. So it's possible that's the case, but obviously it's also possible that they just haven't uploaded all rejections yet.

I can confirm that at least one first-round acceptance went out last Thursday (to a friend of mine). I didn't realize nobody had posted any on the results page.

This has absolutely happened in the past. I didn't ever hear from some schools the last time I applied out and have anecdotal evidence from other people with the same experience.