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.

Perhaps he isn't aware: Harvard is one of the 10 best universities in the world to pursue a PhD in philosophy. And he's in there.

Fun fact: Over the past 7 years, UCR has released on every day of the week except Sunday. They have, however, released twice on a Friday. I therefore prognosticate that they will release tomorrow.

At least one admission has gone out today. (Not me)

Also waitlisted at Toronto :~) I was told that I could reasonably expect to be admitted, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Here's something that someone else said that might be relevant: "I did hear from a somewhat reliable source that UNC has had a very busy month/week and, out of the interest of time, might be accepting/waitlisting/rejecting as they go along, rather than solidifying define accept/waitlist/reject pools. So that's encouraging. But the source was a friend of a friend who happens to be a professor at UNC but isn't on the admissions committee... So who knows? Edit: That was worded confusingly. I heard from a guy, with whom I happen to be friends, who is himself friends with someone tangentially connected to the phil department at UNC but isn't on the adcomm. I'm not friends with anyone on the phil faculty at UNC, as my original wording might have suggested. I'm just a lowly undergrad at a different school."

Claiming another Georgetown acceptance. Got the phone call just a few minutes ago, from Mark Murphy. I'm happy to answer any more specific questions, but by PM.

I've been accepted to a program without first receiving an Academia hit from that area. So, you know, take that for what it's worth.

I'm not associated with the prediction on the blog, but here's what I think about Stanford: the only reasonable definite prediction to make is this week. But it won't be shocking if that prediction turns out to be false. Stanford was pretty consistent in releasing the second/third week of February for quite a while (and I think almost always late in the week), but last year they released in March. As far as I know, there's no extenuating circumstance that could explain that away as an anomaly. If there is one, and that was just a weird fluke, Stanford will almost certainly release this week. But if that wasn't an accident, there's no meaning to anything, and they could release whenever. Dates of first release posted on TGC for the past five years are below, so feel free to make your own judgment. Last year: second Sunday in March (3/8) 2014: third Saturday in February (2/15) 2013: second Thursday in February (2/14) 2012: third Friday in February (2/17) 2011: second Thursday in February (2/10)

You make a lot of good points. However, I'd like to point out that it's irresponsible to quote studies that claim things like "When people look at a resume/cv from someone name Maria Rodriguez and John Smith, and both have the same qualifications, they are more likely to judge the former more harshly" as if they're indisputable fact. These social psych results are notoriously hard to replicate, and there are plenty of studies that claim that the opposite is true (e.g. Williams and Ceci 2014 made a big ole stink a while ago). So, while it's definitely not the case that women and minorities who get PhD spots don't deserve those spots, and it's hard to really know how adcoms are judging people, I think it's unfair to assert right out that women and minorities are automatically viewed as inferior even when they have the same credentials -- while it would explain some things, and it would probably fit some people's prior beliefs, things just aren't unequivocally proven one way or another.

Hey buddy, you're likely to get some backlash for making these claims, so I figured I'd say that I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. But I don't think that anecdotal experience (even though mine lines up with yours!) is enough to make broad statements about the impact of race/gender in admissions. Nothing makes any sense at all, and it's much easier to detect patterns that would explain why inferior people do better than you than to come to believe that something is lacking in your own application.