Coconuts&Chloroform

There's always the possibility that you're on a hidden waitlist. Or I guess a situation could turn out like this: There are, say, 6 spots at the program, and 4 have been filled. There are also 10 applicants who were strong enough to make the waitlist. Of those 10, 3 may be in contention for the remaining two spots. So 7 students get on the waitlist and 4 get acceptances, and the rest will be rejected. But there are 3 more students from the 10 who weren't immediately accepted who may be in limbo, and in this case two will get acceptances while one will get waitlisted. In this case not hearing back wouldn't be a bad sign - it could mean that you're still under consideration for an acceptance. Granted, this last possibility is pretty remote. Probably you are rejected in a case like this. I'm in the same boat, btw, with Berkeley - at least four people were accepted, and at least one waitlisted, but I haven't heard anything.

If I'm not mistaken NYU's MA has a pretty late date. It's not considered a great MA, in spite of the reputation of the department, and it's almost completely unfunded, but if you're, say, already in the New York area, or could get a job there, it may not be the worst idea as a last-minute option.

I wonder what such an email would even look like.

I emailed a POI at one of my top choices a few weeks ago on a whim, asking him if he'd like to look over a term paper I had written that responded to his most recent paper. I had an idea for an argument in support of his view. I sent him a kind of abstract of the argument in the thought that it might pique his interest, hoping that he might say he'd read the paper. To my astonishment, he actually responded a couple of days ago. Quite substantively, too - he said that the argument was interesting but that he wasn't yet convinced, and sketched a couple of different possible ways that someone might respond to my argument. He told me I could send the paper along, but that he couldn't promise he'd have time to get me comments. This was quite a shock - I won't give out any details, but suffice it to say that this person is probably one of the ten most well-known philosophers working today - I thought I had maybe a 10% chance of getting a reply, and that of that 10% there was a 50% chance of hearing 'sorry, I don't have time to look at student work'. Now at the time I was not thinking about my admissions chances at all. Just wondering what he thought, really, and frankly I'm delighted to have heard his reply. But I stumbled across some people who have said that emailing people at school's you've applied to is a bad idea. Schwitzgebel says this, and others. That it comes across as disingenuous, and that even if you make a good impression, people might be biased against you for fear of showing favor to applicants who they've been in touch with. So now I'm wondering whether I've shot myself in the foot by being too forward. I'm also hesitant to send the paper itself, since it's still pretty rough. So I just replied to his reply with a couple of arguments that I think might work against his objections (I spent about 8 hours drafting this reply, lol). I'm wondering what you guys think of this situation. I really wasn't expecting any reply at all, and I wasn't thinking about how this could help or hamper my chances at the relevant program. But maybe I should have, because it seems like a thing like this can stand a non-negligible chance of hurting one's application. On the other hand, just philosophically, I'm immensely glad that I did it, since his reply was very substantive and thought-provoking. And it's also just cool to be in a serious philosophical dialogue with one of the people responsible for your interest in philosophy in the first place. So what do you think: was this a good idea? A bad idea? Am I overthinking it?

Everything on the spreadsheet is a guess based on statistics from previous years.

I was not, so I suppose I should presume I was rejected, huh?

It was frustrating, but I may have misread it. That said, it sounded pretty "We can't guarantee anything, but..." to me. If they're offering to consider it, go for it! There's nothing to lose, and they probably wouldn't say that unless they thought they'd be likely to accept you.

This is not really venting, more gloating (though I don't intend it that way), but I just received a personal email from a major POI (one of my favorite philosophers, really) at UMD telling me how much he liked my sample. Someone whose opinion I respect very much, and who works directly on the subject on which I wrote my sample. And this after spending the last two weeks convincing myself that the sample was a complete pile of junk. So be aware that whatever anxieties about the strength of your application that you have developed during the waiting period are probably irrational. You're better than you think you are.

Are they offering to consider it as a PhD app this year? Or suggesting that you re-apply next because they think you'd have a strong PhD application? The latter happened to me a few years back at NYU, and they ended up not accepting me the next year (much to my bewilderment; the person who told me kind of made it sound like I was a shoe-in, to the extent that anybody can be at NYU). So I would caution you not to put too much stock in what they say, if what they mean is that you should re-apply next year. Someone else could be the DGA, or your POI could have too many grad students already, or there may be less money available, or the department building could collapse, or anything else.

Since it's still quite early in the season I would wait a week or two before giving up hope.

In at UMD. Offer received via email, AOI in cog sci. Very nice, personal email - not a form letter at all.

Thanks, musicdegree4me. You've been real cool to talk to throughout all this and I'm glad we got in touch on here. The 'programme' (why do you spell it that way if you're in Los Angeles? ?) will work out for you, I'm sure of it. I'm with you about the agony of the struggle contributing to the glory of victory etc... but all that is in retrospect, and we're not in retrospect yet. Other news: according to the relevant people on facebook, the acceptances given over the phone by Berkeley the other day were early and unofficial. It's possible that there is just one PoI who is letting his/her applicants of interest know earlier than the others. Or that the people notified are on a shortlist while other acceptances are decided. So for anyone else waiting on Berkeley, I wouldn't worry about not having heard yet.

I've been having a pretty rough go of it for the past week or so, checking my app portals religiously, posting here on the gradcafe far more often than I ought to, and generally stressing out about these applications. I seem to vacillate between total overconfidence ("What grounds could any program possibly have for rejecting me? I've got a 4.0, a 170 verbal, letters from preeminent philosophers, my writing sample is the best thing since the Tractatus! I'm going 12/0/0", etc.) and total despair ("I absolutely tanked the writing sample; paragraphs such-and-such and such-and-such are unclear, the introduction is too long, the conclusion is corny, I should have cited this paper and that paper, nobody even cares about my topic. I'm going 0/0/12 and I better accept it", etc.). It's all unhealthy. Coursework doesn't really help except as a distraction - I'm taking one course that has nothing to do with any of my AOIs, and another in an area that I already know like the back of my hand from multiple courses in undergrad. Once I put my work away my post-application insanity remains intact, and it's hard to get excited about my courses when everything seems to pale in importance by comparison with the great verdict on my philosophical ability that the infallible arbiters at twelve PGR-ranked programs are about to deliver. I've tried playing video games to distract myself, but this seems such a obviously trivial pursuit that I can't enjoy it, even when playing games that I've enjoyed in the past. But, quite surprisingly, the one thing that has worked to restore my sanity is doing philosophy. Since this afternoon, I've been editing my sample, trying to strengthen its weaknesses not for applications but until I'm happy with it as a paper. I'm re-writing an old term paper, thinking about new ways to make the argument and considering new objections that I might have to respond to. I've been doing independent reading - which I used to do like a maniac in my undergraduate days, back when I was single and under 21 and had nothing else to do - reading some monographs in phil mind that I've had on my bookshelf for years but whose contents I haven't really read past the introductions. I don't know why it helps to do philosophy, but it does. Perhaps doing independent work like this, with no deadline and no real stakes, allows me to enjoy philosophy without the attendant stresses of having to keep up with a syllabus or wait for my work to be evaluated by my professors or by adcoms. Or perhaps strengthening myself as a philosopher by editing my work and reading new material helps me to feel more confident in my abilities, and relieve the feelings of self-doubt that inevitably come with the application process. Perhaps it's even that feature of philosophy that I used to find so appealing before I began to think of philosophy as a profession and a career, with which philosophy has been associated since antiquity: philosophical repose; the coolheaded sense of being aloof from worldly concerns that comes from sustained contemplation of philosophical material. Or maybe it's just being off my desk and back in my dear friend the armchair. Whatever it is, it's worked for me. I've checked my portals and my email only once over the past twelve hours, and that's saying a lot. So, if you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or obsessive about your applications, give it a try. Turn off your phone and computer, grab that one book or article you've been meaning to read for months, or print out some of your old term papers and give yourself some comments. See how it makes you feel. It's helped me go from a chain-smoking nervous wreck to being myself again for the first time since December thirty-first.

We have no way of knowing either way. One thing that this makes me wonder is what percentage of applicants post their results to the gradcafe. If it's 30%, then the rest of us are probably out of luck. But if, as I suspect, most of us post them, then our chances may be better. Who knows?

Yeah, that would make sense. Or perhaps they have decided on the candidates that they all agree on, and are now horse-trading over the rest.

Cool. So clearly they are actively doing something... What do you mean by 'logistical'?

Okay, here's some cryptic stuff from Berkeley: Checking the portal, I now notice that the mysterious expression 'Grad 20', which did not appear on my portal until just a few hours ago, is now all over my portal page. See the attached images. What could this mean? Am I 20th on some list? Does this just mean that I applied for acceptance in '20? If you applied to Berkley, it might be worth taking a look at yours to see if anything has changed.

Given that only three people have posted acceptances by Berkeley, and that they all claim to have gotten called yesterday (the 28th), do you think it's reasonable to presume that another round of acceptances will come out?

Congrats indeed. Spill the details!

Cool, I'm always happy to have more feedback. Thanks for offering some of your time. It's in the philosophy of cognitive science. PM me for details.

Sure - having a less than amazing anything will hurt. It goes without saying that nobody should upload work they've done unless they're quite confident in it.

Local philosophy department posts status update - STUNNED applicants cannot believe it. Click the link for this SHOCKING revelation

It's a fair worry and in the end what I did is this. I had four papers, and I added parenthetical explanations of their status as follows: [Paper title 1] (Writing Sample for PhD applications) [Paper title 2] (Graduate Seminar Term Paper, Draft) [Paper title 3] (Graduate Seminar Term Paper, Draft) [Paper title 4] (Undergraduate Honors Thesis) I'm hoping that this will flag which papers I think are well-developed, and which are less-developed. Hopefully that way I can satisfy all desiderata. BTW, there is no doubt that AdCom members are looking at stuff like this. Some of my 'page hits' now explictly mention the institution with which the viewer is affiliated, and they are from the schools to which I applied.

I have no evidence for this claim other than the fact that the very same papers, when submitted to professors as term papers rather than as writing sample drafts, regularly receive strong grades and commendations, even if they also come with substantial objections and suggestions for improvement. For example, I submitted my writing sample as a term paper, and received an A and highly encouraging comments that suggested that my professor was impressed by it. But then, a year later, when I re-sent it to him, telling him that I thought it was my best candidate for a writing sample and asking for his suggestions, he tore it apart (as a result of which it has been greatly improved). This suggests to me that professors view writing samples with a uniquely critical eye, since they know that the sample is supposed to be 1) the best work of philosophy produced by the student and 2) the product of intense revision over the course of months and years. Another consideration would be the reception of papers at conferences and job-talks, and the kind of papers that philosophers regularly circulate as drafts. Typically these are well-regarded even when they contain many errors, argumentative lacunae, etc. People aren't so critical because they realize that they are dealing with a work in progress. So I think that philosophers have different standards for evaluating finished work from those that they employ in evaluating works-in-progress. And I'm figuring that AdCom members will view samples as the latter, and other unpublished papers as the former.

I would have thought as much, but I am noticing a bunch of new page visits from cities where my programs are located... can't be a coincidence.