gughok

Oftentimes personal reasons can factor into the decision in ways that an onlooker would have no way of predicting. At the end of the line my decision was between Harvard and UCLA, and I can tell you that a lot of people saw the former as the obvious choice. For reasons of fit, though, and perhaps more importantly for a host of personal reasons with no academic import whatsoever, I chose the latter. Unfortunately I don't know that there is a reliable method of predicting the choices admits will make beyond very holistic references to perceptions of quality and fit.

For what it's worth, a plurality of the people in my cohort at UCLA (i.e. us current first-years) were on invisible waitlists. Moreover, the state funding situation means the department can only afford one international student per year. I was #2 and waitlisted without notice until the first person they gave the offer to turned it down... the Tuesday before decisions were due. It might end up being a long wait for some of you but it does happen, and not infrequently.

I'm from the previous season, but I'm Iranian-Canadian and LGBT. The visa ban has me functionally trapped in the US for now - while dual nationals are ostensibly fine, the situation is too unstable for me to risk leaving the country. If conditions for me continue to deteriorate, though (there are rumours of a massive anti-LGBT executive order in the works, for example), I think it's genuinely possible I'll be forced to drop out for my own safety and go back to Toronto.

Yeah, the most I can glean from this is that in addition to the two advil, you should take a few OTC reality checks. Sorry =/

For what it's worth, I did no reading related to my AOIs outside of coursework and writing sample (which was basically an extracurricular activity for me). I don't think there's an expectation that you "do" philosophy outside the classroom all the time as an undergraduate. If you've taken enough philosophy courses that should be good enough, and if you take the "right" courses then you should be on the "cutting edge" (e.g. I took multiple seminars on contemporary issues in language and mind). Presumably it could help if you've done a lot of independent reading and can speak on a wide range of issues, but it doesn't seem to me that that's expected. The only extracurricular philosophical reading I've done as an undergraduate is in continental philosophy, which is totally disjoint from what I've professed interest in. If you're mostly worried that your AOIs will seem out of date, do a little reading on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and see whether there's anything new you can talk about related to your interests. If you can plug into some more contemporary references you should be fine.

It's definitely common - just try and select a self-contained excerpt with a significant argument as the thing you choose to submit. Don't send something that's mostly exposition, or something that's far too long. If you do the latter, include instructions for which parts are important to read, and which parts should be skipped, where the former add up to whatever length limit the school has imposed. If you wanted to, you could mention in your cover letter that you're submitting an excerpt of your thesis, and that whatever position you're presenting there will ultimately be expanded upon (but again, that's no excuse for an incomplete product; whatever you send in should be freestanding).

Since people are throwing numbers around, I'll just quote what one of my professors here told me about the process: Good letters will get you into the shortlist of about 40 applicants. A good sample will get you to the last 20. Then things start breaking down into the details.

I'm confident that GPA will never get you discarded out of hand from the admissions process. You will not be looked at any less simply because of your GPA. I also agree with dgswaim above that a committee will be forgiving with your math courses. The best evidence I can give you is of someone this season (not me, and I don't remember their username) who averaged ~3.5 and got into NYU et al. Not exactly the same situation as you, but you've also got a background you can (and should) explain - tell them how you started in community college and how your sense of direction toward philosophy has developed since then. You're definitely right that the game has gotten more competitive since ten years ago. But I'd say the competition has grown in the samples and depth of background expected, not in GPA (or GRE, for that matter).

I'd suggest that UCLA edges out Berkeley in language, especially given that its linguistics department is absolutely top-tier. Of course, I may be biased since I'm going there. Would you be able to take classes at USC? That's also in LA. And if there are faculty at UCLA or USC who you may be interested in, maybe you could have them as external advisors? That would definitely be a leg up.

Yes, I've accepted UCLA's offer (Rutgers rejected me off the waitlist)

I've just declined Harvard in what has been the most difficult decision of my life. I hope one of you fabulous folk gets a nice Friday surprise.

UCLA!

Hot potato! Got an email acceptance from UCLA just now. I will probably be turning it down within a day.

I tend toward existing as non being on Facebook but I appreciate every opportunity to exist more actively.

Unfortunately, moving the deadline back those two weeks would most likely just move everything else back by the same. Departments will inevitably take as long as they can to arrange the visits, and students will similarly take their time to make their decisions. It's a self-bootstrapping problem.

I've plucked up the courage and declined Toronto's MA. I hope that'll translate to good news for someone else.

Depends on the department. I know of places that have learnt to relax their language requirements to basically "any language", since each can contribute in its own way to one's studies.

Not me, but a grad student in one of my classes told me he'd heard absolutely nothing from UNC until April 15th, when they suddenly called him to tell him he'd been accepted off the waitlist. So it's possible you're in a similar situation.

Officially I'm pretty sure you still have to decide by the 15th. I have heard, however, of programs being forgiving and offering a few extra days in such extenuating circumstances.

Oh dear. This sounds like the high school-university transition x100.

You make good points, of course. Regarding your first paragraph: yeah. If the question is how doing philosophy is going to be productive for myself, that's both understandable and easily answered. Regarding your second paragraph, and particularly, "pretty poor reason for ignoring the suffering of your fellow humans" - yes and no. On the one hand, I mentioned my "apathy toward conventions of social productivity", which I'm sure many share (and many don't). On the other hand (and this gets into my rationalization of my apathy), I feel it's a bit misled to imply, as you are, that there's some sort of zero-sum game going on where my contributions are going to be difference makers in one way or another, and it's up to me to justify putting them in one place rather than another. What I mean is that med schools take a certain number of students: if it's not going to be me, it's going to be someone else. Same with law schools. There are limited jobs for public defenders and social workers, and someone will pick them up. Even revolutionary innovators are, within an order of magnitude, replaceable: consider how the intellectual environments of their time pushed Leibniz and Newton to invent calculus at the same time! Had Leibniz decided to stick to discussing monads, we'd still have Newton's calculus (albeit with its rather wonky notation). My point is that your suggestion that I, "a young, intelligent person--could really benefit them in a meaningful way" implies that either it's important for me to be the one helping others, or that if I don't do it, nobody else will. I don't think either of those are true. As long as someone is doing the helping, I don't think it has to be me necessarily. And someone will - my not applying to Johns Hopkins med school and getting in, not that I would get in, means someone else did. To turn the tables: suppose I was considering a career as a doctor, and someone told me I'm ethically obligated to contribute to society by advancing philosophy. I would reply that if I'm not the one doing the contributing, someone else will gladly take my place, with the case-in-point that if I had gone into medicine there would be one more spot at the grad schools I've received offers from for someone else to do philosophy. In sum, I suppose I agree that there's an ethical problem, and I've provided the answer I think works for me. Unless I've got reason to think that I'm superhuman in skill at something I could make a monstrous contribution to, or if I think I can do something that's irreplaceable, there's no reason for me to feel ethically obligated toward a certain altruistic profession. And I, at least, don't think I satisfy either of those conditions.

This is really the winning answer right here.

I think this is a good question. At the same time, I have at best an apathy toward conventions of social productivity (this does not endear me to most). Therefore, my answer is really incredibly (perhaps unsatisfactorily) simple: I'm doing what I like. If that isn't good enough for someone, at this point IDGAF. I don't feel obligated to greater society when a niche already exists for what I want to do, and when that niche itself contains plenty of people I can help by mere cooperation. If I ever defend the "productivity" of what I do it will be in a selfish interest of maintaining the position itself; it will be because I'm at risk of losing my niche, i.e. because philosophy is at risk of losing its position in academia. And even so, I wouldn't be ambivalent toward using sophistry to maintain philosophy. If it's easier to make up some bullshit about why philosophy is useful, then I'll do that and get back to doing the philosophy I like (of course, there are plenty of good and easy arguments for philosophy's utility, to be deployed as needed, but sometimes a little bit of convincing nonsense can save a lot of dull time and effort). Now, this isn't to say that I have no interest in demonstrating the practicality of philosophy to "society" (which is just a big circle-jerk enveloping this little one - I prefer this to the larger). But, whenever I endeavour to make any such demonstration, it won't be because I care about advancing civilization qua civilization - it'll be because I want to get people to help me and my fellows do philosophy, and what better way to do that than to show them how it's relevant to them? Everybody wins! So, broadly speaking, if I'm to comment on "the role of students play in culture or society more generally", I would describe my role (not speaking for anyone else) as this: I'm trying to be happy, and in the doing so I hope to make others happy insofar as happiness can be shared among people who fall into our little corner of the world; but I won't go out of my way to advance humanity to some arbitrary apotheosis. After all, "productivity" tends not to extend far beyond one's immediate circle. An office job, with its office culture and its office goals and office collaboration and so on, is no more inherently productive than five years at grad school, with its grad culture and grad goals and grad collaboration. You can touch at least as many lives as a grad student as you can working in an office cubicle (sorry, don't mean to be picking on this one example, it's just what came to mind). The criticisms you describe simply demonstrate the prejudice of people who've subscribed to some illusory convention that only certain forms of productivity are genuinely productive. Because, let's be honest: unless you're literally growing potatoes or building houses, what you do for money is in response to some biologically unnecessary request that someone else has, and to engage in chauvinism there is just dogmatic. Anyway I hope that wasn't too dreadful a ramble; the sun is heating this room to uncomfortable levels and the words have just been spilling forth from my brow.

Hm. I definitely agree with you that certain opportunities will pass, and that this presents a strong dilemma. Nonetheless, I think I see reason to be more optimistic than this about potential non-academic job prospects after leaving professional philosophy. Here are just a few well-paying industries which (to my knowledge) permit entry at any (well, below 50-60) age that someone with the intellectual talent required for philosophy should be able to enter depending on their personality, listed in descending order of my confidence in the preceding claim: law, IT, tech (e.g. software dev), engineering of all kinds, business (entrepreneurial, managerial, etc.), marketing, finance, numerous others I don't know about. There are plenty of jobs that a bright 30 year-old with a BA and PhD could enter with a little bit of training, especially as autodidactism grows increasingly respected in a number of fields (see particularly tech and IT). As for your more modest claim: these aren't opportunities that "will be passing you by". They're opportunities waiting for you to take them. You're no less able to "earn and save money, travel, buy a house, and establish yourself" after leaving professional philosophy. You're just late to the party. Sure, you can't "get ahead" anymore, but does that really matter? I don't think life is a competition for being the youngest CEO in history or any such thing. I won't claim that your own career will be easy to return to because I don't know what it is. I will simply claim that if someone finds that philosophy isn't for them, they'll have hardly any more difficulty finding profitable positions at 32 than they would have had at 22, save certain niche occupations that are very age dependent. There are many late bloomers, after all, who bloom no weaker for the fact: Alan Rickman and J. K. Rowling come to mind as immediate examples.

I like to try and think of it this way, picking up on your common-sense observation that "if one is brilliant and smart [and hard-working/persevering/etc.] enough to get into competitive PhD programs, then one is more than likely to succeed in other fields": if someone is indeed that capable of succeeding in many potential fields, then at worst going into philosophy is going to be an adventure. Even if one finds after a few years of professional philosophy that they're unsatisfied by the financial compensation, it will have been an incredible life experience. Those years spent are only wasted if they weren't enjoyed - but nobody would (I imagine) study philosophy professionally if they didn't like it. The opportunity cost may number in the many tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of dollars, but if the time was pleasant that's a fine fee to pay in my mind. And, having decided that philosophy isn't well-paying enough for them, anyone bright enough to be a graduate student should have little difficulty finding lucrative employment elsewhere. It's yet another chapter in one's life, but to be an author capable of penning such words means that whether one chooses to continue the story to its end, or switch to another arc after thirty pages, the book will be a fruitful one. TL;DR