FoxAndChicken

My field doesn't do interviews. :/ I did a lot of pageants for scholarships, which are way harder than any interview I've had. So I kind of wish my field had them.

Berkeley LMS seems to be less predictable. The database indicates that it should be sometime this month though. Eeps. Good luck everyone who applied to Berkeley!

I'm still not sure if I'm adult enough to have a cat. I'm thinking about having a fish in graduate school.

I didn't know that. T_T Though my backup plan was to call the department, at which point they probably would have told me that. Instead, I was chastised by a lady at the mail office who told me if I was going to mail more things to Stanford Admissions, to ensure I put the address down correctly. But she got them to deliver it, so it was fine.

Berkeley? I applied to their LMS program, which gets less applications, but also accepts less people. Of course, it's hard to figure out when they'll be releasing information, since it varies so much year to year. Timezones are so weird. But during the application process, it kind of worked in my favor. I realized Stanford needed physical copies of my transcript the Friday before my app was due, so I overnighted it and got an email around noon (my time) on the Tuesday they were due that my package couldn't be delivered. I called them like "Uh, yes. It can be. I saw the tracking thing. My package is DOWN THE STREET from where it needs to be. It's still 9AM! You could walk it there if you were feeling particularly motivated. I could probably even pay one of my friends who attends Stanford to go and collect it from you and hand it to the department. YOU WILL GET IT TO STANFORD TODAY OR FACE MY WRATH." What I actually said to the mail people was "Is there anything you can do? It would be really helpful." And it turns out they knew exactly where it needed to go, and were just being pedantic about the way it was addressed. Fortunately, it was also still like early o'clock, so they delivered it and my application was all in on time. Whew.

Hahaha but in all seriousness, I have six assignments due this week, and I'm sitting here refreshing my email. My first notification isn't even projected to be out until the twelfth.

Don't you mean you KANT wait? ... Sorry.

Still no news. My first app was due December 8th and my last one January 15th. None of the schools I have applied to have released any information to anyone, though. So it's not abnormal, just anxiety-inducing.

Hey wait! I can weigh in on this because I've read a bunch of the literature on philosophy of happiness! ... Basically the literature says that we can't really apply empirical data to happiness because we don't have a good idea of what it is. Any survey that purports to give data on happiness can be answered in ways that show contradictory motivations. (Example: ``Are you satisfied with your life?'' One could answer with ``no'' and still be quite happy, they just are the kind of person who strives to better themselves and sees satisfaction as a type of complacency. Welfare is probably not happiness for similar reasons.) Rational choice theory says you should do the things that you think will make you happy, though, so I fully support your decision to eat chocolate.

I really enjoy studying the interactions between math and language, especially looking at what kinds of things you can take for granted in a math proof but not language. I also really enjoy modal logic. (I had a math friend read over my writing sample for graduate apps and her response was "It looks great to me! Though you spelled 'model' with an 'a.'"... Wut.) I like Kripke's hierarchy of frames, and wonder if their is something analogous to other areas of logic. There definitely is in Abstract Algebra! I haven't done a ton with formal epistemology, though one of my letter writers is in the field. I went to a talk she gave and received a free copy of her new book! It's quite excellent but also I don't feel qualified to read it. I hope to learn more about epistemology in graduate school though!

It's so nice that y'all have people applying with you. Everyone in my department who intends to apply that I've talked to says they're taking at least a year off. Also, because my major is logic, not philosophy, I don't know all of the philosophy students very well. I have lots of math friends to commiserate with though. They're already getting acceptances though, and I've yet to hear anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I second @TakeruK! I am only an undergraduate, but I type literally everything on ShareLaTeX these days.

It's terrifying! Though if any of y'all come visit Ann Arbor, Michigan, I give great tours. I very much love my school.

Some of them gave me legit anxiety. Like, you could tell that they tried to give all of the choices, but I'm like the most ethnically/racially confused person, you know? My dad is Mexican, but he got the weirdly pale genes, and he speaks five languages. So, he sounds European but people frequently ask if he's Chinese. Despite that, he's like 1/4 black, which mostly shows up in that I basically have an afro. My abuelita looks Philippina (is that the spelling of that?), and like half of my family still speaks Mayan. So I'm like ... Native American...? But like all the for those options were the ones like Cherokee. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Good luck, though! My writing sample was kind of in that area... I didn't have a ton of papers strictly using logic, since those kinds of classes are typically problem sets. So my paper was supporting one way of using logic in philosophy of language over another.

This has been totally freaking me out. But mostly in a good way, I think. Weird things that cause vague existential crisis are like when my Starbucks barista gives me free coffee when I'm stressed (which is like basically 2-3 times a week) and I realize that I'll have to make friends with a new barista if I move. Or worse. WHAT IF MY NEW SCHOOL DOESN'T HAVE A LOCAL STARBUCKS?!?!?!?! . . . I don't think I applied anywhere without one, but how would I survive?

I am so sorry this happened to you. I had a kind of awkward reading to do for my philosophy class today, and I can't get through it without blushing. Congrats on the acceptances, though! I'm an undergrad at UMich, but I don't know anything about our physics program. Is it one of your top choices?

I applied to six philosophy programs and Berkeley LMS. Just wondering if anyone else here applied there. What kinds of things are you interested in?

Is that where that's from?

It was recently suggested to me that I go into finance, actually. I can probably spin my degree as a technical one (majored in Logic). I don't totally hate the idea, I guess.

So, given that it's my last semester of undergrad, I signed up for six classes because they're all cool. I'm also working three jobs and in four student orgs, two of which are major leadership positions. I was also recently asked to help on a project to choose art for our math department and another project to develop an online logic introduction for students taking lower level math. (A database of problems.) I'm also speaking at graduation. So, basically, I'm not sleeping. ???? You would think with all that, I'd be sufficiently distracted from waiting but I feel sick to my stomach all the time about the fact that I literally don't have an idea about what I'm doing five months from now.

Hello! I just found this forum. Working on applications and decided to chat with people. I'll be updating my signature perhaps, but for now, I'm an undergraduate senior applying to mostly Philosophy programs (and Berkeley LMS). I'm actually a logic major, though. I'm interested in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and decision theory. I already applied to Berkeley, Stanford, and Princeton. Still applying to Tufts MA program, Yale, MIT, Michigan, Brown, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia. I only have a 3.5 GPA, (though my past two semesters were 4.0) on account of my major is about 1/3 math courses and the early math track did a number on my grades. (I probably wasn't prepared for college math, and the giant weeder classes here were pretty unsympathetic. My upper level math courses are better though, since they are more proof-based. My struggle was mainly with computational questions.) I have all A's in my philosophy courses, though, so that should help maybe. . . ? I've only taken one philosophy course that wasn't really formal, though. I'm taking two more of these next semester. I don't really want to order my preferences, on account of I will go to any program that accepts me. If I get accepted to more than one, then I'll figure that out. I anticipate having to work for a year and reapplying next fall, though.