lisamadura

Just finished my Skype interview with Penn State. That was a humbling experience

@iamtheother, that is definitely worth noting. Thank you.

Congrats! You get one of these...

Wow, thank you. I believe Continental Philosophy has gotten a bad reputation (likely because the writing tends to be impossibly cryptic) but I like to think it is being redeemed. I see so much value in the continental tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries and I enjoy doing the tedious, close readings. I would gladly take on the project of wading through the interpretive muck to distill it into something more accessible to others. We had a guest lecturer in my department recently who gave a talk on the philosophy of perception. She was showing how agnosia (disorders that make people unable to identify ordinary objects or what should be familiar faces) lends support to the idea that we actually perceive artifacts, rather than just more basic natural kinds and characteristics that we then infer to be artifacts. This was an unmistakably analytic topic and approach but it fed directly into my own work on Husserl and how the cognitive disposition and epistemological need to categorize in order to make the world intelligible leads to discrimination and exclusion on a social/political level. It was so encouraging to see a direct connection between these two traditions which have for so long been set in opposition to each other. This is perhaps idealistic, but I hope our generation of philosophers is open to collaboration across traditions. I don't consider myself a continental philosopher, though I have worked extensively on figures who fall under that heading. Neither do I consider myself an analytic philosopher, though I have worked on ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and philosophy of science.

If you want a dancing psychopath, you get a dancing psychopath

I love this. I move that this replace Patrick Bateman's condescending dance for any future acceptances.

Agreed.

In at Vanderbilt! ;alkdjf;aleihgoaishg;alsdkgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <---the most articulate thing I could come up with. So Damn Excited.

Bahahaha!

Dance. Here. Now. (When I was younger, that was my festival motto. Now, it's my success-in-life motto).

I like where your head's at. Consult your faculty advisors--I'll do some reconnaissance work as well. We'll meet back here and share information.

Where in Dog's name is Vanderbilt?!!

Interesting. I am in the same position--there are a couple of schools that haven't made final decisions yet but that are not contenders for the programs to which I've already been accepted. I hadn't even considered withdrawing my application at this point. I was just going to wait until decisions were made and decline any acceptances right away so they could move down the waitlist. Withdrawing it might be more considerate--then some lucky soul doesn't have to get waitlisted before s/he is accepted. On the other hand, it's nice to be invited to the party, even if you don't want to go. Waiting for decisions will satisfy your curiosity about where you may or may not have been accepted to.

For what it's worth, your GRE scores are super impressive (I took it twice and hired a tutor but mine were too pathetic to advertise here. Seriously. Abysmal.) And based on the title, your writing sample sounds badass (Pixies reference?).

Writing is hard.

How did the interview go? How long did it last? What kind of questions did they ask? Do you feel confident? Give me a play-by-play.

Is this getting annoying yet?

Thanks @sidebysondheim and @philstudent1991. I won't worry about going into hiding.

Got an email from Loyola this morning. Waitlisted. I NEED ADVICE. I'm not terribly concerned about anonymity. I doubt that admissions committees spend their time perusing TGC sizing up the applicants. And if they do, nothing I have posted would give them any reason to doubt my abilities as a philosopher. However, I had a moment of paranoia this morning. There are still a lot of school that have not yet made final decisions, do you think that if someone on the admissions committee happens to wander into this thread and see that I have multiple acceptances they will reconsider offering me a spot because they think it is likely I'll turn them down and go with a different school? Or does that seem super far-fetched?

I believe March is very popular for organized campus visits. Both Emory and Penn State have a designated "recruitment weekends" and both of them are either the third or fourth week in March. Fordham is allowing me to choose when I want to go. Stony Brook hasn't mentioned anything about fly-outs. I'm going to bug them about it in the next week or two. That's all the info I can offer.

I am going to assume that I haven't received anything in the mail because I live just about as far as you can get from Boston so the acceptance letter has further to travel (don't tell me where you live, I'd rather remain comfortably within my delusions). This is for you, ya bad ass!

Under the "submit confirmation" tab there is a document that says "You have successfully submitted your web application" with a red "submitted" stamp on it. There doesn't appear to be any way to check application status beyond this point.

Yes! Breaking it down into smaller sections/papers is so necessary. The prospect of writing a 20, 50, 100 page paper is far too daunting. You'll be paralyzed by the size of the task in front of you. Write the different sections/chapters in different documents if you have to. For example, I know that I need to devote approx. 3 pages to Husserl's theory of internal time-consciousness so my task for the day is to write a 3 page "paper" on that topic. So much less intimidating than thinking of it in terms of the thesis as a whole. And only carrying books related to the specific section is very clever. Then once you have all the smaller sections written you get to do the fun part of organizing, integrating, and polishing the language! I don't have a day job, per se. I teach at my university but that means I have (almost) complete control over my own schedule. That being said, I make my roommate wake me up when she wakes up (she's a kindergarten teacher and gets up at 6am) so that I can write in the morning. Mornings are for thesis work and afternoons/evenings are for lecture prep and grading. I opt for getting up super early (something 4:30/5:00am) and writing in the morning rather than staying up late to write, but that's just a personal preference. I do my best thinking in the morning and I have no discipline in the evening so I assign my most mentally/imaginatively taxing jobs for the morning and the stuff I can do while watching re-runs of Seinfeld for the evening. Know your tendencies/habits and use them to your advantage. When I get tired at night there is nothing (not even a deadline) that keeps my head from hitting the pillow. Knowing this, I never leave important work for the evening.

Mail? Like, regular old snail mail? Now i'm going to be refreshing my email and staring at the mail slot in my front door like a lunatic.