Hello, I'm Nat. @jacbarcan introduced the idea of contacting admissions in an attempt to find out information about admissions decisions. I would be in charge of this task. The aim would be to minimize contact between applicants and admissions committees while also alleviating some of our (the applicants') stress and uncertainty. Of course, this may not work. Admissions committees are notoriously ambiguous in answering any questions regarding decisions. Moreover, we do not want to pester them more by contacting them a day or two after the prediction date. I'm here to discuss ideas for how to get the most informative answers without annoying anyone in admissions.
Some of the topics of debate are:
(1) Email or phone?
(2) Contact general admissions or graduate director?
(3) How much information should we give them? Should we let them know this information will be posted on grad cafe?
(4) Ground rules for posting, e.g.
(a) contact only 7 days after prediction date if no results have been posted yet
(b) contact only 5 days after acceptances/WLs have been posted to see if school is done with acceptances/WL (this applies to Berkeley, for example)
(5) Contact Leiter?
Please discuss your ideas and concerns here.
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Since I want to centralize the thread on this topic, I'll quote some of the discussion that's already taken place.
First, here's Jac's original post:
@jacbarcan: "I've asked a fellow applicant to collaborate with me on the blog. This person's role would be to call universities at appropriate times and check on the status of decisions. We hope that by doing this we can alleviate some stress on the applicant side as well as on the side of professors, grad students, or administrators in philosophy departments, the latter by reducing the amount of applicants calling and emailing. We never before have done this and it is possible it won't work. If it seems to cause too much trouble, my collaborator may withdraw from the role. Please let us know how you feel about this and whether or not you think we should continue with this option."
And some discussion of the role(s) I should play:
@jacbarcan: "Maybe a job for my new blogger buddy could be to make sure [that results posts are legitimate] after a few days of crickets."
@jacbarcan: "Nat and I are still trying to figure out good ground rules for emailing/calling and I'm unsure what the consensus is on asking before anything has been sent out when they're still within their release date ranges. (Hopefully that all makes sense.)"
@gughok: "I would be incredibly surprised but equally grateful if this succeeded. My impression is that admissions committees are not eager to make particularly unambiguous statements concerning where they are in the process, so I would predict that your calls might not get useful answers (and, if multiple calls are made, committee members might grow irritated). But I would appreciate someone at least trying, and if it works that would be all the better."
@Abendstern: "Wouldn't it make more sense to email a DGS or the like than to call admins? The latter seems much more likely to give a canned response." "
"I would only add that it would be wise to pitch it as service that would benefit the admissions committee. E.g.: 'We understand you probably receive a large amount of emails from anxious applicants asking about when to expect results, so we wanted to reach out to you directly in order to help cut down on this. If you were able to give us a sense of when applicants might expect to hear back about rejections, etc., we could informally advertise that information on the GradCafe forum in a way that wouldn't require any official commitment from you.' Something like that?"
@philosophe: "If you call you don't have to identify yourself (whereas email obviously has your name). In my experience administrators are happy to let you know if all of the acceptances have gone out (or not), if they know. I think it might be worse to publicize that you're posting the results on Grad Cafe. Better to have a casual chat with the department administrator and schmooze to see if they're willing to mention what they know.
EDIT: I just wanted to add, I wouldn't ask about when rejections will be sent out (because we can infer rejections from lack of news). I would ask about whether or not all offers have been made and whether or not there is a WL."
@Abendstern: "Don't we already have the information for when acceptances went out and whether there is a waitlist? I think the torturous part of this process is waiting for a rejection letter with the lingering hope that your rejection is being held back 'just in case' rather than due to the slow, lumbering process of the graduate school bureaucracy (which I believe is the entity that tends to process official rejections). Maybe it's just me, but I find the idea of 'presumed rejections' really appalling. They should say something like, "Yes, we have released all acceptances and WLs, you can expect the rest to be rejections, which usually arrive in early March."
As for you point about email: fine, but each of us could call the admins right now and do the same anyway. What's the point of doing this in a centralized way in that case? Also, there is such a thing as caller ID. I certainly have it on my work phone, and I imagine any admin or DGS would as well. And if you're concerned about them knowing who you are as an applicant, we could have people who aren't applying (or even ever planning to apply) to a particular department send emails to that department. Or, you know, make a fake email even...
Really, though, the wisdom of contacting departments at all in order to create a more centralized basis of knowledge is a question we might even consider requesting Leiter to ask on his blog. My guess is that a fair number of commenters would support the suggestion, even if they think GradCafe isn't necessarily a positive development in the admissions process. (Though, if that were their belief, then they should recognize the phenomenon as a result of their own departmental failings to send out acceptances, rejections, and WLs all at the same time.)"
@jacbarcan: "1. Fake email: both Nat and I are under fake names and emails.
2. Totally agree that it would be excellent to send to Leiter this question since most of the point is to alleviate the stress on both ends, including on the department's end. I'm sure some professor's don't care, but even from that post on the survey a couple of weeks ago some profs definitely feel harassed."
