Calyspo06

Don't know what your AOI is, but a number of people have got admits at LOTS of top places, including Pitt, and they will inevitably have to decline most of their offers, which will open up a lot of slots or other people and bump people into new offers. So, I'd say your chances are good at least some of them will end up declining Pitt. I would hang on to your current offer at the other place a while longer if you really still have your heart set on Pitt. Unless you have some other pressing reason to commit to your other offer. This process can take a while to sort itself out. People are probably reluctant to post where they are declining this early in the game right now quite honestly because they are having a hard time deciding and it's a very scary process to let go of a good prospect when you just can't know for sure where is going to turn out to be the best place. I wouldn't give up hope this early in the game. I didn't get my best offer till the last week before April 15!

Wow!, Congratulations!! Not to immediately put the pressure on you, 'cuz it's a big decision, but I think a lot of ancients lurkers here who are wait listed at some of the places you've been admitted to would appreciate learning which 4 of the Pitt/Notre Dame/Arizona/Chicago/Princeton departments you intend to decline. (There's a thread for that.) Or, maybe a reminder to people that some declines at 4 of those places are on the way and that they might hold out hope before making their own decisions too soon. Your decision will inevitably trigger a domino effect in the whole system of ancients slots available. It's going to be crazy, lol.

Agreed. LOL. This brings back such memories of my days at Boston College. And I also do think the railing against analytic types by continental people, in my experience, comes from profs over 65 (who were that age at least 15 years ago). For anyone reading this, I should say that half the faculty at BC that I knew has retired or died since I was there, so I have no idea what it is like now in terms of its faculty's attitudes about the "great divide." Indeed, I feel like since I moved to a different department, I have moved to a completely different ball game. And that's another thing I should mention. Regardless of whether you're continental or analytic, moving from one department to another, even supposedly within the same 'style,' can still often feel like you've moved to a completely different ball game. The culture can be so different. I also attended classes at BU while I was in Boston. It was very different from BC, which again was very different from where I have been recently. You'll find there is a learning curve wherever you end up, just to get up to speed on how things are done in the new philosophical culture you find yourself in.

I did my MA at Boston College MANY years ago, which as you all probably know is about as Continental as you can get, in that SPEPy kind of way. I ended up in that program accidentally, after transferring out the pol-sci dept because I realized I would way rather do philosophy. Whoa, was that continental thing weird, but it was the only philosophy I really knew. As an ancients person, I was fairly insulated from the most intense aspects of the continental language game, I guess, however. Anyway, after my MA there, I went to a PhD program at a school that, at the time, dubbed itself as "pluralist." I wanted a program that would be less continental but where I would still understand what was going on. Well, I actually felt like I was in kindergarten my first year in that program. The continental people and even the ancients people did philosophy in a totally "analytic" (which is actually a misnomer) way. I really struggled. It was liking learning a whole different language, immersion style. After my first year, my department underwent a radical shift towards becoming more solidly analytic. Of course the grad students who had come there to do continental phil were not happy about this shift. At any rate, I ended up being trained up in what, as I have come to understand, is a kind of middle-ground analytic style. We are not uber-analytic like the way you might find things at a place like UCLA. But we are analytic enough to be taken seriously by the Leiter cabal. I am glad I was trained in both styles. I have learned a lot from both "sides." I think each side will never fully appreciate the other side unless they give the other side's methodologies and respective language games a real try, experiencing it from the inside. Ultimately, I think I am more suited to the analytic style because it suits my personality and style of asking questions better. But I have met some absolutely brilliant people in my department who do some crazy amazing stuff in the continental vein who I have tremendous respect for and who I am convinced I will see great writing from in the future, particularly after Leiter and his generation of people who are intent on drawing such a rigid line between these two styles retire/die off. Really, Leiter contrived this whole divide and then created the analytic hegemony as a kind of self-serving and institution. I know a lot of younger so called "analytic" philosophers who would themselves just as well do away with the distinction and and the whole Leiter crusade to keep the division going. I really believe younger philosophers-- your own generation, surely-- will outgrow this distinction and cast it off within the next 10 years or so and start creating your own paths. This distinction has already gone stale.

Actually, languages are not essential depending on your area of interest. Obviously if you are doing ancients, or continental French philosophy or something like that, the relevant language(s) is/are pretty much a must. But if you are doing M&E, phil of science, or logic, I have seen departments move toward the the trend of having flexible requirements that allow you to opt out of the language requirement and allow you to take some non-philosophy classes that are useful for your area of interest or else take high level logic courses if that is more relevant. E.g., if you are doing phil of mind, you may be required to take some psychology or cognitive science in lieu of a language. Also, I highly recommend what @KevDoh says above. I know people who did well getting in PhD programs some years later by the tactics KevDoh has described above. Believe me, you have time. I didn't get into my PhD program till I was 32. I first spent time in grad school doing poli-sci, then classics, then an MA in philosophy. I made a lot of good faculty connections during that time before applying to the PhD. Keep your chin up.

Wow, UNC-Chapel Hill is on the rampage today. I sort of wish they had admitted EVERYONE. Or at least wait-listed more people than they evidently have. Also, hurry up Stanford and Princeton! Lets get this ball rolling. I'm glad today is Super Tuesday. It will keep my mind diverted tonight.

I disagree about the importance of highly attractive funding packages. If you are really serious about making a career in academia, then you should attend the school that is best positioned to give you the best academic experience for your area of specialization and frankly the best letters of recommendation and credentials you can possibly get when it comes to going out on the market. Those letters will make a huge difference for you! The market is so absurd right now that really the only people with good to decent chances of jobs are those coming out of T10-15 schools. It's just not worth it to take a couple thousand dollars more for the sake of creature comforts in your grad school school years when the school you go to plays such a huge role in whether your dossier gets reviewed in job applications. Of course, if you can't actually live on the funding offered, or you have a child you are rearing, that is certainly something to consider. But usually decent programs offer funding that is enough to make it by on (or better) in the location the university is located. That's my 2 cents.

I don't think it's a selfish hope, I think it's just the reality of how it all works. Arguably, it's selfish to hang on to multiple offers all at once for very long. Lots of people get multiple offers while the best others get is a pile of wait lists. The people with multiple acceptances can't accept every place. May as well free up some spots ASAP and get this whole ball rolling for those are are agonizing about getting in anywhere. Yet I suspect we won't see a whole lot of movement for a few more weeks. People still have to do campus visits. Also what makes a huge difference is when you choose to commit somewhere versus hold out for a place you're wait-listed at to finally come through for you. Some of the "top 1%" (I saw someone make that socio-economic comparison in of these fora once) are likely disappointed with the fact that they got into, e.g., Yale and Harvard but not NYU and holding out for a late offer, meaning a Yale spot (or whatever top 10 place) could be given up later in the game. This happens at all strata. So, unfortunately, I think a lot of people push it to the last couple weeks and in my experience a lot happens in that last week before April 15. That last week is a crazy domino effect. So part of me doesn't mind it taking a long time for the people "ahead" of me to bide their time if it means they get better offers later in the game. I'm in a special situation myself. I haven't technically applied anywhere this season. Rather, I am trying to return to my original PhD program from which I had to leave several years ago for major medical reasons. Due to funding issues, being reinstated back in my program depends on the top two people they made offers to in my subfield declining their offers, so I am essentially wait-listed. At my age, and after having done an MA and all my PhD coursework, it makes a lot more sense for me to finish up in my program than to try to apply at other places and do another PhD worth of coursework all over again at some new place. Plus I've established relationships with all the people I will work with. So for me, it all rests on these two applicants declining their offers. Praying so hard that these two applicants get better offers elsewhere and are wise enough to realize, for their own academic and professional interests' sake, that my department is suddenly extremely handicapped for future work in my subfield, particularly for those who are at coursework stage but also for anyone who plans to embark on a dissertation 3 years from now. There's no indication that the dept. plans to improve this situation. The Leiter specialty rankings do not reflect this new deficiency and I'd say there are about four schools we appear to be above in those rankings who totally ought to be above us now due to our situation plus other faculty moves that strengthen other schools. (Happily, for anyone reading this, given my special situation, basically no one here is "competing" with me. Nevertheless, how the cascade of Declines plays out is all-important to me. So I am feeling everyone's pain without actually feeling like a competitor in this year's game. I do have to say, however, that after you all get through this Olympian feat, since that's how bad just getting into the PhD system has become nowadays, academia is nothing but one Olympian feat of competitive prowess after another. The admissions process is just the beginning. Academia is more brutal than whatever you've been told and whatever you can imagine. You've been forewarned. Also, I've come to realize, in watching the admission process this season versus how it was 10 years ago and 8 years prior to that, that the game has become increasingly based solely on your academic pedigree alone. If you weren't lucky enough to go to an outstanding undergraduate institution with name-brand professors in the field-- as if you could have known as a high school senior that you wanted to do a PhD in philosophy!-- then it's like you can kiss your chances of getting into a T15 school goodbye. You are judged all too heavily on your letters of rec and, if you look at the GRE scores of some of the folks admitted to T10 schools, clearly those don't really matter. Basically, the game is rigged so that talented students from no-name institutions or even good schools with no-name profs will never have their application dossiers given much consideration. In addition, students are coming into programs far more polished and with more advanced level writing/research skills than they had as first-year students 20 years ago. I just want all of you to realize how absurdly competitive it is now, compared to how it was 20 years ago when I graduated from a small, good, liberal arts college. At that time, it was not unreasonable for me to expect to get into a PhD program-- I did political science at that time so that's what my program was. Now, if I were graduating from that same liberal arts college, I do not think it would be possible for me to get into a PhD program. I would certainly have to do an MA first at a very good program before being able to get into a respectable PhD program. So I just want everyone to realize how much the picture has changed in favor of elite pedigreed students. If you get in anywhere ranked at all, even just on a wait list but never get accepted this season, without that cream of the crop pedigree, you should be very proud of yourselves, not down on yourselves. If you don't gain admission this round, try for an exceptional MA program with faculty whose names will be much noticed on your letters of recommendations.) I, of course, have other middle-aged wisdom about this whole matter, but I will refrain from any downers and even quite possibly psychologically freeing advice that is nonetheless not welcomed by people under 30. :-) Good luck to us all.

In reply to SamStone's question: I have no specific info on Johns Hopkins per se, but the unfortunate answer is that it seems that not everyone who lurks around on GradCafe to check results necessarily shares their own results. So we are not getting a complete picture of the whole acceptance/wait-list situation. So there are likely to be a number of JH acceptances that have not posted their acceptance. Also, I am familiar with at least two methods departments use to make decisions: (1) They have X number slots available, but they make roughly 2X admission offers, on the idea that they will get around the right number of people to accept their offers as they have slots available. They have a wait-list, but the wait-list is already fairly disadvantaged and perhaps they don't notify those people what their status is unless they have to. Method 2) They make offers to their top choice applicants and send out wait-list notifications at that time, see who bites, then start making offers in a second round after they get some people who decline. But-- and here is the sticky situation that I was in several years ago-- they do not always tell all wait-listed people that they actually have been wait-listed. They just simply keep them in limbo in case they have to go that far back before getting a bite. I was finally made an offer 5 days short of April 15 the year I got admitted to my PhD program. I had no idea I had been wait-listed because I had never heard a thing from the school that eventually made an offer to me. And I was also in that very same situation at another school as well, and they weren't able to make an offer till AFTER April 15!. Also, many departments divvy up the slots they have according to area of interest. They want to bring in a class of people that represent all the different areas in the field, rather than pick just the absolute top applicants. This way they don't end up with, e.g., all M&E people and then make their ethics and philosophy of language faculty ticked off for not bringing in students for them to work with. So if you get wait-listed at various places, you gotta hope that the correct applicants (the one's in your AOI) decline their offers, because that is the wait-list line you are in. And that's why it's extremely difficult to gauge your chances based on the postings here on GradCafe. You rarely can tell most people's AOIs since most of the Results posters are not forum participants and many people are not even posting in the Results. If you don't hear ANYTHING from certain schools you applied to by mid-March, I would suspect you are on one of those wait-lists where they haven't yet told you that you're wait-listed. Unless it's a big bureaucratically run school like U of Arizona. I didn't hear a thing from them till like June, when I finally got not one but TWO rejection letters from them! I don't think I was ever wait-listed there. I think Arizona is just extremely inefficient about sending out rejections. So, moral of the story: call the department if you haven't heard anything in what seems like a reasonable time to hear something. Especially if you are holding onto acceptances while waiting to hear from a school you really have your heart set on. The unfortunate reality is that this whole application season game actually really does play out all the way to the very last minute, with tons of people making their decisions in the very last week and triggering a cascade of wait-listers to move up a notch, and with many departments having to dig back several people down the line on their waitlists before they get a person to accept their offer. It's agonizing and brutal.