TwoTimesTolstoy

Awesome, thanks!

Would you mind reporting back with your general impression of BU from students? I'm on the waitlist and I noticed that the graduate student page on their department's website doesn't include email addresses (and I feel a bit uneasy about emailing the DGS and being like "Hey, are there any graduate students that you can put me into contact with?" even though the questions I have are better directed toward grad students)

Really? Take a damn shower. People have to smell you -- they have to sit next to you for 2-3 hours in a (probably hot & stuffy) seminar room. Shower for the sake of others, but for goodness sake give enough of a damn about yourself to take care of yourself. Do whatever you want with your hair, but I really can't imagine it feels very good to walk around stank AF.

Does anybody have any ideas regarding UCR? I haven't heard of any waitlists or rejections, only the two fellowship acceptances (perhaps they had a university-wide deadline to meet and so made fellowship offers early?).

Anyone want to claim the New Mexico acceptance?

No, you're fine. If anything, there are way too many people who think/feel that if they don't climb the ladder of academia and get a TT job at a university that they're a failure. Philosophy was once, thousands of years ago, concerned with living a meaningful life -- something that concerns everybody. Nobody should feel bad about pursing an education in philosophy while planning to do something with their lives outside of the academy. I think it would very much behoove a lot of people if they were to realize that there is more than one right answer to the question of what to do with their lives and their education.

I think it's a bit obsessive and pointless to try to work out one's "odds". The biggest point to be made here is that the process is far from cut and dry. Stats really don't mean shit. Nobody cares about your GRE and GPA if other applicants are a much better fit for the program. Nobody cares about how famous your letter writers are if they consider your writing sample to be uninteresting and/or underdeveloped. Nobody cares about your publications/institutional prestige if your statement of purpose is blunderous or you don't seem like a good match for the people in the department, both in terms of research and personality (I've talked to people on hiring committees who swore up and down that the person who eventually gets the job is often the person, of the finalists, who got on with the current faculty best -- they're building an intellectual community, and they want people who seem like they'd get along great). Moreover, I think this obsession about an applicant's "stats" has grown out of the "How exactly does this process work and what exactly do I need to be successful?" mentality, which is, in many aspects, absurd and dangerously obsessive. GPA/GRE/University prestige (and even publications!) give very little, if any, indication that one is a good philosopher; one shows their competency as a philosopher through their writing sample, a well-written statement of purpose, and writing interesting papers and making interesting contributions in classes that your letter-writers will mention. There are too many very gray aspects of consideration that hugely weigh in on the determination of admissions decisions to say that "one is likely or more likely than most to be successful with x, y, and z." As in myriad situations, the attempt to quantify things is not only unhelpful, but also serves to cover up other aspects of the situation that matter quite a lot. In the fictional words of Albert Camus (taken from my favorite edition of Existential Comics, "The Analytics at the Bar"), "It's more of an art than a science, old boy."

Good look! Do other people do cover pages for their writing sample? Part of me feels like it's pretentious (...it's just a writing sample...) but part of me is like "well a cover page can't count toward the page limit, and that's another half a page of real estate I could use..."

EASY! ...I was using Calibri lol. I don't have word, I use libreoffice so I'm tinkering now to see if I can't find a more suitable font.