Tsuroyu

Hey nano, I lived in SF for about the last 8 years or so, let me see if I can get you started here. Unfortunately, "cheap" and "in SF" are not likely to be found in the same sentence very often. On the bright side, the other part of your question ("walking or easy commuting distance) has a better answer: from pretty much any point in the city, you can easily commute to any other point. UCSF in particular is right on the MUNI's N line, so it's very accessible, regardless of where you live. And if you end up somewhere that's not close to a MUNI line, busses will have you covered. So then your question gets a little trickier. Are you willing to spend more money to live in SF proper, making your commute a lot easier? Or would you rather spend a little less to live outside of the city, but perhaps deal with a nightmarish commute? I personally opted for the first option when I was a student at SFSU: I found that my gas expenditures to drive in a given month were nearly as much as the pricey rent anyway, and the commute can be really terrible by car. Caltrain or BART are both options, depending on where you end up living, but they may take significantly more of your time each day. But if you don't mind that, it's definitely an option, and I've found them both to be pretty good compared to what you get in other parts of the US. Living in the city is great, even though expensive, and I really loved it there. If you're a city person at all, it's a great place to live. You do need to be careful when apartment hunting, though, and avoid a few neighborhoods that will immediately be the obvious "inexpensive" places to live. The Tenderloin, parts of the Mission District, Excelsior, Bayview, Hunter's Point, these are generally cheap, but can range from a little slummy to downright awful. There are some really nice places (and closer to UCSF anyway) in the Sunset, Richmond, Parkside, Cole Valley, Haight, and Noe Valley areas, and even farther out like Daly City (a little bit of a commute, but easily tolerable), Pacifica, etc down the peninsula depending on how far you wanna travel each day. I have commuted daily from as far south as Morgan Hill, but this is at least 1 hour each way with NO traffic, much much longer in rush hour; I don't recommend it. To give you some idea, I lived in the outer sunset with my girlfriend and our small dog in a 1 bedroom apartment (old, but not bad) for $1500/month. It was hard to live on the tight budget we kept, but I loved the area while I was there. I would go back, if it were in my price range. For a bit more, the apartments at Park Merced aren't bad, although that area is swarming with SFSU undergrads. Also, you can save a TON of money if you're willing to take room/housemates, depending on your situation. Feel free to ask if you have other questions, I love the city (which is what people from there usually call SF), and I'm happy to try to help

So I've got great funded offers of admission from both schools. Both are pretty good places for philosophy of religion, especially the sort of continental philosophy that I do. I also do religious epistemology. I feel like both departments could support my research interests pretty well, and both have a strong selection of potential advisors. What makes the decision tough (and I almost feel guilty that I'm finding this to be so important) is my quality of life at the two locations. Syracuse wants to give me a little more money than BU (about 2000 more per year), and is a less expensive place to live... much less. So I could have a larger place, maybe have a yard for my dog, and even get another dog (which i've been wanting to do for some time). My finances would just be a lot less restrictive here. Boston offers a little less money, and is much more expensive. I'll be living in a smaller apartment, almost certainly no yard. On the other hand, the city of Boston seems much more exciting than Syracuse, and there is the Boston Theological Institute, which will allow me to take classes and dissertation readers from any of the member schools, including Boston College, Harvard, and several seminaries in the area. That's a pretty beefy academic perk. How much weight do you guys generally give to your quality of life in making your decisions? Part of me thinks that I should be looking entirely at the academic situation to make my decision (assuming I can afford to meet my basic needs), which would seem to suggest Boston, in this case. But the other part of me feels like living in Syracuse for much less would be less stressful for the next 5+ years while I'm working on the damn thing. I'd love to hear some opinions Thanks in advance.

I received an acceptance from IU about a week ago, for Ph.D; wait-listed for funding. Best of luck!

Johannes, I saw your mention of San Francisco State and got excited. I did both my BA and MA there, in philosophy, and absolutely loved it. Depending of course on your specific interests, it's a really awesome program. Great fellow grad students, great bunch of profs.

I applied to phds this last cycle, not in religion, but in philosophy. 13 schools, 0 acceptances. So, in preparation for trying again next time around (and it will be mostly in religious studies programs, this time), I've been talking to the chair of my current department about where I went wrong. She said some discouraging things. For one, although I thought I could just keep my GRE score, she disagreed. I had a 640 V, 780 Q, 5.5 writing. I knew the verbal was low, although not... extremely low. I thought maybe the high quant (high, at least, for us liberal arts types) might demonstrate my analytical reasoning abilities to such an extent as to offset the low verbal. Apparently, no such luck. One of the schools I'm looking at for next cycle (one of the few phil programs I'll apply to) is SUNY Stony Brook, where my dept chair has some friends. They tell her that they literally do not even look at applications that have lower than 700s in both. So, after having forgotten about the GRE months ago, I'm brushing up on vocabulary again, although I'm not sure I can make a gain of >60 on my verbal. So I'm pretty much terribly worried about this, myself. One big worry I have is that, even if I improve my verbal significantly, my math will drop, resulting in a lower score overall. I wonder if anyone has thoughts about that issue? The other thing she said was, of course, fit. Since my BA is in philosophy & religion, despite my MA in philosophy, a very very sizable chunk of my coursework has been in topics at least closely related to religion. So while I had wanted to study religion from within a philosophy department, I'm told I'll make a much more attractive candidate for religious studies (which I hope is really the case). So make sure to keep your eye out for good fit!

I rated you up, Monkee, and I appreciate your input!

This is a little tough to articulate. He did not read the writing sample in full, but rather requested that I point him toward specific sections that I want him to review for me. Well, ok, but at some point I really do need somebody to read over the whole thing and either give it a thumbs up or provide advice on what needs to change. His advice was always to make very specific changes, mostly about the substantive content. While I do appreciate trying to get the paper just right, philosophically, I also want to polish it for adcomms who don't necessarily care if I have a totally correct understanding of the entire discourse around topic X. In fact, I imagine they'd prefer that I don't, so that they can influence my development in that regard. Does that make sense? I have the impression that schools are looking for a good project, written well, that shows critical thinking and writing ability, and I feel like these weren't really part of the advice I was getting. And if, after months of revision, something is still fundamentally wrong with my paper (and judging by the repeated revisions that he requested, time after time after time after time), it might be helpful to say something broad about the thesis as a whole, and suggest some approaches for substantial reworking of the thing. I would often revise some small section of the paper, at his request, and then go back myself and try to make the necessary revisions throughout the rest of the paper that would result from the changes made. But upon resubmitting it for advice, again, he would not read enough to see how the paper had changed as a whole, but only that small section, which he would send me back to revise again. And after about an hour of talking about this one small section, we would not have enough time to discuss my SOP at all, so that got edited very scarcely, and generally by only myself. Whew, sorry, that got a little incoherent. I'm trying to be articulate while becoming more frustrated by rejections as time goes by, so I'm sorry if my tone is whiny. Thanks for your thoughts, though!

Ya know, one of my biggest frustrations during the entire application procedure, long before I finally sent the damn things out, was getting enough feedback on my writing. I go to a large public university in California, and while my department here has an excellent reputation, the financial situation in this state is awful, and the school has very visibly suffered from it. So I know that my professors are overworked, underpaid, and just generally extremely busy these days. But nonetheless, I still feel a little cheated, in that I got very little help on my SOP, and the help on my writing sample was not exactly what I needed, I think. But maybe this time around I can get several more professors to work with me on it, closely. And the writing sample, too, for that matter. I don't know... I will have to try the suggestion of contacting the departments that rejected me, to see if I can squeeze out any info at all. Even if it's just, "oh yeah, your SOP sucked," at least I'll know specifically which piece to work on. Right now, I feel totally in the dark, like my rejection could have been a result of any element of my app. It's a miserable feeling.

Well, I didn't mean I was confident about all of them. I was pretty confident I would NOT be accepted to Yale, Notre Dame, or UChicago, for example, but I figured I had a pretty damn good chance at Loyola, Emory, and Villanova, none of which are mentioned on the Leiter report at all (although I guess a mention on SPEP acts as something of a substitute, for the continental schools). But you're right, it was a rookie sentiment, big time. If I decide to reapply (and if I can afford to), the experience will definitely have helped in my preparation next go 'round. And your belief that having a master's completed is something of a condolence, so thanks for that! Guess it might just be time to find a hold-me-over job and redo that SOP and writing sample (sad/tired face goes here).

I ask mostly to relieve my own anxiety, if only a little bit, but also out of genuine curiosity. It seems like a terribly ugly and competitive year, although I'm not sure--I have a hard time trying to figure out what the situation is really like out there, although it's common knowledge the phil is one of the most competitive disciplines... So how are people doing so far? Anyway, for myself: I'm in a philosophy MA program at a school the Leiter report mentions as an excellent place to earn a master's, and I got my BA in philosophy and religion at the same school. Undergrad GPA 3.74, Grad GPA 3.97, GRE 1480 (640 V/ 780 Q/ 5.5 AW). My interests are in continental (phenomenology), epistemology, and phil of religion. I've been told I'd make a very strong candidate, although from where I'm standing right now it doesn't look like that was really the case. I had glowing letters of rec, so I guess my writing sample was underwhelming or my SOP was silly, but I'm not sure anymore. I applied to 13, with 7 rejections so far and no accepts, and considering that some of the rejections were from schools I was very confident I'd get into, my prospects aren't lookin so good for the last few. In rough order of preference to get in: Notre Dame Yale - rejected U of Chicago - rejected Fordham - rejected Purdue - rejected Boston U St. Louis U Villanova - rejected Vanderbilt Marquette Emory - rejected WashU - rejected U of Kentucky How is everyone else doin so far? Any thoughts and what did me in? It would have to be the writing, wouldn't it? Or GRE not high enough? A colleague of mine, also defending his MA thesis this semester, has already gotten acceptance letters from 4 schools, 3 on the Leiter report, one is top-20. And my school has a pretty good placement history. Man, wish I knew what to work on, if I were to try again.

I'm sorry, this is in the wrong place. I've moved it to the "Waiting" forum instead. Sorry about the mispost!