Scoots

there's a distance/online BA at the University of London in philosophy that has had some success in getting people into good, even top, phd programs (there was a discussion about it on the Leiter blog a while back--some googling should be able to locate it).

I produced a writing sample in X and wrote in my SOP that my main interest was Y, and one department explicitly told me that was a major factor in denying me a place: apparently it was difficult to know who to assign to read my application. (They said they liked the application otherwise, and told me to reapply next year with a sample in my stated area of interest)

I really wonder what kind of work/study people are talking about. I spend most waking hours thinking about philosophy, but I couldn’t really call that work. I’ve been out of the academy for a few years now, but even when I was studying for my degree, I doubt I could manage more than about 10 hours of productive reading each week, on top of a few lectures. It didn’t hurt my grades, or—it seems—my chances w.r.t. PhD admissions. Talking to my undergrad professors (at a top 10 Phil. Gourmet department) this seems to capture their experience as well. If you’re spending 70 waking hours reading papers and engaging in directed academic study each week, I imagine you’ll produce beautifully polished academic work, and be up to the minute on all the latest fads... but will it really be interesting, creative philosophy? (—I mean, perhaps you can make that work, but I feel it would hinder more than help?) Wittgenstein was mentioned as an example of a hard worker. As far as I can tell from biographies etc., that meant open-ended pondering of philosophical questions, reading detective fiction, and discussing philosophy with his friends and students. I can’t imagine that’s the kind of study under discussion here.

Declined Brandeis.

How do you go about doing that? Is there a separate application?

Probably best not to quote real names on here!

I’m interested in Japanese philosophy (mainly Nishida) and Chinese philosophy (mainly Zhuangzi)! I’ve also studied some Indian Buddhist metaphysics, but only at an introductory level.

Ooh same! What kind of non-Western things?

One of my recommenders is torturing me by sending every recommendation within an hour of the respective deadline.

Anyone having difficulty with USC recommendations? I just got a very irate email from one of my recommenders who has spent the last two days making no headway with uploading the recommendation.

How did you make it so long?? I’ve been merrily sending out 300 word statements... what are you including?

One thing people’s GRE scores do correlate very well with is their belief in the utility of the GRE.

Just got my first acceptance! Rather a surprise to get something so soon. (UK masters degree, details posted on gradcafe results page)

Hey folks! Would any successful applicants from previous years be happy to share their writing samples? There’s some useful advice online, but it’s fairly basic, and it would be interesting to see the kind of samples that do well. I’m particularly interested in samples that tackle more unusual topics. Thanks in advance!

Great advice on this thread. I applied with a writing sample on an unusual topic that didn’t align particularly closely with my stated interests on my statement of purpose. I also had pretty wide-ranging interests expressed on my statement of purpose. Reading this thread, it appears I committed all the cardinal sins of applications! I’ll try again next year, but I’m taking up a place in law school in the meantime. If I’m successful next year, I’ll try to combine the two; if not, at least I’ll have a career in something I’m almost as interested in as philosophy...

It’s quite difficult to know what I should do differently next time. I have a perfect GRE; great grades from a top undergrad; a writing sample that was called ‘interesting’, ‘original’ and ‘eye-catching’ by the professors who looked at it (from top institutions in the US and elsewhere), some of whom gave comments over multiple drafts, all of whom recommended submitting it; and I applied to a lot of schools. All of which rejected me. I guess I should just write a new writing sample, but it’s beginning to feel rather like a very expensive lottery... Ah well. It’s springtime. Good luck everyone!

I’m a couple of years out from undergrad, and while I haven’t had any success so far, I can at least say that you don’t need to be isolated if you apply from outside the academy. I’ve attended philosophy meet-ups and become friends with philosophy professors from top institutions around the world, several of whom provided helpful and substantive feedback on my recent writing. I kept in touch with my recommenders, and they were just as happy to recommend me for grad school as they were when I was in undergrad. Best of luck with your remaining applications, and if needs must and you apply again next year, best of luck with that too.

When I was applying my professor said I was applying to too many programs (12) and that I should be more optimistic. 6 rejections later........ edit: it looks like actually 7 (several implicit) rejections so far. There was I going and being optimistic again lol

Congrats to those in/waitlisted at Rutgers! (the implicit rejections just keep on mounting...)

With your engineering background and your numbered paragraphs... are you channeling Wittgenstein? (Sorry, I don’t have anything helpful to add!)

That’s a rather scary picture you paint of admissions. Prof A: We have 250 applicants. 249 have glowing recommendations. Of them, 240 have excellent writing samples. So what do we do now, Prof B? Prof B: Darts. Prof A: How about horoscopes. Prof B: Or the GRE. Prof A: And don’t forget the US News College Rankings.

Regardless of whether the GRE says anything about philosophical ability, I do think it says a lot about your ability to quickly understand and learn certain types of information. Someone may be an awesome philosopher but take a very long time and need lots of help to understand the philosophers they read. It doesn’t seem outlandish to suggest that PhD programs would prefer an awesome philosopher who can also quickly process and understand the texts they’ll be reading for coursework. The GRE verbal test does seem like a good test for this. Of course, understanding such texts quickly is less important than being an awesome philosopher, which is why the GRE is not very important for admissions. The quantitative test is useful for certain types of analytic philosophy. Obviously it’s not really useful for continental, but then I’ve never seen any evidence that having a low quantitative score actually harms applicants to continental programs. Certainly on here, people post acceptances with very low quantitative scores. The AW section, by contrast, doesn’t tell committees anything useful about the applicant’s philosophical writing ability that the writing sample doesn’t say already. So even if it did test “producing and evaluating clear arguments”, it would be at best useless. Moreover, the fact that the range of vocabulary used and the length of the essay are both proportional to the AW score rather suggests that there should be little correlation between AW scores and philosophical aptitude. I think that the GRE reveals far less about money and preparation than where one went to college does. That factor is acknowledged by all to play a bigger role in admissions, but in the US it is a) contingent on SAT/ACT performance, which is even more tutorable than the GRE (spoken as someone who teaches both), and b) contingent on extracurriculars, legacy gifts, etc.; so it seems even more predictive of wealth and privilege than the GRE. If anything, then, the GRE can be a useful corrector to this, as you really don’t need to study or pay for lessons to get a perfect score.

I found my Chicago rejection in my junk folder. (Where it belongs.)

Investigating the notion of consent

You’ve now made me anxious about every single program I applied to (also massive congratulations btw!)