poppypascal

It's a very important part of philosophy, but last I checked, German Idealism isn't 20th philosophy. As for Husserl, it could qualify as 'continental' 20th century, but David Smith's approach is markedly analytic. Indeed, he's written papers about phenomenology and phil of mind, and the relationship between phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Even if we accept him as interested in continental philosophy, even though Husserl is one of his interests amongst others, that's still one member of faculty. There's good departments not ranked on there that have over half the faculty working on 20th European philosophy.

Yeah that is confusing... But even just restricting it to the non-LPS Irvine philosophy department, having just done quick check of the faculty's cited areas of interest, not a single one cites 20th century continental. There's interesting stuff going on at Irvine, but if you want to specialize in continental, it's not really the place to go. First, who there is going to be able to be your thesis advisor? And second, if you want to specialize in something, shouldn't a fair amount of the coursework also be somehow related to said topic? If you want to study Ancient philosophy, you apply to places with at least a few people doing that, where you have the opportunity to do Ancient phil coursework. The PGR rankings for other areas probably bear this out. But for 19th/20th continental, large departments with a lot of faculty working on it aren't included, and small departments with one or no faculty working in the area are ranked. Makes no sense, it must do more harm than good at this point. People are guaranteed to be mislead by this and waste their money and time applying to places they either have no hope of getting into, or where they'd be miserable if they ended up enrolling.

The specialty rankings in 19th/20th century continental are quite interesting. To be ranked in this section (e.g. Harvard) you don't appear to need any members of faculty or graduate students who publish in the area or indeed even cite it as a specialty on their webpage. At Harvard, there's one member of faculty who cites "French and German philosophy" as an interest, but his most recent work appears to be on cognitive neuroscience and he doesn't mention any research current research in the area. Irvine is a heavily analytic department. The list goes on. Some other major places for continental aren't even mentioned. Does anyone else find this bewildering? Harvard is probably raking in thousands in application fees from people who want to study continental philosophy just because they managed to get their name on these rankings, when there's no one there studying the subject. Here's the list for 20th century: Columbia, BU, Georgetown, Oxford, UCL, Warwick, Harvard, Northwestern, Rice, Syracuse, Irvine, Riverside, Chicago, Notre Dame, Sheffield Additional ones not evaluated (why?): Boston College, Loyola, New School, Penn State, Stony Brook, Dublin, U of Essex, U of Kentucky, U of Memphis

Agreed, which is why even armed with that info, it's still mostly a question of luck. There are a few people with impeccable applications who get accepted pretty much everywhere, but even they get turned down now and then, sometimes by pretty random places. It's not a quantitative evaluation. It's purely qualitative. I'm not even sure tailoring to 2-3 members is tight enough. I mean, I guess it depends on your area, but for a lot of people, there's one, maybe two, faculty members roughly interested in what you want to do. I'm not saying you have to mention their names and make it patently obvious you're applying to work with them (though some do this I think), but they need to be able to read it and think you're interesting and like the same things as them and feel some kind of affinity. Just having good grades and writing well and loving philosophy unfortunately doesn't appear to be a guarantee with this system. I bet a lot of talent is going to waste... Some data on which AOIs have fewer applicants would be useful, don't know how we could ever obtain that. If the idea is to maintain roughly the same proportions of people doing phil of mind, logic etc over the decades, might be useful to let people know where there's demand so we're not all crowding into a few specializations.

Similarly, I don't want to crash this thread because I didn't get shut out, but I was very nearly shut out, and have a few thoughts regarding the process. I applied to 5 schools, accepted at one. The one place that accepted me was one of the most desirable ones I applied to, and programs generally less reputed and with worse placement rejected me. I think how well your interests fit with at least one member of faculty is considerably understated on here and elsewhere. If you can't find a specific faculty member that is interested in pretty much exactly what you are (not "political philosophy" or "phil of mind" but specific problems within a tradition, authors, a trajectory of thought), it's not worth wasting money on the application fees. I selected places based on broad headings like "political philosophy" and a general interest in traditions that I like, and it was only after receiving my acceptance that I realized why I got accepted, and it was because my SOP really aligns with what one of the faculty members does. This faculty member probably thought I'd expressly written it with their work in mind, which I didn't. Now, I don't think most people are as stupidly careless as I am, but I was really lucky to get in somewhere and I think some of people getting shut out might have made a similar mistake. I think you have to be the best application for a specific member of faculty. That also means that some areas within philosophy are probably a lot more competitive than others. It'd be fascinating to get data on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the composition of the faculty of all philosophy departments in terms of areas of specialty is considerably out of step with the composition of the applicant pool in terms of interests. This is normal in any discipline, but perhaps more so in philosophy, which seems to have a real inertial force when it comes to disciplinary hierarchies. For example, I think continental philosophy generally is way more in demand than there are professors to teach it. Scientific disciplines tend to be way more open about this sort of stuff, indeed, you tend to apply to labs with assigned projects rather than developing your own. So just to say, you might also have an area of specialty that is really popular at the moment, and therefore up against a lot more competition than others. Anyway, all that to say, I'm really sorry for people who didn't make it this year. It's a pretty terrible system I think. It's like rolling the dice on major life decisions. There should be a way to make it more rational.

I've been invited to do a visit at a school whose offer I've already accepted. I'm living in Europe at the moment and the combination of distance, flight costs, moderate fear of flying, the fact I've already accepted, and work, make me reticent to make the two or three day trip across the Atlantic. Do you think they'll understand if I say I can't make it but that I'm looking forward to meeting them at the start of the year?

I agree: don't think you can get away with a bad GRE score simply because it's such an unfair mode of evaluation to begin with. However, we are in some sense addressing the future faculty of philosophy departments in the US here, and therefore the future admissions committees. And to them I would say: let us find a better solution. Either figure out a way to render public the standardized testing, or somehow come up with a "European-style" final exam, but whatever happens, this model is hopefully on its last legs.

True, it would be great to reform the whole system. Making public schools tuition free would already put some downward pressure on private fees. I think there should also be caps on private tuition costs, and stricter regulation of the student loan market, so that colleges can't just raise fees ad infinitum knowing full well the loans will be there to cover it. But the GRE (and SAT for that matter) is exceptionally egregious in my view. You always (in theory, anyway) have the option of going to a public college or a cheaper private college. So it's not such a blatant monopoly. Standardized testing is essentially monopolistic. The whole point of it is having a unique standard by which to compare people. It's so strange that this would be a private test anyway. We have a huge public school system, tens of thousands of teachers educating kids throughout their childhood and adolescence, and yet somehow that same system can't produce a general test that every student takes to graduate high school? The UK has A levels, France has the baccalaureate etc... These are detailed tests where students actually have to formulate nuanced answers to questions about things like history, philosophy, geography, literature... Why can't the US have something similar? And if we're so attached to the multiple choice model, why can't the government administer it? The most maddening aspect of the GRE for me was paying to have my results sent to each school. You're clearly paying 30 dollars to have a computer send an email with your results. It's almost certainly an automated process. Total rip off.

The major problem with the GRE is that it's owned by a private company which exploits its monopoly position to rip off students who often don't have a couple hundred dollars to fork out for a multiple choice test, let alone enough to retake it if they screw up the first time around. If the US government wants to nationalize the test and make it basically free and 20 bucks for a re-take within the year, that'd alleviate a lot of the injustice of the test to start off. When it comes to the test itself, I have to disagree with most of you, I think the writing section is an utter waste of time. All it measures is your capacity to waffle in a limited time on a usually pointless question. If you have a proper exam at the end of secondary education, like most countries do, there's no reason to have such a childish and ultimately useless test for people who have undergone 4 years of higher education. I would do away with the test altogether; to my knowledge, they do fine in Europe without it. What is it about the American system that makes these multiple choice quizzes necessary? Most of us here, with enough work, could score near perfectly on the test. All it tests is your willingness to waste several weeks or months revising high school mathematics so that when the time comes you can calculate the square of the hypotenuse in record time. Much better off having rigorous testing to graduate high school and a mandatory undergrad thesis to see how well you can undertake big research projects...

When do you think it's customary to accept an offer? Do most people wait it out until all schools have answered? I accepted an offer the other day, and I don't know if you're meant to ask a load of questions or wait until April 14th before accepting, but I haven't heard back from them and it's stupidly stressing me out.

Yes thanks for this, it's really informative. From what I've read here and elsewhere, I think the researching of departments and faculty interests is possibly underemphasized by the blogs etc on applying. I've read some frightening account of people with top grades, gre, etc... getting shut out, I'm sure we've all read the blogs that seem to mostly dissuade people from applying to grad school in philosophy. I think part of the problem might be people applying to the wrong places, because of rankings and the like, instead of actually finding a professor or several you could really work with.

Hey all, I was wondering if anyone here had any insight on how admissions committees work w/r/t assigning accepted students to individual faculty members. First question I have is whether most people name a POI or several in their applications. I didn't, partly because it seemed risky to tie my fate to the choice of a single professor if others in the department I might have overlooked liked my application. What is the general opinion on this? Also, did you contact professors before applying? I didn't, also because it seemed more risky than the potential benefits: risk irritating a professor for the small chance he'd see my name on the application and fondly remember exchanging a couple of emails with me. Second question: in a situation where no POI is named in the application, do the committees still 'unofficially' associate students with advisors based on their interests? Do acceptance decisions generally depend on having a member of faculty being really taken with your application, or do they accept students on a more general 'high ability' standard where everyone agrees the student is good without anyone expressly saying they want to work with them? Thanks for any info and good luck getting through the next few weeks!