prtrbd

I for one am excited for a career where I can never really be sure I'm good enough, because I haven't had enough of that already in life.

Notre Dame.

I have also just accepted my only offer. Good luck to everyone with waitlists and final decisions and feel free to PM me on here if you want to keep in touch about philosophy going forward.

I have also just accepted my only offer. Good luck to everyone with waitlists and final decisions and feel free to PM me on here if you want to keep in touch about philosophy going forward.

Hi all,
The current slogan for Grad Café, “Where something is always brewing,” really isn’t cutting it. In fact it gives no indication whatsoever about the purpose of the site. I am going to start brainstorming other possibilities and I wanted to enlist your help. Maybe we can send the top three suggestions to the website managers. 
I realize that this is not about Philosophy, but (a) you philosophers are my people and (b) I think that philosophical training can help one to think creatively and logically about these things.
Thank you,
NitH

Not a big deal but thank you. Just curious since I received a waitlist-type email four weeks ago.

The evergreen hullabaloo about continental philosophy makes me really glad I'm going into a field that everyone agrees is coherent and useful - analytic metaphysics.

I've never had the sense that there was anything particularly wrong with the Leiter rankings. With Leiter himself, that's a different issue.

Have you already gotten in? If so, dress however the hell you want. They are trying to impress you.

I almost forgot why I came here. Accepted to Brandeis with a $20k scholarship, TAship, and fellowship nomination.

Have you already gotten in? If so, dress however the hell you want. They are trying to impress you.

Deplorable.

I heard back today. Accepted to PhD

Right, that’s what I figured you meant, but just making sure. Like you and many others, I’m hoping for good news from UNC.

Well, it's March 15th and they don't seem to have waitlisted or rejected anybody, as far as I can tell.

I'm in the same boat. Looking forward to responses!

This cycle, I applied to nearly 20 schools, and only got into one. It's a top 20 school that is very highly ranked in my subfield, so I'm actually very happy with the result. But I have to ask -- is it common for people to apply to many schools and only get into 1? Is it a sign that there was some problem with my application, or that I am behind in some way that I will need to work hard to make up for in graduate school?

I am not a faculty member in this field, but I just went through a process where we hired a summer undergrad student for a research project. Due to our institution's rules and policies, we are also unable to directly contact any of the applicants, even though we have all of their information. Any question to us needed to be redirected to the "right person", and the right person is a not very helpful in answering most of the questions. (To be clear, the right person is a very competent and great person but their job is to manage the hiring process. They are not a researcher and cannot answer any questions about the work that the student would actually do, and we're not allowed to answer either). 
Not only we cannot directly contact the student applicants, there are minimum timelines that must pass before we can enter the next step. For example, we posted the job for 1 week, but even if we see an application from someone we would love to interview for sure, we can't schedule anything with them until the application deadline has passed and we made an official/final interview list. This list then gets approved by the hiring manager and then they schedule the interviews (giving candidates some time to respond to the invite). So everything is drawn out and protracted.
Finally, the 5am email thing is common because in many people management software (e.g. SAP), we input things into the database during the work day (e.g. mark a candidate as accepted/rejected) and nothing happens until the system does its nightly update. Each night, the database takes the input we provide it and then runs its reports and its automatic scripts which produces these auto-generated emails. And for these same reasons, this is why you don't often get personal emails regarding rejections and we are generally discouraged from discussing the (details) of the rejection at all with candidates. 
This is the same thing as lurkingfaculty said, but I just wanted to provide more details and examples  This is my first year post-PhD-graduation and wow, you learn a lot from the "other side". 

Thanks for the encouragement! It's kind of hard to see things very optimistically from this end of a rejection-barrage, so it's always nice to hear things like this.
I did send GSU an e-mail the other day asking about their more generous assistantships (if they're all gone or not) and just how fixed their finances are, so perhaps there's still a chance there - if I do end up getting in, of course, haha. And I suppose it's no crime to dream about last-minute news from NYU or MIT (or UNC, who I'm still waiting to hear from!).

I think it's very important that departments and directors of admissions be polite, kind, respectful, and thoughtful in how they communicate. I agree that they are not always, and I think that sucks. I would say the same thing to them.
One thing to note, though, is that there are some asymmetries in the process: for one, we get hundreds of applications that we have to deal with (I don't think this excuses the above, it's just a thing to note). Second, we often are not permitted to contact rejected applicants until the process goes through the admissions office, and the admissions people often use software and systems that we have no control over. So I'd be hesitant to immediately hold a grudge against a department or faculty rather than the fact that bloated university administrations tend to use crappy systems.
Take care.

What a scam.

Rutgers rejection available via portal. Only UNC and NYU remaining!

Hope not.

Just wanted to put it out there that a student from my undergrad's Masters program got a total shutout from PhD's the first year they applied (though they came from an Ivy league undergrad) and got into Rutgers the second year they applied. Just goes to show this process can be a total shot in the dark. 

From UNC: 
I am sorry that we can’t give you any more information at this time. At this point, we have made offers and constructed a waitlist, but we have not sent out rejections because we have not made final determinations about the applicant pool. As soon as our entering class is filled we will process rejections. I am sorry I can’t tell you anything more about your personal situation. I know this is a stressful period and UNC will be in touch as soon as it is possible to give you more information.
In other words, probably rejected (but she can't formally say), but if, somehow, everyone on the waitlist and all offer holders rejected their offers perhaps we'll have a chance. So, hey, non-zero probability!
Edit: Offer Holders/Waitlisted People: you know what to do!