Rose-Colored Beetle

Sorry to hear that. I know they're Catholic, but what are their philosophical strengths? (I don't see them on PGR [not that PGR is everything!]). Fun fact, I just learned the right way to pronounce Duquesne...

Welcome to the light, dear lurker!

During the 2018 cycle, I applied to four MAs with a writing sample on Locke and Gadamer. I got into Brandeis and Western Michigan.

Times like these call for Avril Lavigne...

Really? A crowd of philosophers and not one person says "hur hur, that depends on your definition of safety school"?

@SexandtheHaecceity, Even if nobody at WMU is in your AOI, it might not hurt to apply... WMU is good at being a "slingshot" to Leiter-ranked programs. (I got in there but couldn't think of where I would want to be slung to, so I just took my one PhD offer, which I liked anyway). If you get in and they say "Yeah, we can't help you here" (which I doubt), you've spent an application fee for a free vacation in Kalamazoo (and some great food).

No idea about tax percentage... I just know the numbers are accuarate. Electric is about $30 per month per person, and internet is about $25. Food isn't Wisconsin cheap, but it's not terrible, and I like cooking for myself. We don't pay for TV, so that's something. I'm still on my parents' health insurance for another year, but by that time I'll be making more (stipends increase when you start teaching), and the school offers a plan for us to shift into. I don't have a car, because ain't nobody got time for that. Uber and the subway is your friend.

I attend Fordham too. My GRE was 160 (76th percentile) quantitative and 164 (94th percentile) verbal. I wouldn't worry too much about your score. Definitely try to get good letters of rec, and definitely work on your writing sample. (Can I ask what it's on?) If your writing sample is logical and well reasoned, it's hard to imagine people saying "but that MATH score though..." Pertinent to your interests, @Krauge, one advantage of Fordham is that due to our masters' programs (and the whole Jesuit track) there's a high concentration of courses that might interest you. In just the past few semesters, there have been lecture courses or seminars on Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in particular, Plato, Plotinus, and the Presocratics. (Stay tuned for changes, as the masters' programs are going to be revamped soon.) We also have connections with the phil of religion people at Rutgers and can participate in their reading group. Also, funding is guaranteed for six full years.

My program is Leiter-unranked ("receiving votes" in epistemology, medieval, and phil of religion). Over the last 10 years, we haven't gone a year without placing people in tenure, tenure-track, or postdoc positions (roughly 3 per year). However, none of those placements were to schools on the ranking. This is anecdotal, but it seems to reflect a general trend: the PGR is a strong predictor of placement into PhD-granting programs and placement into PGR-ranked programs, and a weak but not hamstrung predictor of placement per se. This agrees with APA research on placement, which (if memory serves) found that Baylor, of all places, has the highest percent placement into full-time positions. (One significant weakness of the APA study is that they didn't consider postdocs full-time positions even if the postdoc later went on to full-time employment later.) When it comes to getting a job, there are so many other factors than school prestige: strength of your school's brand in a particular location, the nature of your research, the quality of your teaching record. Someone from a #20 school could easily outclass an MIT grad for an R2 position, for instance. Still, school prestige does obviously play some role, even a leading role. Whether that's due to inappropriate bias or the simple fact that prestigious schools produce better philosophers is at least up for debate, in my view. Of course, this doesn't overturn the obvious general truth that higher-ranked PGR schools give you a better chance of having a career in research.

I agree with Hector on this. Given how nebulous (arbitrary?) the selection process can be, it can't hurt to add one more sticking point to your app. I'm really sympathetic, Krauge... this happened to a friend of mine, which may have had significant bearing on where she got in. Hopefully it works out for you!

Indeed. I applied to 4 MAs and 4 PhDs. Fordham was my only PhD acceptance, which worked great, since it was probably my best option to begin with.

Well... I live in NYC, where my rent is $1800 on a $25,000 gross yearly ($1993 net monthly) stipend. I split with a roommate and pay $950 for rent. I don't live luxuriously, but I'm not walking around naked or lying in dung like the Presocratics.

I submitted my rough draft at my first application deadline, and kept revising it as subsequent application deadlines loomed, with the result that every school (or many of them) got a different writing sample. Ironically, my one acceptance was the school with the earliest deadline. Would not recommend this method, but I like telling the story.

The other looming variable here is cost of living. A friend from my program recently took a postdoc in LA, and he seems to have less money now than he did on his PhD stipend in a cheaper city.

Thanks for the clarification, @quineonthevine. I'm not sure I agree with everything you say, so I may start a new thread entirely so as not to hijack this one. For the moment, I will certainly agree that when men dominate things, things tend to go wrong in particular ways, and I can't help but think that this has something to do with the current state of academic philosophy. With the affectionate humor of one who has a hearty degree of respect for men, I would have us consider the ease with which we can imagine seven or eight men in a circle smoking pipes or cigars, telling each other how profound they are.

Hey Xinnabon, Let me put in a plug for Fordham (where I am currently). We have two respected analytic epistemologists who get tons of research money (Stephen Grimm, Nathan Ballantyne). We also hosted the New York - China epistemology conference this year, which brought together epistemologists from China and the US (e.g., Ernest Sosa, Jane Friedman, Nicholas Silins, Selim Berker, Miriam Schoenfield). Despite what Leiter says about the pluralist label, I've found it to be fantastic. Pursuant to your other interest, for example, we have Lauren Kopajtic who did history of early modern at Harvard. You're encouraged, even required, to take a variety of courses before narrowing your focus; this can be helpful as you iron out what you thought you were interested in when you started. Also, if there's something not represented on our faculty (say, analytic phil of mind), we have agreements worked out with most of the other NYC programs to allow you to take their profs' seminars. Those profs can even become dissertation readers/advisors. As for international worries, none come to mind, as long as there's no language barrier (which there obviously isn't in your case).

I did what Aurelius said above, mentioning professors that seem interesting. Plenty of rejections ensued... part of me wonders if they may have sniffed out that I didn't really care a ton and was just hoping to use them as a springboard. But yeah, tailor-make the SOPs, no question. Especially if you can find things at the school that correlate objectively with your writing sample or AOIs.

You're concerned about a pretty large cocktail of negatives... I'll just say that I agree in essence with everything Duns Eith said above. Personally, I've grown jaundiced to any specific reports about departmental climate, whether positive or negative; in my experience, they're just too colored by anecdotal evidence. And now to be anecdotal: I had a great seminar this past fall in which I disagreed with just about everything the professor said. He told me flat out that he thinks (what I secretly wanted to argue) was false, "but so what?" Of course, not every prof is like that. As for the treatment of women and people of color, I'd be interested to hear more from quineonthevine. My experience has been that academic philosophers are quite sensitive to minority issues, both at the official level (MAP chapters, concerns over syllabus inclusivity, etc.) and at the personal level. Of course, my experience is anything but a systematic study.

I guess "low-tier" was the wrong word for OSU, but I think my point stands regarding programs that have alternative modes of appeal (religious, regional). Fair enough on Princeton. The placement director at WMU thought it worth mentioning that they've never placed there, so I was just parroting.

Thanks for the input, Hector. My comment about UWM was maybe too dramatic. I have two colleagues who recently did their MAs at UWM, and my understanding from talking to at least one of them is that they've recently lost at least one of their good professors. This impression is vague, though, and I'd do well to follow up on it. As with any MA program, it'd be good to look at where they actually place. There could be quirks; for example, Western Michigan has placed at Boulder, Michigan, and Cornell, but never at Princeton, despite having one (and now two) Princeton PhDs on the faculty.

Hey ITH, I have a few thoughts for you. Take them with a grain of salt, since I'm just one person. First, I'm curious to know your philosophical interests and aims going into academia. Do you want to primarily teach or just research and write? What are your topical areas of interest? Do you know anybody you'd particularly like to work with? (If you don't that's fine.) Second, depending on what unranked programs you're aiming for, I would advise caution. The rankings seem to track placement into PhD-granting (e.g., R1) programs and postdocs well, but overall placement somewhat less well. Baylor, for instance, was #1 overall for sheer placement on a fairly reliable report from the APA. Some unranked schools place well because of brand strength in certain niche domains (local, religious, etc.) These schools will be an advantage in my book over low-tier state schools like Ohio State, Iowa, Missouri, etc. Third, if your undergrad institution is not well known (which was my situation), that might be okay. This probably seems obvious, but the more prestigious the PhD program, the more it (and your GPA, to an extent) could matter. For small-school graduates, an MA can go a long way, and you may want to apply to a few good MAs as backup. These MAs are often used to picking up small liberal-arts students like us. Look at Western Michigan, Boston College, Brandeis, Georgia State, and NIU. (UW Milwaukee could be included but I think it's been losing influence.) This will depend on your intended direction and interests, of course. If you want to talk more (which I'd be happy to do!) feel free to PM me if you'd rather.

Two thoughts: (1) You may have done this already, but if you want a PhD eventually, you may want to look at placement rates, what sort of school each MA places to, etc. (Can confirm what was said about Brandeis at least anecdotally, since I got in there last year and did not get good funding at all, at least not off the bat). (2) Don't overestimate the "gap time" that an MA will give you to explore interests. For one thing, even a 2-year program goes by fast; before you know it you'll have to produce a thesis and start the application cycle again. Also, your fellow students may not be as much of an "incubating" community, as they will all either be fresh or leaving. Finally, some PhD programs knock a year off if you have an MA; but that could mean (as it does at my institution) that you have to submit both your qualifying papers your first year (and have a year less to decide on your AOS). One of the QPs can be your MA thesis, of course, but there's a gap between MA-level work and PhD-level work, and it could be stress you don't need. This is, of course, just one point of view, and everyone's different. Personally, I'm glad I didn't do the MA first. Good luck!

I don't know your AOS, but would it be possible to present Scheler as worthwhile vis-a-vis more popular theorists? That might help make you seem less of a maverick. On the other hand, my writing sample kept being shaped as I kept applying to more schools. The offer I ended up accepting (Fordham, PhD) receiced the first iteration of my sample, which I wrote just for my applications. I am not proud of that paper at all, but apparently it worked. I barely engaged contemporary literature at all, save one paper from Chalmers. (My paper criticized Locke's theory of language, with help from Gadamer). In my estimation, continentally minded philosophers care less about how much you are salient in the academia de jour.

I did my BA in philosophy and theological languages at a medium-sized liberal-arts school. I got into WMU and Brandeis (MA), and Fordham (PhD, accepted), on letters from two philosophers and one theologian. I'll note that phil of religion and phil of language are of prime interest to me, and the theologian in question did graduate work on the Dead Sea Scrolls at Harvard. He also knew my work better than either of our other two philosophers did.

It really depends on what you mean by a "continental" program. Programs that study philosophers typically categorized as "continental" are one thing. Programs that do philosophy in a "continental" mode are another thing. And it's not really clear what "continental" philosophy is in the first place. The rankings aren't so bad if you consider what they are actually ranking: not the best programs, but, as the PGR website makes explicit in many words, faculty reputation. That these do not necessarily correlate should be fairly obvious. Consider the reputation of various philosophers in Socrates' day, as reported by Plato's writings. Faculty reputation seems to correlate quite weakly with job placement, strongly with job placement into PhD-granting programs, and (in a circular fashion) strongly with job placement into top PGR-ranked programs. Faculty reputation, it may be argued, also correlates these days with a certain way of doing philosophy, that which seems to be common in many philosophy journals and which is admittedly the opposite of what we feel continental philosophy is. Of course, whether there is a meaningful distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is controversial; one wonders, if the distinction is meaningless, what this bifurcation is that everyone seems to feel. I've been thinking recently that it has to do with which propositions a given philosopher chooses to leave implicit, and which terms he or she chooses to leave undefined.