lurkingfaculty

Ask the faculty in your program. The ones who will be writing you letters. Ask for an honest assessment of your chances and for them to tell you how strong your letters will be. Maybe in an email so that they don't have to say it to your face. Also ask them what kind of PhD program, if any, they would expect you to be able to get into. The people on this forum don't have access to what matters the most: your actual work. I don't think your GPA matters if it is a result of transferring in courses from an earlier program, especially with a gap. Your grades in the new program matter, but what matters much more is what the faculty there actually think about your work. Grades in any grad program are not necessarily a good guide to that. (If they are bad they are, but lots of people get good grades despite faculty thinking their work is ok; an A in a grad course doesn't mean much.) If this is the kind of situation where they could have easily given you funding once you had been there for a bit, but haven't done so, that's probably a decent sign that they do not think your work is excellent. But you should ask them, because there may be other explanations for that.

Hi Fkarachi, my department (PhD) would definitely read your application and would probably discount your low GPA if all of the other aspects of your file were extremely strong. I do suspect lots of people would be concerned though. I would think that if you have a strong writing sample you would be a good candidate for the good MA programs. And I do think if you had a very strong writing sample that PhD programs would consider you, but I think you'd have better luck by first going to an MA program and developing a more consistent academic record there. It's easy for people who are not currently in grad school to underestimate how competitive PhD admissions are (because it's gotten progressively more competitive), so your professor may not be being overly encouraging, but may not really understand either how big or how good the pool of candidates you will be competing against are. If you do apply to PhD programs, I would focus on PhD programs that match your interests extremely well. Having a writing sample that is really strong *and* in an area that lots of people on the faculty are experts on and can trust their own evaluation of really well would put you in a better position for people to discount your grades.

I don't know anything about drama in the department, but they've hired three people quite recently who are all great. That's better than most departments are able to do right now with respect to hiring, so I'd say they have a fair amount of "fresh blood".

I don't think the OP was suggesting otherwise, but just wanted to clarify since there are different kinds of numbers being thrown out in this thread. The acceptance rate (which you're unlikely to find out from departments other than UCSD) is how many people a given dept accepts, not percentage of students that enroll out of the applicant pool. My department typically accepts about three (sometimes up to four) times the number of students they enroll. This year we got about 300 applications (slightly more than usual), and are aiming to enroll 5 students (which is normal), so we will probably (if history is a good guide) end up admitting about 15-20 students, which is a 5-7ish % acceptance rate. (My department is ranked below 30 on the PGR, though I think we get an unusually high # of applications in general, especially now that I've seen UCSD's acceptance rate.) When I was in grad school at a PGR-top-five place, they typically accepted about two times the number of students they enrolled. (UCSD is definitely listing this, not percentage of students that enroll out of their applicant pool; but that means you can't compare it to places where you just know how many students enroll and how many applications there are.)

The good news is that many of us basically don't look at grades, in some ways *especially* from MA programs where small differences can result in As vs A-s. (I think I'd notice if someone had a lot of B+s or below from an MA program--but still, if their writing sample was strong and they had letters that backed their work, it wouldn't bother me. I doubt that's true of everyone but I do bet that most people don't care about MA grades very much one way or another as long as they are As or A-s and the work is good.)

Admissions committee member here. I agree that there is no point to these sorts of posts or responses to them. Every admin committee makes decisions differently. In my dept there is no "threshold" you have to pass, though, and I doubt there is in most departments. We read every application. (Really.) We don't read all of every application, but we would definitely read your transcripts, cv, personal statement, letters, and at least skim the first five pages or so of your writing sample before putting anyone in a "no" pile. We don't do a "first pass" where we toss a bunch of people out on the basis of grades or anything like that. I personally don't care about grades at all unless they are bad in philosophy courses or there is some unexplained downwards trajectory. (Though fwiw I hate to say this, but a 3.87 is not a great GPA for an MA, and places that do care about grades will not be super impressed by it. It's not bad, but it is not particularly impressive since the grading scale in grad programs is much different than in undergrad courses. It is far less impressive than a 3.87 undergrad GPA is, imo.) Skimming your writing sample could lead me to examine it more closely even if your grades are terrible and your letters aren't great. If you're a terrible fit for my department, I'm less likely to spend tons of time on your app. If you are a great fit for my department, I'm more likely to spend more time on your app. If you have an unusual background (e.g. community college, long breaks in your education, etc.) I'll likely completely ignore grades regardless of how bad they are from early on in your education. Some people care about grades a lot. Even within admin committees there will be disagreement about this. It could be, for example, that the "first pass" works by the committee dividing the apps among them and each coming back to the first meeting with a list of 10-15-20 names they want to consider more closely. In those kinds of cases probably each member of the committee is using a totally different set of criteria to make that list. It will just be luck how they divided up the alphabet, or whatever. I do think that the only real close-to-universal thing there is to say here is that your writing sample matters above all else. I think that is true in nearly every department. Perhaps some departments will throw you in a "no" pile without taking even a glance at it, but my guess is they only do that if at least a couple of the following conditions are met: you don' thave a really strong background in philosophy, your letters are lukewarm, your grades are bad, your personal statement is weird or bad, etc. (The applications I spend the least amount of time on are people who just obviously have no philosophical background or very little. Apply to MA programs if you are in that position.)

P.S. I should have said: I didn't mean to discourage you from applying to PhD programs. You should! The most important thing for most places is the writing sample, and it can outshine less than stellar grades/letters. But just statistically your numbers don't look ideal, so I'd definitely suggest more MA programs too.

Simon Fraser and UW-Milwaukee (both MA programs) both have excellent metaphysicians. I'd do research on which places have funding and apply to more MA programs. It's unlikely you'll get into any PhD program worth attending given your situation, but you sound like you'd be a good candidate for MA programs.

No, it's not. A couple of things that can affect it: first, location! I used to teach in a department in a desirable east coast city with lots of other universities. My department was very low ranked. We got way, way more applications than we do in my current department (in a less desirable area and much better ranked, but not super elite). Second, coverage/breadth vs. specialization. Some programs are very very strong in a few things, but don't have a lot of breadth. I strongly suspect (though neither of the places I've worked are like this, so I'm not sure) that they get fewer applications than similarly ranked programs that have a lot of coverage of different areas--especially when they are strong in areas that fewer people tend to specialize in as undergraduates. But, I don't think that's necessarily what explains getting rejected from lower ranked depts and accepted by higher ranked depts; they are concerned about fit, diversity of areas of interest, etc. And also, the most important element of your application--the writing sample--is something about which subjective assessments by admissions committees are going to disagree quite a bit in most cases.

(PS I should say I'm in North America so I don't know if things are different in the places in Europe that you are applying.)

For what it's worth, I'm a faculty member at a PhD program that is very strong in Ancient, and we wouldn't care whether you had formally taken the courses or not. However, we have a joint program in classics and philosophy that students can apply for once they are already in our PhD program (so you can demonstrate proficiency once you are here by passing an exam). I think for some PhD programs you need to be able to get into such a joint program right off the bat if you're going to get into it at all, and classics programs might care more about whether you had actually formally taken the courses. (I'm not sure about this! Just guessing.) My guess is that for almost any MA program it is fine to not have formally taken the courses.

I would just email the director of admissions directly and tell them that you have a different offer that you will definitely accept. (There is probably a way to do this online in some of the systems, but I would say even if you do that still email the director of admissions, since they might not notice that you've done it in the system, etc.--at least in our system we still have access to withdrawn applications and they look just like regular ones.) In addition to the reasons given above, this helps admissions committees A LOT! If you withdraw your application, then we can offer the spot we might have offered to you directly to the person who would be first on the waitlist, instead of waitlisting them. (Or, if we were on the fence about you, we can stop worrying about you altogether and just move on.)

Fyi I'm just representing one (ranked) program but we generally don't look at grades until after we've holistically evaluated the person's writing sample, statement, letters, etc. Occasionally then when we look at grades and there is a big problem (e.g. nothing above a B+ in any philosophy course, a poor grade in logic or math for someone who wants to do formal work, a really really low overall GPA) someone just gets immediately counted out. But normally once we've looked at everything else unless there is a huge red flag in your grades you're already basically in the yes, no, or the maybe pile. That being said, without looking at grades at first, it is rare that someone with a GPA below, say, 3.3-3.4 (unless they were e.g. taking a lot of very hard math/science courses) ends up in the yes or maybe pile. But it does happen. A 3.7 would certainly not even raise an eyebrow in my department at all unless the philosophy grades were bad. Even then it is the sample and the letters that matter more. We also don't look at GREs though our university requires that we ask for them.

Hi. I can tell you from experience on multiple different admissions committees that schools definitely engage in this practice. And, in my case, admissions committees in the same department, but made up of different faculty, make different decisions about whether to engage in this practice. (So, at least in my department, there is no policy about it, the admissions committee is made up of a rotating cast of 3-5 people, and whether we use the strategy "admit the best people and hope for the best" or "try to guess at who we have a decent chance of actually getting and admit them" is basically dependent on what those 3-5 people think.) As a practical matter, this is part of where good fit with the research interests of the faculty can help you if your file is strong (perhaps weirdly, it is also why being a less good fit can help you if your file is weaker). If you have a fantastic file and aren't a great fit for the department, you're likely going to get rejected because we don't want to take the chance on you given that you are going to get into places that are better fits for you. If you have a fantastic file and are a great fit, you're more likely to get accepted even with the worry that you'll go elsewhere, because we have more to offer you and there is more of a chance you will come (if, say, you got into our program and a higher ranked one that was a worse fit for you).

Hi, I just wanted to say that I was only admitted to one PhD program (though I applied to far fewer than you did, but I also think that PhD admissions were less competitive when I was doing them), and recently received tenure at an R1, Phd-granting department. Don't worry! No one remembers or cares who did what and while sometimes getting in everywhere tracks later success, that's also often not the case. (If anything, you just should consider yourself as having better practice at the constant rejection that you will receive from now on, from journals, jobs, etc.)