philosopuppy

Hi everyone, I hope I'm not making too many threads ?? but I figure lots of people are in my position or will be in the future, so any advice collected here will be of benefit to others. So, I've received a few funded MA offers. Generally the advice is, "go where there's money", so now that there is more than one place with money, I'm struggling with how to choose. Should money be the overriding factor, or are there finer points worth considering? Particularly, I'm interested to know what people think about the placement records of the tippy-top MAs. Are they all basically the same? I combed through the data, and it seems like -- for instance -- UWM has a much better placement rate than NIU or GSU for the cluster of very-prestigious northeastern Ivies, NYU, Oxford, etc. But that when you look at places like the UC schools or CUNY, NIU seems to have far and away the better placement rate. Is an analysis of this detail really worth anything? I worry that maybe the data set is too limited, & reflects students' interests & choices as much as the strengths of the school. Thank you all again for your help (and I promise this is it!) ❤️

Hi everyone, As I choose between MA offers I was hoping I could get some input on a kind of specific question I have. So, I work on [unspecified non-Western region], in addition to some more mainstream analytic stuff. I applied for MAs this round, because my coursework in the latter was kind of lacking & I felt I'd benefit from more time to work on a sample, get my background up to speed, etc. However, I will also need to spend some significant time abroad to get my languages up to snuff and be able to spend time reading the texts I'm working on, etc. (Also, it's just very important to me personally.) I would be taking some sort of fellowship or scholarship to do this -- I'll be applying to Fulbrights + a whole range of language training fellowships and [country] government scholarships, the latter of which are plentiful. So I wouldn't just be kicking around. I want to make sure I get some of this - say, a year or two - done before I get to the PhD, so this won't hold up my research, make things take longer, be seen as a distraction in my program, etc. And I know this is quite common for people who study [this area of philosophy] in programs that aren't philosophy (like religious studies or area studies), and my advisors in those areas have all done it. (One of them took like 5 years in-country between the MA and PhD.) My question is, does anyone have any idea how this looks to philosophy departments? Would they be suspicious of this, or would it make me seem less serious about philosophy? The reason I ask is that I know some of my MA programs will let me take a year in between, which would shrink the gap before applying to PhD programs, but those are also the ones with less funding, so it's unclear which way to go. I know this is kind of an out-there question & that I'll probably have to ask some people in person, but I figured it couldn't hurt to see if anyone here has any insight. Thanks all in advance, and I hope you're all hanging in there

Anyone else in at GSU? (I'm particularly interested to know if anyone got one of their fancy named assistantships!)

NIU folks (past and present): does anyone know when we hear back about the TAships? (And congrats to everyone who's gotten in so far this cycle!! ❤️)

Is it really true that Brown and Cornell have "abysmal" placement ratings compared to other top-10 programs? My impression was that it was all kind of equally terrible-but-not-impossible among the various top 20-ish schools. (This might be a bit off topic, but would be good to know!)

Hopefully I'll be able to take you up on that

No wayyy! I'm writing my senior thesis on the Kyoto School! Love those guys.

I have friends who are or have been at programs in LA and NYC and had $40-50k stipends. Just for an additional data point.

Awesome, same here! I do a lot of stuff on Buddhist metaphysics & ethics these days. ☸️?

2 of 4 in! I see I have some MA buddies

I'm submitting two for just one of my schools, where basically I have (1) my main sample, in a pretty mainstream/analytic topic and (2) an additional sample to be considered for a fellowship in a less analytic/mainstream area. I wanted to demonstrate my analytic chops while also being a contender for this fellowship. My advisor thought it would be a good idea, and I put a note in my statement specifying what each was for.

Hey everyone, this is my last advice-begging thread, I promise! I had another thread about getting into MA programs, but I'm going back and forth on also applying to some PhD programs, and could use advice/input on a couple things... So, my aim is PGR top 20-30 schools. If in the end I couldn’t break into that tier at all, I probably would still take the PhD at a lower-ranked school, work hard, and see what happens - but, naturally, the higher-ranked, the better. Since I am entering into mainstream “analytic” philosophy fairly late (having done only Continental for most of my undergrad), I am applying to MA programs, since I think the added two years of preparation will make a huge difference in terms of my competitiveness for the programs I want to end up in. If I got into a below-30 PhD program this cycle, I would want to master out and apply to stronger programs. Is this something people can do? I haven't found very much substantive information about transferring PhD programs, how it's received, etc. Would it rub people the wrong way to be transferring out of a perfectly good PhD program? Maybe it'd be better to go the MA route, which is at least an established path for getting there? However, I’m also thinking about top-ranked PhD programs where my “non-analytic” background might actually count for something. Most of the time I was doing Continental stuff I was taking grad classes, presenting at conferences, etc. I could get a letter from one professor who had me in his grad class, has read all of my most recent work, and with whom I’ve organized a department reading group for several semesters. He’s definitely in my corner and I think he’d write a great letter. However, he is definitely a SPEP person, and you can tell this from a quick search. So, the question is: if I apply to places like UChicago and UC Riverside, where Continental is actually a big strength of the program, would that help me at all? Would it nudge me over from “maybe wait until after the MA” to “might be worth a shot now”? Or would the fact that my teachers were all SPEP people be cause for suspicion? I just took my GRE and got a 170V/162Q, so that’s part of the reason this is on my mind. My other letters are from junior tenure-track faculty who know my more recent “analytic” work really well and have taught independent studies and grad classes with me. I just don’t have the years of research experience and famous letter-writers that other people applying to these top PhD programs have - and these are things that I could get with a couple extra years. Thank you everyone again for your helpful input and advice. I'll do my best to pay it forward once I've ended up somewhere! tl;dr: Can I transfer just for ranking, or will that piss people off? Can I get into PGR Continental programs if my letter is from someone with a SPEP background?

Thank you so much for the advice. I'm gonna apply to some mid-ranked PhD programs, but seeing some of the people who post here and elsewhere about applying to top PhD programs with more stellar accomplishments than I'll probably ever have, I find it really easy to get nervous about it... And yes, I'm only applying to programs with funding. By the way, we already know each other in person!

Hey everyone, I'm a senior at a non-prestigious state school with a decently good Philosophy program (hovers around what would be #51-52 on the PGR). I'm planning to apply to a mix of funded MAs and mid-ranked PhD programs this fall. But I've done enough reading about how horrifically difficult it is to get in anywhere that I want to get as much input as possible. So I'm wondering if anyone might have some thoughts about how I'm doing. I spent my first, say, five semesters focusing mostly on Area Studies/Religious Studies, and then on Continental philosophy. I did some research working with primary texts in [foreign language], took a bunch of graduate seminars with SPEP-type people in Philosophy and Comp Lit, and presented at a bunch of Area Studies and Religious Studies conferences. I have a peer-reviewed article coming out in an edited volume in Religious Studies, and my article is explicitly concerned with philosophy & is about philosophical topics. However, my interests nowadays are actually solidly analytic. What I really want to study is metaethics, reasons, that kinda stuff. So I'm now feeling like most of my best accomplishments aren't going to count for much, because they're not "real" philosophy. I've since taken a couple graduate seminars in metaethics. I have at least two solid letters from philosophy professors, one of whom I've done several independent studies with and am now developing publications with. The other taught both grad seminars and can testify to my ability to handle grad-level work. My third letter would either be (1) a Continental professor who also had me in his grad class and with whom I've worked really closely since (reading groups and stuff), or (2) the professor co-teaching one of the analytic seminars, with whom I've not worked closely, but who could at least say that I'm holding my own in the grad class and am always at colloquia asking questions and stuff. My GPA is approaching a 3.9, and is closer to like 3.96 in Philosophy. I'm not taking the GRE until later this month (weather delay... ?), but I'm studying a lot and feel well-prepared. The main problem, I think, is (1) the letters situation, and (2) my sample. My sample is on a particular extension of expressivism which has become popular lately but is still quite new. So I'm referencing lots of current major figures, whose work I'd be expecting to deal with throughout my grad school career. But I haven't done a ton of original writing on analytic topics until fairly recently, so I'm afraid it's going to end up feeling amateurish. I'm basically just taking stock of what the objections to this view are, and trying to respond to each in turn, and then trying to say something about the direction in which those strategies of response will push the theory as a whole. But it sometimes feels like kind of biting off more than I can chew, and I know that my arguments aren't so original and clever as to be of publishable quality. I feel like I have no chance next to people at much better institutions who have spent their entire undergrad working on analytic philosophy and writing good papers on it, and who have famous letter-writers vouching for them. So I'm mostly going to try to get into the best funded MA programs, like NIU, Georgia State, Simon Fraser, etc. What do you guys think? (Thanks so much for your help!)