Krauge

I know I'm two months late here. When I was an undergrad, my professor knew that this was my field of interest, and told me explicitly, "do not apply to BC for a masters, it's a cash cow". According to former students of hers, there is no funding at the MA. I can't speak to the PHD level, but that was direct advice given to me by a professor who does a lot of work helping students prepare for graduate school applications.

Thanks to everyone who responded, and having thought through this a bit, I’ve got a follow up question, for anyone who knows, but especially for people in Ancient, like Marcus and Prose. Having now been informed that I should avoid Hellenistic as a main focus for at least this part, are there also parts of the more commonly studied subjects (meaning mostly Plato and Aristotle) that it would be better to avoid in the same vein? That is, are there areas that I should focus on and avoid, like more popular and less popular dialogues and treatises? In regards to Plato, I find myself drawn to the Crito and Charmides, but these are short works, and there is much work being done on things like the Republic and Symposium. And similarly Aristotle

This ties into what I was going to ask anyway. And, I know that you can’t say anything concrete without actually seeing the paper, but would a more historically based paper like mine be looked at more favorably by a classics track of ancient philosophy than a philosophy track, or is it just a bad way to proceed? Prose is obviously right that I need to get back into reading journal articles for philosophy, but in your experience, would classics look more favorably on this than philosophy? And, as far as articles go, how different would an article in an academic journal, say Nous, be from an article in a Cambridge Companion or Blackwell Companion? I went through a decent number of those for the paper? I’m trying to gauge what I have cut out for me.

Is it suggested then that I write a new paper from scratch? One that is a Plato and/or Aristotle based one? The paper was on The Intellectual Children of Socrates in the Hellenistic world, looking at the three major schools of Hellenistic Philosophy that claimed Socrates as their intellectual progenitor, and who has the best claim to him. So, it does deal with Socrates and Plato. And Xenophon, but most philosophers don't care about him. This brings up something else that I had been thinking about, which is how useful a paper that is historically based like this one is as opposed to a topically based paper (e.g. epistemology in Plato, volition and will in Aristotle)? I happened to catch some of the advice given in another post to someone trying to come up with a writing sample, and there was a disagreement about the usefulness of a paper that compared and contrasted two position. This is something similar; do Philosophy departments care at all about a historically based writing sample like mine, or should it be saved for Classics departments? That's not to say that there is no philosophy in the paper - there is plenty of it. It's just that it takes a more historical approach to a philosophical period than an exposition of a particular idea in a philosopher.

The general area of interest is Ancient. The specific subset I wrote about is Hellenistic, the area my capstone paper was about. I emphasized in my Statements of purpose my interest in the full scope of Ancient- Presocratics to Augustine. I have also read posts and comments from various philosophy blogs (legitimate ones, not just any schmuck) that emphasizing a strength in Hellenistic could be advantageous for study and job prospects, since it is rarer to find someone who does it, and that person will most likely know the standard Ancient stuff (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) anyway.

That’s more appreciated than I can say. I’ll do that in a few months when your semesters are over. And, while I have you both here, some professors suggested to me Boston University’s dual PHD philosophy/MA classics program. Do either of you have any option of that?

Rejected at Villanova

The absolute last results haven't come in yet, but it very much looks like I'm not going anywhere this fall. Whether I try again in the future is up in there air for me. But something that I have been thinking about is the task ahead of me of retooling my writing sample. I have been out undergrad for a few years now, and so have not had that frequent contact professors who could go over my writing sample with me to see how it stacks up. My sample was a punched up version of my capstone thesis/term paper, whatever you call it. Not only is it a relatively understudied subject area, hellenistic philosophy, which my professor evidently didn't know very well. I found as I was going through it during my rewrite, that my professor had missed many many mistakes; not just interpretation things, but flat out factual errors in my presenting positions, dates, and even to my unbelievable shame, names. There were extenuating circumstances at the time that I don't need to go into; suffice it to say that I wasn't at my absolute best that semester, but it was still a solid paper. And, This is an excellent professor as well, I don't want people thinking it was some uncaring bad teacher. It just seems that they missed some stuff in an unfamiliar subject while grading one of the 15 capstone papers. Thats kind of a mouthful for an introduction, but my question is, how do I go about getting help/advice/guidance for this next round of editing? I thought my paper was pretty good (I actually thought one of the sections was excellent), but I had no way of knowing. There is no one I know who I can shoot an email and say "hey, can I get some feedback here?" It seems unbelievable tacky to email professors that I don't know who have giant course loads already and ask them to read through 20 pages and make comments. I was thinking of maybe emailing the professors at the schools I applied to who probably read my sample, but even that seems out of line. I just want someway to find a baseline telling me that I'm in the right ballpark. Being out of school, and having just rewritten it last year, i just have this horrible feeling that I might be in the middle of nowhere, completely out of line with how I should be writing. And I don't know how to find that baseline. Any advice would be hot.

Thanks very much. Some of that I suspected, such as classics being slightly less competitive, if only just slightly, based on numbers. My big interests are outside Plato and Aristotle, so that’s helpful. In what you’ve come across, does that hold true even when departments have professors who specialize in other areas of Ancient. For example, I applied to Cornell because they have two people who do Hellenistic Philosophy, a big interest of mine. It might not be able to be calculated, but based on why you said, would something like that be better received through Classics? Finally, do you know of any difference between the two tracks GRE wise, like classics maybe being more concerned with verbal and less with quantitative.

One of my AOIs is Ancient Philosophy. I’ve got a background in both classics and philosophy. I’ve seen people around here who have applied to some schools for the philosophy track and some for the classics track. For those of you who applied to PHD programs in Ancient Philosophy, how did you decide which track to apply to at the different schools? Especially helpful would be Those of you who applied to some schools Phil track and other schools Cla track.

Does anyone know what’s going with Villanova? People have reported acceptances, rejections, and waitlists, all on March 1st. I still haven’t gotten anything. I assume that’s a rejection, but this is my first cycle, so I was wondering if that’s usual.

Rejected by Cornell

This forum is supposed to be about who was acceptanced where for fall 2019. Take these arguments to another thread.

Rejected from Fordham

My sample was on the intellectual children of Socrates in the Hellenistic world. It looked at the Cynics, Stoics, and Sceptics, how they stacked up in relation to Socrates, and who had the most legitimate claim to him as their inspiration or proto-founder. If I am accepted nowhere, I'll probably begin reworking another undergraduate paper on St. Bonaventure and his intellectual influences. My two big field of interest are Ancient and the Philosophy of Religion, so that would be able to tie the two together, and might be more attractive to a department like Fordham. Christopher Cullen at Fordham was a prime influence on that paper. At the time, I only had the opportunity to rework one old paper for the sample. Having more than one would be helpful. I like the Fordham program. In researching it, I looked through previous course offerings and they looked exactly like what I want in a program, and each area has multiple professors with different emphases. It's one of the few programs that while researching, I actually got excited about. It's a buffet of opportunities for someone with my interests.