brookspn

I did an MA at Texas Tech and would whole-heartedly recommend it. It's a great place.

I've just finished the terminal MA at Texas Tech University, and I can't say enough good things about it (I'm going to Rutgers in the fall. I certainly wouldn't be if not for the program here). If you have any questions, feel free to message me.

I'm going to read some books by my soon to be professors to familiarize myself with their work. Otherwise, I'm just going to take it easy. Regarding workload, I think one has to find one's own balance. I don't mind my work-life balance skewing towards work, but even so, I still have plenty of time to have beers with colleagues, play video games, or just relax. I'm sure you'll figure out what works best for you.

Declined USC

Admitted off the waitlist to Rutgers. I've accepted the offer.

I'm not sure whether one's MA AOI really matters–I don't have a strong intuition about this. I do, however, think that it would be weird to say in your SoP that your interest is in x while your sample paper is on ~x. It would be weird, also, to express a (primary) interest in y in your SoP, or to use a sample paper in y, to apply to a program at which no one works on y.

Declined UT Austin and removed myself from the waiting list at Stanford.

Same for anyone planning on declining Rutgers!

Idk, it seems to me that the nature of our job is such that thinking really hard about x counts as working. I'd say at least 30% (probably more) of my reading and writing time is spent either thinking carefully about what I've just read or considering what I am about to write. And why wouldn't talking to one's friends about philosophy count as work? Again, it seems to me that this is part of the job.

Right. So I think we might be talking past one another, @hector549. When I say 70 hours, that's inclusive of time spent in seminar and time spent on TA responsibilities (roughly 20 hrs/wk total). The remaining 50 hrs/wk is spent on reading and writing. To me, these represent different kinds of work. If these are different kinds of work, then I agree with your 50 hrs/wk number–it would be quite a lot, maybe too much, to spend 20 hrs/wk on classes and TA-ing + 70 hrs/wk on reading and writing. If these aren't different kinds of of work, then your view would suggest that I should spend only 30 hrs/wk on reading and writing. This is the claim I was disagreeing with since, as @Prose said, I have things I want to accomplish that cannot be accomplished by working that few hours. I also disagree that work/life balance is at all important, but, as I've already mentioned, I'm a bit mad!

So, there seem to be two kinds of answers here. On the one hand, there are answers which put a high value on work/life balance, e.g., @hector549. On the other, there are those which do not put a high value on work/life balance, e.g., me, @Prose, and @The_Last_Thylacine. I think one ought to use whichever method works best for one. Still, as long as there are people in the latter camp (and there always will be), it seems that those in the former camp will be at a disadvantage. Maybe they'll have better lives in some sense, but it's unlikely they'll be as productive philosophically.* I mean, even super-genius philosophers like Wittgenstein, Quine, and Lewis (to name a few) were famously hard workers. * I should add that, for me, being maximally productive at the thing I've chosen to pursue (e.g., philosophy) is a good life.

Exactly this. It's no different than becoming excellent at anything else, e.g., guitar, dance, painting, writing, etc. I don't think any of the greats in these and other areas were primarily concerned with striking a healthy work/life balance.

I don't entirely disagree @hector549 (I was mostly being glib with the time breakdown). Look, I'm not saying that working 70 hours per week is in any sense required to be good at philosophy. What I am saying is that I do spend that much time (as does @Prose), and spending that amount of time works just fine for me. Then again, I'm super-obsessive, I don't have an off-switch, and I generally like working on philosophy and prefer doing it to the exclusion of most other things. But I understand that not everyone is like this (nor do they need to be).

I mean, there are 168 hours in a week. Even if you work 70 hrs/wk, you can still sleep 8 hrs/night AND have 42 hrs/wk to just do whatever.

This is the info is the APA: https://www.apaonline.org/page/aid_offers