I heard that the number of applicants decreases this year by 15% in comparison to last year. A prof from Yale says on his twitter, Yale got 530 application last year and this year it is 450.
I would suggest University of Barcelona APHIL program. LOGOS research group has a very very strong faculty like Manuel-Garcia Carpintero, Sven Rosenkranz, Genoveva Marti, Josep Macia, Jose Diez..etc. The program is highly competitive. And Barcelona is a great city.
In fall 2017, I followed a seminar on Kant's philosophy of mathematics. The course greatly influenced me in that I started to grasp Kant's theoretical philosophy from a new perspective. Then I decided to turn my term paper for that course into a writing sample. So I spent approximately one and half year on it and presented it in an international conference. It is a bit weird to say but I've turning my term paper into a graduate thesis rather than extracting a sample paper from a thesis.