Mischief

The first question is the number of applicants. This varies a LOT from place to place, but it wouldn't surprise if e.g. SFU got 100+ applicants in a year and very strong ones considering their preparedness to take on international students (if you look at their cohorts every year, it's largely international students not domestic ones). Within Canada, some of these programs get 30-60 applications a year, others get less. The matter is more funding than anything--if you're applying, can they fund you and will they admit you if they can't? Dalhousie is a good example of this: the department is direct that department-level funding for grad students students (MA + PhD) is scarce, so beyond TAing they have to nominate you for funding or you have to win on your own. They might admit you without, but it's a consideration.

It happens, but usually people in your situation do an MA first.

Yeah, when I applied to Georgetown the grad director told me directly that I was on hold in this way and I was checking with places before I accepted an offer.

This sounds like a deeply frustrating situation, I'm sorry to hear you're dealing with this. Could you say a little bit more about what area specifically you are talking about? It's hard to imagine being admitted somewhere while simultaneously conceiving of what counts as a philosophy paper in fundamentally different terms from the department tenor--that's pretty radical, and beyond the more recognizable problem of the department members no longer caring very much about a research area. Regarding transferring: I did this and I'm much happier. Would be fine to chat more about it if it's material, but it sounds like you might be in a situation much, much worse than anything I encountered.

Rejected with a 13.76/20. Committee 2!

Me neither for what it's worth. Applied from Philosophy, so Committee 2 I believe.

On this, you'll be best off simply looking through the tags on Cocoon and following the cross-linked articles. Here's a few though: https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2019/08/supporting-non-academic-careers-guest-post-by-kevin-js-zollman.html https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2020/07/can-good-publications-offset-grad-program-rank.html https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2019/06/aos-job-types-and-placement-a-hypothesis.html https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2020/05/motivating-phd-programs-to-focus-on-industry-jobs.html https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2018/01/grad-program-rank-publications-and-job-market-a-hypothesis.html I'd look at the posts on Cocoon under "Real Jobs in Philosophy" and "Reader queries" especially, but be cautious of when people are speculating

Hi again, No problem: ABD means "All But Dissertation." Yes out of coursework, though not always teaching. Should be doing research, but it varies a great deal by department what the support is like during that phase, which is a key part of any program. It's easy to be excited about a program when things are well-funded, structured by coursework, and you have frequent contact with your cohort. Things get different when you are in the comprehensive exams and dissertation phase. To your point regarding TT jobs: you should consider reading up on this through posts on DailyNous and Philosophers' Cocoon. One thing worth thinking about is what kind of job you would like to get if you were to get one: some people want teaching jobs, others won't be satisfied with anything less than a prestigious research job at an Ivy School. If you are only interested in jobs like the latter, you'll (almost without exception) have to go to a very narrow set of schools like Princeton, Yale, Rutgers, etc. But those same students, as it turns out, sometimes struggle to get the other kinds of jobs at smaller and teaching oriented schools. Not that any of them are easy to get. If you want to work in industry, your considerations will be drastically different--many of these programs will do a terrible job of preparing you to work outside of an academic setting and will even consider it a disappointment. If you want to keep that door open, you should be looking very carefully at each of these places to see how they set students up to make a transition to the non-academic job markets you wish to be in.

Chiming in to say that I agree with everything @SmugSnugInARug has said. I have been through a shutout too, and it's important that you work at not associating your success in philosophy graduate admissions with your own self worth. I know it is hard to do, but it's something to work on.

I'm surprised you find these results disappointing, especially give how competitive this cycle was and given it sounds like you are applying straight out of your undergraduate degree. @Marcus_Aurelius is right on this, and the typical answer to questions like this is that you are better to take the bird in hand than to try again (and risk getting in nowhere). This said, it may be that you now think that they may not be a good fit or something else. If that's the case, think very carefully about which will be the best fit for you, your research interests (allowing that they may shift somewhat), and that gives you enough money (indexed to the living costs in the area). Talk to students at each school (include ABD students), do the visits, etc. to determine whether you would expect to be happy at the program. WUSTL PNP and Irvine LPS seem like the standouts of the group in terms of placement (Irvine especially). Austin places well enough but has funding issue from what I understand (investigate this before they ask you to make a decision very quickly on, like, April 14th), and UMass seems greats.

Occasionally people ask questions like this on the forum, so there is now a boilerplate answer: there is no reasonable way to make an "educated guess" about those who don't get offers this year. Even who will get offers and who won't (as washabirva's point illustrates) is quite unlikely to be fruitful, unless we're comparing fringe cases and making a lot of generalizations. The only way we could approach an educated account of this would be through a disciplinary survey of applicants, which I believe someone has put together this year. Even then, having a raw account of how many people are shutout in a year wouldn't tell us anything actionable because of how imprecise the process is as a whole. We would need a corresponding study of the institutions accepting applicants that would assess the trends in decision-making. Such a thing might be useful if it were conducted a bit like the ADPA research, but would be a huge undertaking in itself. For what it's worth, I was shut out last year and have an offer of admission this year, so I'm happy to chat if anyone on here is would like to. I just think it's a good idea to discourage attempts to try to do napkin math about the application process (I've seen some very cringey attempts to rationalize the possibility of success on this forum).

Putting it out there: there are a lot of posts on this board from applicants who have profiles similar to yours. It might be worth doing an AMA of sorts, or at least a write-up of your experience, once things are settled down a bit. It could be very helpful for people in a similar situation.

Edit: was not making a helping contribution. This is a thread for venting and commiserating. Sorry all.

I've had a brief chat with someone else I know who was just admitted to the same program, we each received an automated e-mail around 1:15PM. It is probably worth checking the portal for any update. Sorry if this means a no-go for UBC, but you've got many more irons it the fire it looks like!

Update I literally just got in at UBC.