Mischief
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Posts posted by Mischief
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On 3/30/2023 at 5:57 AM, PhilAnthro said:
Hi!
I want to apply to PhD programs in philosophy (in the US). My undergrad degree is in philosophy from an Ivy League university. However my GPA is not good (3.5). There is an upward trend in my grades and I have a good reason for my bad grades in the beginning but to make things worse, one of the classes I took during these dark times was logic and I got a C in it. The truth is I should have failed this class because I didn't attend the classes as I was struggling with mental health issues and my professor was nice enough and understanding of my situation so they just gave me a C instead of failing me. I took a leave of absence for a year and worked on my mental health and came back doing much better and getting good grades and even writing a thesis and graduating with honors but I'm afraid that C in logic and the overall low GPA would haunt me. I have a good GRE with high verbal and quant scores so maybe that would redeem me. I am also confident I could write a good writing sample and SOP and I have good recommendation letters.
I have thought about applying to political science/international relations/religious studies programs since I have a background in those areas too and these programs seem to be somewhat less competitive and more forgiving of lower GPAs than philosophy programs but I really just want to study philosophy and nothing else satisfies me. But it seems that I would need a near perfect GPA to get in (and without a C in logic!) I don't mind attending a lower ranked program at all and I just want to study philosophy. But even lower ranked schools seem to have ridiculously high standards and I don't know if it's worth applying.
I would appreciate it if you could tell me if it is possible to be accepted to philosophy programs with my credentials (granted that I do really well in other parts of my application.)
Thank you so much for reading
It happens, but usually people in your situation do an MA first.
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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.
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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.
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Rejected with a 13.76/20. Committee 2!
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1 minute ago, Generic_Applicant said:
Ah still no extranet email. Weird
Me neither for what it's worth. Applied from Philosophy, so Committee 2 I believe.
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8 minutes ago, csandphilguy said:
This sounds pretty important. I'm pretty familiar with DailyNous and Philosophers' Cocoon, but any articles you found particularly valuable there? I'm mostly familiar with stuff like this that describes how dismal the odds of a TT-track job are.
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/2019/06/aos-job-types-and-placement-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
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Just now, csandphilguy said:
Thanks for the replies, folks!!
> On the other hand, I believe UCI LPS has an outstanding placement record, so you may also want to consult with some faculty there about what to do if you don't get off their waitlist. They might recommend an MA, or reapplying, or they might even suggest you take WashU.
I totally agree with this, @Happybuddha. I'll begin reaching out to folks at UCI LPS and talking to them, among other things, about fit. The program has a tremendous academic placement record, which matters to me, as I want to be an academic. I also wish to keep industry doors open though (I truly think philosophy in AI is applied).
> Chances of a TT job are so small anyway, and if anything (totally spitballing here), a PNP program might give you better non-academic job options than a straight Philosophy program.
@Marcus_Aurelius I'm not fully sure about this myself TBH. I presume brand value matters quite a bit in keeping industry doors open. I don't know how a WashU or UCI would compare. I want to be in an interdiscplinary program, something like LPS/HPS (Stanford's symbolic systems track was my dream program).
> 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.
@Mischief Thanks! Rookie question...what is an "ABD" student? Are they students who are beyond coursework who now just teach and research?
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.
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7 hours ago, SmugSnugInARug said:
This is a perfectly normal part of the experience. The application process is not designed to promote applicant mental health nor to provide clear, actionable feedback on your application.
At best, there’s a general sense of what is valued for programs, but the whole variety of factors at play can make it extremely difficult to determine why a decision is made.
This is especially true because there are often so many more applicants who are perfectly qualified than there are slots available.
You could have a great application, but they may already have 6 students studying that topic, so they have to pass in favor of someone else whose focus is less represented (this example is less true for MAs, but still holds).
Unfortunately, this means you have to rely on analysis that doesn’t come directly from the programs themselves. Speak with your letter writers, especially anyone who has served on a graduate acceptance committee (which can be hard when you attended an undergrad where there isn’t a graduate program).The two best things you can do for your application are:
Figure out what you can do to improve your application based on general standards (do you need to edit your writing samples? Do you need to get a different letter of rec? Do you need to retake the GREs?)
Make sure that the programs you are applying to are the best ‘fit’ for you, where you have the greatest chance of being picked from a pool of equally qualified applications, based on your research interests and the department specialities. (Again, this is less true for MA programs than PhDs, but it is still somewhat true.)
And yeah, it sucks. I’ve been shut out before, left alone with basically no understanding of why I wasn’t successful in my application, which was a terrible feeling. You are definitely not alone in this.
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.
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40 minutes ago, csandphilguy said:
Hey folks, it's decision time and I'm struggling.
I applied to a ton of PhD programs this cycle. I ended up with one acceptance (WashU PNP) and three waitlists (UCI LPS, UT Austin, UMass). My AOIs are: the Philosophy (nature and ethics) of Artificial Intelligence and its intersection with Phil of Mind + Cognitive Science. I'm super grateful for these decisions that did go in my favor but I regret not applying for MAs. In hindsight, I was arrogant and felt I had an unreasonably good shot at a T10 PGR school.
It's decisions time and I'm not quite sure how to proceed. On the one hand, I feel I could improve my writing sample (by how much I don't know) and reapply, including to MAs which could hopefully be a stepping stone to a T10 school. On the other hand, I know the cycle is getting harder every year and there's never a guarantee.
Advice appreciated
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.
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5 hours ago, HomoLudens said:
Considering how competitive most programs are in a normal year, I would imagine that the number of people who get shut out of grad school is pretty high. Can any of you stats whizzes make an educated guess as to what % of applicants don't get any offers?
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).
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On 2/25/2021 at 7:11 PM, PhilCoffee said:
Waitlisted at UT Austin! I'm an international student and applying out of undergrad - with no pedigree and bad GPA. My main target was MA programs but would be really really grateful if I got in. If someone got accepted by UT Austin and is not interested, please let me know! Please.
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.
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Edit: was not making a helping contribution. This is a thread for venting and commiserating. Sorry all.
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24 minutes ago, ObamaIsGuiltyOfWarCrimes said:
omg tell me more. I'm going to cry. All of my top choices are running away it seems.
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!
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Just now, ObamaIsGuiltyOfWarCrimes said:
Nothing on FB.
Update I literally just got in at UBC.
- Marcus_Aurelius, BabyFarmer, eleatics and 3 others
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Saw a UBC post on the results page--anyone on here have info?
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3 minutes ago, lurkingfaculty said:
I don't think the OP was suggesting otherwise, but just wanted to clarify since there are different kinds of numbers being thrown out in this thread. The acceptance rate (which you're unlikely to find out from departments other than UCSD) is how many people a given dept accepts, not percentage of students that enroll out of the applicant pool. My department typically accepts about three (sometimes up to four) times the number of students they enroll. This year we got about 300 applications (slightly more than usual), and are aiming to enroll 5 students (which is normal), so we will probably (if history is a good guide) end up admitting about 15-20 students, which is a 5-7ish % acceptance rate. (My department is ranked below 30 on the PGR, though I think we get an unusually high # of applications in general, especially now that I've seen UCSD's acceptance rate.) When I was in grad school at a PGR-top-five place, they typically accepted about two times the number of students they enrolled. (UCSD is definitely listing this, not percentage of students that enroll out of their applicant pool; but that means you can't compare it to places where you just know how many students enroll and how many applications there are.)
To throw in one example: places like Michigan are transparent about these things. See here and sort for philosophy:
https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDoctoralProgramStatistics/ProgramStatistics?:embed=y&:showAppBanner=false&:showShareOptions=true&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no&FOSDParameter=All+RackhamI haven't encountered many schools who are like this, but they do exist. I, for one, think departments in every discipline should aim for this kind of transparency, but that would take an institutional change I imagine.
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Hi all,
This is a very general question, but I'm trying to broaden my horizons. I am a Philosophy applicant, but I'm also thinking about next steps if things don't work out this time around. I have considered applying to policy-focused programs and interdisciplinary social science programs if I don't make it into a PhD program in philosophy this time around, I wonder if anyone could suggest where I might look to find benchmarks for other areas of study (I don't want to be a lawyer). To be clear: I know GRE scores aren't everything and don't determine that anyone gets into whatever program. My question is only about how to think very broadly about what my be opened up by decent GRE scores--many of the websites with this kind of information are either run by test-prep companies or seems misleading.
For reference, I am working with 168V/162Q/5AW. I imagine I could score higher if it mattered, but these were around what one is looking for in philosophy so there wasn't much pressure to work at a perfect V score or a higher Q score.
Thanks for any help!
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1 hour ago, RoPhilos said:
Thanks for the info but how did you know that? Do you also know if they gave out waitlists for this cycle? It seems that there is no WL post either on the gradcafe or the Facebook group.
He's the graduate admissions coordinator at MIT at the moment and we'd had a very brief chat about some of my documents back in January. I e-mailed him right after the rejections to thank the department for the fast turn around on the rejections (sometimes we wait a long time to hear about rejections officially or not at all), and he was forthcoming about the number of applicants and slots.
EDIT: No info about waitlists, but I didn't ask. Don't forget that the information we can glean from posts on GradCafe and Facebook are quite limited.
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FYI for those rejected from MIT:
Alex Byrne mentioned they had more applicants than usual with +300 for only 4 slots this year. -
On 1/30/2021 at 4:14 PM, HomoLudens said:
I was banned from the FB group, so I tried to join under an alt, and I encountered the same problem. That was a while ago, so IDK what the problem is.
Wow wow wow, we definitely need this story ??
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7 hours ago, PhilCoffee said:
@Outer Heaven Yeah. And he says "no". So I don't know what's going on. Probably I should wait, maybe they'll find the letter, or they'll reach out otherwise.
Don't wait any longer. Send an e-mail to the admissions coordinator at Pitt and find out what's up--it's entirely possible that the messages you're sending are going to a portal inbox for someone who no longer checks it (i.e. a past coordinator who now has no reason to log into the portal).
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Hi Mitch,
Sorry to hear that you're feeling stressed--it doesn't help that the cost of applying is so high when you apply to such a wide range of schools. Let me try to distill some of the common comments you'll get around here and on the blogs. Here's your list, annotated:- 4.0 Cumulative GPA - Good, this bodes well for your ability to get scholarship funding and as a result counts in your favour. It won't, however, play a big role in whether or not you are admitted--rather, it will plop you into the pool with the majority of other applicants who have a high enough GPA not to make people worry.
- Two independent studies and a grad seminar on my transcript -- These won't bear on your application directly. Rather, they will hopefully help people writing your letters be better informed about your abilities.
- Majoring in Econ and Phil -- As above, this keeps you in the running insofar as a non-major might have to explain their preparedness for the program. Having an Econ major is probably *useful* for your preparedness to do, e.g., political philosophy, but isn't a point in your favour by itself.
- NCAA D1 athlete -- Good for you, really! This, however, will not bear on your application. It might only in a small way if you say something about how demanding the schedule was and that despite this you were very successful.
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Three writing samples on Aristotle, Beauvoir, and Kant respectively (about half the programs allow two samples) -- This might have been risky. I'm not sure who gave you advice about submitting two samples rather than one, but generally you don't want to submit two samples unless you are proposing to work in both an area of history (e.g. ancient) and in an area of systematic (e.g. epistemology). Perhaps this is what you did. How this is addressed will depend on the program
- All reviewed by multiple faculty and 100% + papers according to them -- a good sign, though not sufficient--this should be the baseline for any writing sample.
- No publications except for a small blog I run myself -- that's alright, publications don't typically play a role in philosophy admissions anyways (as has been described quite a bit by a few applicants over the last few years).
- Tons of outside research which I highlight in my personal statement -- Could be good if it is tightly related to philosophy, though again, not a determinant. Hopefully this will count in your favour when discussed by your letter writers.
- (I presume) three really solid letters of rec -- Good, again, this is the baseline for considering making an application so I'm glad you feel confident about it!
- No GRE - I had some circumstances with the Covid stuff -- totally fine for most schools, and you would know more about this.
I am certain this won't give you the relief you are looking for, but I hope it helps throw into relief just how little things matter outside of the writing sample(s) and letters of recommendation. You sounds like an absolutely terrific applicant--and really probably a shoe-in for other kinds of programs, like professional schools--but the received wisdom across the board is that much of what you've listed above will either play no or a small role in the assessment of your file.
It will be okay! It's just a waiting game now that your applications are in! Don't forget that many people with fewer credentials than you will be admitted, and many with more credentials than you will be rejected.
Good luck!
EDIT: sorry, missed your thing about applying to more schools. Don't apply if you (1) wouldn't go, or (2) it's not a good fit for you. If they weren't on your initial list, think very hard about whether it's spending the money and time to apply.
- freC, Happybuddha and Marcus_Aurelius
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EDIT: sorry, I double-posted. See below.
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Hi again ak71,
Thanks for clarify, I didn't follow your point here. You are proposing to submit five letters rather than three, which is going to bump you up against NYU's suggestion that you only submit more than three in special circumstances. I don't take your situation here to be unusual, but you might ask the person in charge at NYU what the right take is on this. The general advice I've seen on this is always: pick the best letters, not the most. In your case: pick the three strongest ones, namely the ones from people who know you best and can speak most effectively to you being on track to become a great philosopher (given it's NYU, literally the next David Lewis). You will know best which three are best here, and it may be that the old ones are preferable to the new ones, but my suggestion is still that you stick with three rather than five. It may be that you've written something transformative for your writing sample--good, that should speak for itself, rather than having two topic experts weigh in on the writing sample alone.
On submitting both samples: I wouldn't. Really, I think the best case would be to ask those people to submit new ones if you think they are in the best position to write on your behalf, but if that is out of the question I would simply make a note in your file about the discrepancy rather than submitting a whole second sample. Alternatively: just the cover page, not the whole sample. Then again, this might raise questions: why didn't ak71 ask them to simply rewrite the letters? Was there a falling out? These things do come up in grad admissions, especially in cases of PhD students jumping ship (I'm doing something similar).
how competitive are canadian philosophy MA programs?
in Philosophy
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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.