Hypatience

It was an account of mine that started the thread that Monadology links, but it is inactive now (not sure I still have the password). If you send me a message on this account I should be able to receive it, though. But I would really recommend that somebody in the current crop of women start a similar group. It really was immeasurably valuable, and having only prospectives in it and nobody with a current PhD affiliation of their own made everyone much more candid. Regardless, I'd be glad to connect via forums messages and Facebook with any women prospectives, and to do what I can to either answer questions myself or put them in touch with women who are at schools they're considering. (Although I'm very busy because of the end of my semester, so I might not be very prompt to reply!)

I did not tailor my statement whatsoever and I did well at a lot of the places you're applying. They don't really get looked at very closely and I'd say it's probably the most unimportant part of your application.

Oh man, I always feel compelled to post this! But for those of you who aren't Canadian, lots of great Canadian MAs fund international students! Simon Fraser might be our best MA in terms of placement and international students don't even pay higher tuition there: "The Philosophy department welcomes applications from international students. Our admission process is blind as to citizenship and we often accept students from outside Canada. Non-Canadian Graduate students do not pay higher fees at SFU. Teaching Assistantships (our main form of support) are available to them, as are internal SFU Fellowships and Research Assistantships. Holders of student visas can accept employment on campus, and apply for an off-campus work permit in order to support themselves. Non-native speakers of English must take the TOEFL or equivalent exam, as per university rules (Section 1.3.12 English Language Competence), unless their previous degree is from an English-speaking institution. Because most of our graduate students work as Teaching Assistants, the department pays particular attention to evidence concerning the mastery of English." UToronto's MA funds international students, too, as well as a few others. Just check them out!

Oh, one last thing about visiting off the wait list: don't be shy about saying you're on the wait list. I mentioned it casually a lot in my meetings right off the bat -- "So, I'm on the wait list, and I don't know if that changes the tone or tenor of this meeting, but I was told to just take it seriously in case an offer materializes, so that's what I'm going to do!" And then you can just ask the kinds of questions you would ask if you were admitted without feeling sheepish or like a fraud. Because there's no reason to feel that way, anyway -- it's so competitive at some of these places that they realize there isn't much of a difference in quality between who gets in and who gets wait listed. One top school told me they'd looked at their records for past years and found that a student being initially wait listed or not didn't positively correlate at all with success in the program or on the job market. Everyone is pretty much equally good at that level. So be open about it, although be a little careful not to sound desperate or anything. Just be really positive and say you've got some great options but you'd love to be able to consider school X. Some people were super secretive about the fact that they were on the wait list (to the extent that I thought they'd been admitted until they told me otherwise after the visits) -- but being open about it and acting like it wasn't a big deal worked for me. And at the school I mentioned in my previous post, where I got accepted partly because people "lobbied" for me, I'm sure that this wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been really forthcoming about my position. (Sometimes the grad students don't know who is wait listed and who isn't, this can vary really widely.)

One thing I didn't talk about much was the prestige of your letter writers, but I think that can be a factor. If you can, I think it's good to try and get letters from the most senior scholars in your department, or at least the ones who are currently publishing the most and in the best places. I was lucky in that my interests happened to align with two people who fit that description at my MA program (not entirely by accident -- I chose the program to work with one of them). My third letter was actually external; I took a grad class over the summer at my BA institution and got a letter from a younger professor who was a little more well known, or at least one of those fairly visible mover-and-shaker types. S/he ended up taking an interest in my work and being a big help to me. I think having an external letter can help a lot -- the professor knows you're motivated, because you went through the trouble of taking the course for credit at their institution (doing this in my province wasn't necessarily expensive, but it involved a lot of 'visiting student' paperwork). Plus if you're going through all the trouble it motivates you to be a really good student and to be super proactive about getting the most out of the class. Especially if the professor is at a school that hits heavier in the rankings than your current one, an external letter is something that can help you stand out. But right, I started out talking about prestige -- I was a little awestruck by how many of my peers' letter-writers on the visits were by mega-famous scholars. Like I said, my letter writers were good people producing great work, but I definitely met a lot of folks who were mentored by all-out superstars. If you happen to be at the kind of school that has faculty like that, you should try to do all you can to get them to take an interest in you!

Yeah, this might partly explain it! I can see the Ivies getting a lot of applications, and can definitely see them getting more than some top five schools like Pitt or Michigan. And if that's the case then this makes sense -- the students I met from Ivies were really good applicants and very well-prepared, so I can plausibly see them edging out competition in a larger pool. I guess it was the almost total division in my results that surprised me -- I was startled to get into NYU, for example, but to be flat-out rejected from, say, Cornell and Columbia. Having applied basically everywhere gave me a really interesting spread of results to consider and that was the only curveball I hadn't even anticipated (besides getting in anywhere in the first place, that is). You're so right that an Ivy League degree carries a lot of weight outside academic philosophy -- I did get a solitary Ivy wait list and my non-academic family members (which is to say all of them) were utterly devastated when I took myself off of it.

OK, I'm just going to fire off some stuff! Feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear or to call me out if anything sounds false. For background, I went to a decent ranked school for my BA (not a top 10 and not an Ivy), but I didn't really distinguish myself and my primary concentration wasn't philosophy. To compensate, I got an MA from a small, unranked program without a PhD, and when I applied out this season I ended up with some very good offers, some of which were at top five schools. So I feel like I have some good advice to give, since not a lot of my success is attributable to pedigree. A lot of it will apply more to people in MAs than to people finishing up BAs, but some of it will generalize. An MA is a great idea if you're not coming out of undergrad as a ready-made hyper-competitive candidate. It will train you up and (more importantly) buy you time to prepare your applications. Two year programs are good, otherwise you might need to take a year off to apply, since you probably won't be able to lock down stellar letters after just three or four months in a program. Obviously try to do a funded MA, if at all possible. If you're American, there are some good Canadian MAs that will fund you and you shouldn't write them off. (Pretty sure there are some funded American MAs as well.) It's probably better to apply as a weaker candidate with no MA than a stronger candidate with an MA that you had to go into debt for, unless it's Tufts or something, in which case do the calculus. If you're Canadian and doing an MA, do apply for the MA SSHRC. You have to apply early, October or November the year before, but if you've missed your deadline you can still apply during the first year of a two-year MA to receive funding in your second year. Your school will probably claw most of the funding back (although mine didn't!) but in any case you'll end up with more money than you would have had otherwise. Plus, winning a SSHRC is a big deal and will open some doors for you. It will make it easier for you to win more external awards in the future (like the PhD SSHRC) and will definitely make you stand out as an applicant at good Canadian schools like UToronto. Be really, really mercenary about your MA -- everything you do should somehow contribute to strengthening your applications package. Get feedback and assistance from as many faculty members as you can and listen to what they have to say. If you do this right, they will feel invested in your success and go out of their way to keep an eye on you. Mentorship like that is professionally valuable and also really personally fulfilling. Apply to conferences. Apply to all the conferences. Even (especially!) professional ones that seem out of your league. Every time you write a paper for one of your grad-level classes, submit it to every just-barely-plausibly-relevant conference. I did this and got a paper accepted to a conference that was way out of my league in the first year of my MA and it made a huge difference. Plus the social atmosphere at conferences is very cool and you'll end up amassing a great philosophical social network. I met senior grad students and junior, senior, and even superstar faculty, all of whom taught me so much and really filled out my idea of what academia was like. Even if you're the most junior person at a conference, don't be shy -- people will be impressed that you're there at all and they won't be judging you by the same standards they judge senior members of the profession. And for the most part they'll be delighted to offer you applications advice! I went to a couple of conferences the summer before I applied and I met more than one person who spontaneously offered to read my writing sample and told me to stay in touch. If you're an undergrad at a school with a grad program, you should try to audit and even enrol in some grad-level classes. You might not have known you could even do this, but you totally can. Find the graduate course list and directly contact the professors teaching the courses you're interested in. This might be the most important piece of advice on my list! The undergrads I've seen who've placed in stellar programs are almost universally the ones who've been sitting in on or taking graduate seminars. If you're not at a school that offers graduate seminars, but you live in a big city, then try nearby schools. I've audited classes at a school I wasn't attending -- you just need to contact the professor and say you're interested in sitting in. Attend departmental colloquia, talks, workshops, and other events, both at your school and at other schools in your area. Talk to people, even if it's just saying you enjoyed their talk and asking a clarificatory question. Do the GREs early. Do them early enough that you can do them again if you have to. Make sure you at least get whatever the new-scale equivalent of a 700 is on both the verbal and the quant. I had a perfect verbal but my quant just barely broke that threshold -- the second time I wrote it. Not a great score, but it was evidently good enough. Work on your writing sample like a demon. Start early the year before applying and submit it to summer conferences so that you can use the feedback you get to make it even better. If you've got an involved advisor, that's great -- my advisor probably read five drafts of mine, all counted. Get your peers to read it, too. Heck, just get as many people as you can to read it. This is the most important part of your application. Do really well in your classes. If you've got more than a handful of B's in philosophy courses, think about an MA. Go to office hours. Ask professors to suggest additional readings on topics you're interested in, then go do those readings and follow up with them. You want letter writers who know you and who think you're driven. If you're in an MA, professionalize. Have a CV and an academia.edu page. Don't go overboard and print business cards or post your papers online, but be somebody that people can google and find minimal information about. Apply to at least 10 places if you can afford it. Heck, if you can afford it, apply to at least 20 places. I've seen people get shut out, people only get into one school out of fifteen, et cetera, everything you can imagine. This might be controversial advice, but prioritize applying to similarly-ranked public schools over Ivies if you're not coming from an Ivy League school yourself (or a top American school?). My pedigree isn't amazing and is foreign to boot and I did really well at most of the good non-Ivies while doing surprisingly poorly at almost all of the Ivies. Go figure! Sample size of one, though, so take with a grain of salt. Don't do anything too special with your statement of purpose. I've heard top places hardly even look at these. Be really straightforward and professional. Say what areas you're interested in working on and briefly explain any related work you've done in the past. I didn't personalize mine at all and did very well. I even got accepted at one top school where my statement should have indicated I was an apocalyptically bad fit. I get the sense that schools are into it if you know something about formal methods, or at least express an interest. Take advanced logic and do some formal semantics stuff if you can. Learn a bit of stats and gesture in your statement at hoping to be able to integrate empirical results into your future work (which is a good thing to want to do anyway, because it's cool). If you are wait listed and invited to visit, go to the visit. I've seen people on these boards say you'll only disenchant them or something, and, unless you're extraordinarily unlikeable in person, that is terrible advice. I visited schools where I was wait listed and subsequently accepted, and I was basically told explicitly at one of these schools that it was because students and faculty liked me enough to lobby for me to be taken off the list next. If you would rather attend a school you are wait listed at than the schools you have been accepted at, let the wait list school know that. I was invited to visit one school that I told this to just because I told them that. I think it's especially effective if the schools you're accepted at are ranked higher than or are comparable with the wait list school. If you can tell a school explicitly that you would rather go to their school than to top school X, this will matter to them. If you're a woman or another underrepresented minority, network with like people who have faced or are facing the same challenges. I'm a woman and reaching out to established women in the profession made a big difference for me -- they were often really helpful and supportive, and had great advice. And don't just reach up, but look to your peers as well. This year a bunch of women prospectives from thegradcafe created a hidden Facebook message thread to trade climate information in and it ended up being a really awesome hub of camaraderie and support. There were more than 30 of us! Women applying next season, I encourage you to do the same kind of thing! Become an expert at scrutinizing job placement pages; once you're deciding between multiple offers this will matter a great deal. Be nice and be positive to the people you meet and to your peers in your program. Be interested in them, read their work, and help them out. Chances are they'll do the same for you. Surround yourself with smart, hard-working people -- eventually it'll rub off. Don't pay too much attention to the advice you get on gradcafe, including this advice. Rather, ask faculty at your school for advice, especially younger faculty who know what it's like out there.

I'm in at a top three and on four other wait lists in the 7th+ range that I'm waiting to hear about. I'm also in at Berkeley, which I'm taking seriously because of my interests. I'll probably pull myself off one of the wait lists soon, but the others are still live options and I'll be attending the visits. So although I don't know where exactly I'll be next year, I can at least say that it'll be somewhere I'm happy about. I have been very fortunate!

I thought you got into a top five?

It isn't March 15 yet, so maybe wait a couple more days.

Bumping this thread because we have 26 members and you should join the coven

My offer came with a Puryear Fellowship, I'm not sure if that's standard or not. But if it's not then maybe other offers with other kinds of funding will go out later? Edit: this is reply to the above about UMass

I can claim Oxford BPhil and UMass Amherst offers. I've already declined the latter, and plan to do so for the former as well.

I got a perfect verbal but only 155 on the quant (60something percentile) and I managed some top offers. I had to write it twice to even get that quant score. I think even if your math is weak, you can squeak through at the great places if you have a good application otherwise. Just wanted to say that there's hope if, like me, you're completely hopeless with numbers.

I only held my offer very briefly so maybe they just counted me as a blip from the wait list who shuffled herself off.