MattDest

To be fair - when I get an acceptance I probably will be a little bit too excited to make a ton of sense, especially on the GradCafe results page.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you apply to Northwestern? (Not that using someone in your writing sample means you should apply to their program.)

Congrats to those who got into UNC! Bummed I wasn't among them.

We would get along famously. I love Paul Draper, and especially his work on the Evidential Argument from Evil. I would love to see your thoughts on this, if you'd ever feel comfortable sharing it. I have a really hard time picking a favorite philosopher, because I tend to go between picking them for their ideas, or for the lives they led. I'm really fond of Epicurus, David Hume, and A.J. Ayer.

We have no idea who they are, which is sort of the point. Unless we have more information about the applicant pool, most of this is just baseless speculation.

I bought each a box of chocolates from a nearby store and wrote a hand-written thank you note. I felt I owed them a significant debt based on how much work they did for me.

Acceptance: the Carlton dance, followed by heavy drinking. Shut-out: the Darth Vader 'Nooooo', followed by heavy drinking.

My advisor recently posted some thoughts about the scarcity of women in philosophy and how we might begin to ameliorate it. I'd be interested to hear thoughts about that here. It also includes a link to the wonderful opportunity that catwoman has pointed to.

This is a good idea. It would be really interesting to see these sorts of stats for the entire applicant pool. My AOIs are philosophy of mind (especially psych/neuro and perception) and epistemology (especially social, but also some decision theory etc.).

Of course it means *something*, but it's wrong to think that this statistic tells us much about our chances as individuals. We can't do that without knowing more about the pool of applicants that we are competing against (AOIs, competitiveness, overall amount, number of applicants per school), and about what admissions committees are looking for (AOIs, target demographics, the weight each adcom places on various materials).

I think there are too many variables to have any meaningful data about chances of getting shut out. The average acceptance rate is going to vary depending on the list of schools one applies to. Someone who only applies to T25 schools is going to have a much lower average acceptance rate than someone who applies to a range of schools and some MA programs. There is also the question of application quality. There is no algorithm for determining quality of application, but it seems clear that not everyone is going to have equal chances. You also must consider the relative number of applicants in your AOI. Are there many competitive applicants with roughly similar AOIs to you? What is the total number of prospective applicants that might fall under similar research interests? How many people with your AOI is University X targeting (if they do this sort of thing)? It's a cool project - and I think it can give us a rough estimate about just how tough philosophy admissions is - but I don't know that we can begin to have meaningful data about this without isolating more of the variables.

Congratulations! Duke looks like an amazing place to be. I'm still holding out a tiny bit of hope.

Congrats, and thanks for filling us in!

Congrats to the Duke acceptance! If you happen to hang out on here, love to hear more info on it.

You don't need to come off as though you are instructing them. Just say, "I've read elsewhere that a lot of times these e-mails get flagged by spam filters. Have you by chance checked that folder?" However, I don't know that it matters what e-mail address they use. It's probably better for them to use their institutionally-affiliated e-mail address thought.

We definitely welcome analytic folks. You can update your profile by going to your username top right, Edit Profile, and then Edit Signature. By the way - thanks for sharing your stats. It helps satiate my never-ending curiosity.

*woosh*

No, I'm totally joking. My stripes are also blue. I really thought all of this was sarcastic...

My stripes are green. Pretty sure that means I'm accepted into MIT and everybody else got rejected. no not really and i would hazard a guess that the color of stripes means absolutely nothing and it's kind of funny to see everybody freak out about it.

Nah, it was warranted. I probably would have been discouraged from bar_scene's post and I think that the poster should definitely contact the department.

I disagree.

Are your stats serious? Hot damn!

Nope - what did it say?

So, TIL that Jack Gleeson (Joffrey on HBO's Game of Thrones) wants to get a PhD in philosophy. I'll give him a pass for liking Zizek, because he is so perfectly hateable in the show.

Congrats! No, I don't think people can find out your e-mail address as long as it is private.