gradcoffee

Aww, too bad they made no announcements about the extended deadline on their main webpage (or am I wrong?). If this is so, then those who were considering UBC but who missed the initial deadline would not even have known about the extended deadline. 

Current status: 0A/0W/0R 
This silence is....

Current status: 0A/0W/0R 
This silence is....

Well done! Now, can I have some luck please!

Well done! Now, can I have some luck please!

I'm beginning to think I'm in a bizarre Twilight Zone episode, and I'm never going to hear from anyone ever. I think there must be scientists studying me or something. 

Aww, too bad they made no announcements about the extended deadline on their main webpage (or am I wrong?). If this is so, then those who were considering UBC but who missed the initial deadline would not even have known about the extended deadline. 

Meat.
Naps.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers. 
Reality TV shows. 

Consumption of animal products. 

I hate how entitled people are in their abuse of celebrities.  They're still human beings with feelings.

Hi everyone, I am new to this forum and great I found this forum.Looking forward and thanks for having me here..

I agree to your points.
 
Just to add that it is better to have few industrial experience and make some industry connections before joining graduate school to mentally and financially help in all the five points you mentioned above.

Someone wrote me a message, asking: "What's the most challenging thing about graduate school (in contrast with undergraduate study)?"
 
Here are the things that come to my mind. My answers are based on a typical American's experience in graduate school.
 
1. Graduate study is and ought to be self-directed learning. You set the standards, the goals, the agenda. For some, the freedom is quite challenging.
 
2. There's probably more pressure to do well in graduate school. More is on the line, and there's more competition for positions, attention, funding, etc. Many graduate students also place a lot of pressure on themselves to do well; perfectionists will have a great deal of trouble in graduate school.
 
3. People typically must devote more time during graduate school to self-care and caring for others, just by virtue of the fact that people who are in graduate school are typically older and looking to accomplish things in personal life. People with spouses or children, of course, must devote time to them. And for many people in their 20s or early 30s, life is challenging on a personal level. People often lose social connections from childhood and have no obvious place to make new social connections. The stress of graduate school can make matters much worse. People who fail to take care of themselves in graduate school may hurt themselves and others.
 
4. There is a great deal of financial pressure for most people in graduate school. At age 25, some people are buying a first home and landing a six-figure salary at a law firm. Others at the same age are matriculating at a graduate program in philosophy. Psychologically there is a great deal of financial pressure on 20-something year-old graduate students.
 
5. Graduate students often feel pressure to figure out where they are going with their lives. When things in graduate school don't go well, graduate students may feel a lot of anxiety, depression, or anger. There is tremendous pressure to set a final goal and reach that goal before the time and money "runs out."

I can't wait till you get off GSU's waitlist! Also we'll be 'fairly' close (by US standards) so maybe one of us could visit for a conference or something!

Two points, based on my experience as an history undergraduate at a liberal arts college that does extremely well in graduate school admissions, including in philosophy:
 
My school has a very strong philosophy department, but it is by no means an NYU or a Rutgers. Yet graduate schools trust its recommendation letters and accept its students. (I think by one reckoning my school is the LAC with the best acceptance track record at philosophy grad schools, in fact—and one of the few Leiter deigns to mention on the PGR website.)
 
It seems to me that people on this board may sometimes overestimate the importance of having a recommendation letter from a big-name philosopher. Sure, having letters from reputable philosophers/departments whose background and achievements the adcom can quickly look at is important, but the actual content of the letters is surely weighted far more heavily. Which is not to deny the existence of an unfair prejudice against faculty from departments which aren’t “on the map,” because I’m sure that has worked against many an applicant in the past. But as long as you come from a recognizable department at least, I think the names of your letter writers are less important than the actual letters themselves.
 
I suspect there may be a slight bias at play here; because applicants don’t, for the most part, read their recommendation letters, but they do know who wrote them and where those people stand in academia, when looking for reasons they were rejected, applicants assume the deciding factor was the one they are familiar with, rather than acknowledging the possibility that their letters were simply not that convincing. (Or, which is more likely, that their application was perfectly good, but admissions were so competitive that good applications were denied and only stand-out applicants got in.)
 
Do let me know if you think I’m underestimating the unpleasantness of philosophy grad school admissions. As someone with an interest in philosophy and many friends in the phil department at my school, I have been following this website, Leiter Reports, and other philosophy blogs for a long time, but of course that is no substitute for living through the actual experience of applying.
 
2. I get the sense philosophy grad school admissions are more competitive than history grad school admissions. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single person applying to history grad schools from my school getting completely shut out. In all fairness, I haven’t heard of that happening to a philosophy student either, but looking at this board makes it seem like it is a very common occurrence.
 
Good luck to all who are still waiting to hear back from schools or hoping to get off the waitlist somewhere! And sorry for invading your space on Grad Café! I have been following your fortunes with interest and trepidation (in no small part because I'll be applying to grad school this year myself) and could not stop myself from commenting, but I will understand if you find my interjection unwelcome.

Seeing how most of the posters in the acceptance/reject/waitlist threads are mostly applicants from US colleges, I'm quite curious as to how are the international applicants faring in the current application season.
 
For those of you who have received offers, how is the funding situation like? Looking forward to hear your replies.

For what it is worth, I got into WashU despite taking more than 9 years to get my BA, including several semesters of W's and an overall GPA of 3.7.

How much philosophy did you guys read when you were an undergraduate? Do you read journal articles or books?
 
Do you have a systematic way of reading philosophy? Time-based (e.g. 1 journal article/day, 1 book/week) or other systems (e.g. achieving "competency" in sub-field X before moving to sub-field Y)?
 
Do you read across a variety of sub-fields? If you abhor a particular sub-field, would you avoid reading any works within that sub-field?
 
Any other reading advice for current undergraduates? Thanks!
 

I read a lot as an undergrad. I read books mostly, though occasionally I would look through JStor or something like that for interesting articles. I didn't have any system, which is to say that I read as much as I could when I could, but my work was always my primary focus. I tried to read a variety of topics, though most were either continental or related works. I would never avoid reading a work from another field of philosophy though, it's just difficult knowing where to start. For instance, though I have no particular interest in Hume or Plato, I've taken two advanced independent studies on Hume's corpus and Plato's Republic.

If I had to give you advice, I would say this:

1) Don't shy away from studying areas of philosophy which you're unfamiliar with or which seem unappealing at first sight. You may be surprised at how much you can be interested in.

2) Start language preparation early. Even if language requirements might be on their way out, you have no way of knowing what the future holds and you'll benefit from a knowledge of at least one philosophical language. I wish I'd started German earlier, but I decided to do Mandarin first and now I'm playing catch-up.

One thing that you could do, if you aren't already, is to read all of the works cited by a particular article that you really like. Then, the next article (out of the bibliography of the first) that you really like, you can do the same thing. This will help you get familiar with a very specific set of sub-specialty literature, but will also introduce you to relevant stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise read. As to how much you should read...grad students should read as much as possible, but for an undergrad, I would say, as much as interests you.