Shut Out Discussion Thread

[ThePeon]

With the acceptances and waitlists for most schools having been out, some of us are starting to find out that we are very likely if not certain to be shut out this cycle.

With that in mind, I thought a discussion thread for those of us in this situation might be helpful to process and commiserate about our status. Possible topics of discussion (these are just suggestions):

• How do you feel about being shut out? Disappointed, devastated, numb, tranquil? How are you coping?
• What are your plans? Will you reapply next year? If so, what will you do differently? If you have other plans or are unsure, why?
• Gripes about the application process.
• Theories about why you were shut out. What, if anything, would you have done differently?

Edited March 8, 2018 by ThePeon
had to finish an incomplete sentence

[soproperlybasic]

I'm 99% sure I'm shut out from PhD admissions this time around, and I'm starting to question if I even love philosophy enough to go to an MA, especially if it ends up only being partially funded. I've been really disappointed and upset about the whole thing, and while I objectively know that this is a really competitive field, I'm not sure I have what it takes to succeed in this. I go back and forth every day about what I want to do next year.

[machineghost]

20 minutes ago, ThePeon said:

With the acceptances and waitlists for most schools having been out, some of us are starting to find out that we are very likely if not certain to be shut out this cycle.

With that in mind, I thought a discussion thread for those of us in this situation might be helpful to process and commiserate about our status. Possible topics of discussion (these are just suggestions):

• How do you feel about being shut out? Disappointed, devastated, numb, tranquil? How are you coping?
• What are your plans? Will you reapply next year? If so, what will you do differently? If you have other plans or are unsure, why?
• Gripes about the application process.
• Theories about why you were shut out. What, if anything, would you have done differently?

This is a great topic. I’m definitely frustrated, especially because it’s not clear to me what I would do differently, even after emailing several departments to ask them what I should consider doing differently. The obvious thing to look at is one’s writing sample. But that’s not very helpful when one’s writing sample was looked upon favorably by one’s letter writers and, in my case anyway, the Eastern APA (poster). I think I would try to publish something in a good journal in the next year if I planned to try again. It’s not clear what else I could do. But I will probably just move on. 

[ThePeon]

1 hour ago, soproperlybasic said:

I'm 99% sure I'm shut out from PhD admissions this time around, and I'm starting to question if I even love philosophy enough to go to an MA, especially if it ends up only being partially funded. I've been really disappointed and upset about the whole thing, and while I objectively know that this is a really competitive field, I'm not sure I have what it takes to succeed in this. I go back and forth every day about what I want to do next year.

I didn't get apply to masters programs, but I feel similarly. I do enjoy philosophy and find it valuable, but I wonder if I love it enough to do the work required to compete both in the application process and in graduate school when the competition is so high level, especially given the low standard of living one has to accept on a graduate stipend.

1 hour ago, machineghost said:

This is a great topic. I’m definitely frustrated, especially because it’s not clear to me what I would do differently, even after emailing several departments to ask them what I should consider doing differently. The obvious thing to look at is one’s writing sample. But that’s not very helpful when one’s writing sample was looked upon favorably by one’s letter writers and, in my case anyway, the Eastern APA (poster). I think I would try to publish something in a good journal in the next year if I planned to try again. It’s not clear what else I could do. But I will probably just move on. 

That must be very frustrating. Perhaps you just had bad luck? There is randomness to this process.

[machineghost]

Yep, it’s a frustrating process, and given the randomness, it’s not clear that trying again will yield a different result. At some point, it probably would, but who knows when. Somebody posted in the admissions page that they were waitlisted at NYU and GSU (MA) but rejected from Michigan and some other places. With that sort of randomness, it’s hard to have any hope that the outcome will be favorable next year. 

[Kantattheairport]

5 hours ago, machineghost said:

Yep, it’s a frustrating process, and given the randomness, it’s not clear that trying again will yield a different result. At some point, it probably would, but who knows when. Somebody posted in the admissions page that they were waitlisted at NYU and GSU (MA) but rejected from Michigan and some other places. With that sort of randomness, it’s hard to have any hope that the outcome will be favorable next year. 

This was me, and yeah, I'm finding it very hard to know whether to be encouraged or discouraged by the application cycle so far. I may well end up being effectively shut out, and I don't really know what I'd do if that were to be the case. I suppose I'd have to find the heart and funds to reapply next year, since at the moment - like most other people, I assume - it's hard to imagine what I'd do if not philosophy!

[tmck3053]

I'm not sure how helpful this might be but I was very almost shut out this season and I feel I learned a couple of things from it. I was accepted at one PhD program that I applied to (along with the BPhil) out of about 9 that I applied for, and I happened to have a long chat about the process with the person that called me from the program at which I was accepted.

What he said in short was that I had a sample that they liked, but that my statement of purpose made it reasonably clear that I didn't have a particular tight focus and that I had broad interests (for instance my sample was broadly in social epistemology while my SOP said I was interested in phil of maths and phil of language). As it happened for balance or whatever reason that is something that they found appealing but it could very easily not have been at another grad school.

What I took out of that is that most schools are interested in someone that has a reasonably tight vision for the area that they want to work on, and they want to see (in the form of your sample) some evidence of your ability to work in that area. It might not be the case that having a sample that pulls in a slightly different direction to your stated AOI will explicitly hurt your application, but it doesn't seem as though it will help - given how unbelievably random and competitive the process is, it would seem that you would be giving up an opportunity to appear as a really 'tight' and 'streamlined' candidate.

This is obviously reasonably speculative and all anecdotal, but it makes sense to me on some level. Imagine how many people have a statement saying that they are keen to work in area X and a great sample in X - those are the people against whom you are competing. I think I was, in retrospect, very lucky that my sample fell into the hands of someone who read it and liked it (they weren't the obvious choice in the faculty to read it) and that they were [a] in the right mood at the time to feel positively about it and willing to overlook the fact that I came across as a reasonably broad candidate.

Anyway - this might not apply to many of you, but it's something I feel I learned over the course of my many rejections this season. I'd certainly done things differently if I had my time again.

Edited March 9, 2018 by tmck3053
accidentally bolded half the post

[poppypascal]

Similarly, I don't want to crash this thread because I didn't get shut out, but I was very nearly shut out, and have a few thoughts regarding the process. I applied to 5 schools, accepted at one. The one place that accepted me was one of the most desirable ones I applied to, and programs generally less reputed and with worse placement rejected me.

I think how well your interests fit with at least one member of faculty is considerably understated on here and elsewhere.

If you can't find a specific faculty member that is interested in pretty much exactly what you are (not "political philosophy" or "phil of mind" but specific problems within a tradition, authors, a trajectory of thought), it's not worth wasting money on the application fees. I selected places based on broad headings like "political philosophy" and a general interest in traditions that I like, and it was only after receiving my acceptance that I realized why I got accepted, and it was because my SOP really aligns with what one of the faculty members does. This faculty member probably thought I'd expressly written it with their work in mind, which I didn't. Now, I don't think most people are as stupidly careless as I am, but I was really lucky to get in somewhere and I think some of people getting shut out might have made a similar mistake.

I think you have to be the best application for a specific member of faculty. That also means that some areas within philosophy are probably a lot more competitive than others. It'd be fascinating to get data on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the composition of the faculty of all philosophy departments in terms of areas of specialty is considerably out of step with the composition of the applicant pool in terms of interests. This is normal in any discipline, but perhaps more so in philosophy, which seems to have a real inertial force when it comes to disciplinary hierarchies. For example, I think continental philosophy generally is way more in demand than there are professors to teach it. Scientific disciplines tend to be way more open about this sort of stuff, indeed, you tend to apply to labs with assigned projects rather than developing your own.

So just to say, you might also have an area of specialty that is really popular at the moment, and therefore up against a lot more competition than others.

Anyway, all that to say, I'm really sorry for people who didn't make it this year. It's a pretty terrible system I think. It's like rolling the dice on major life decisions. There should be a way to make it more rational.

[machineghost]

7 hours ago, Kantattheairport said:

This was me, and yeah, I'm finding it very hard to know whether to be encouraged or discouraged by the application cycle so far. I may well end up being effectively shut out, and I don't really know what I'd do if that were to be the case. I suppose I'd have to find the heart and funds to reapply next year, since at the moment - like most other people, I assume - it's hard to imagine what I'd do if not philosophy!

If you get shut out, you should definitely reapply. Getting that close at several top places is a good sign of things to come if you hang in there. But it’s really bizarre that you were that close to admittance at the best place to do philosophy (NYU) but not admitted at GSU. That must be frustrating. 

[artshop]

I haven't heard back from Memphis and Vanderbilt.  I have been waitlisted at UW and Rejected at Penn State.  I don't think I'll be accepted this time around so I'm looking at this as a trial run.  I didn't take the GRE until late December when the vast majority of of deadlines had already passed.  I applied for the few schools whose deadlines hadn't passed that have programs that had someone in my AOI.  I was working as a teacher full time so I had no time to properly adjust my paper that I intended for my writing sample and wound up using an Ancient philosophy paper.  I have a low undergrad GPA and still managed to get waitlisted on the strength of my SOP, AOI, recommendations, and my GRE score.  I am taking some time from teaching so that I can have the time to finish my paper and do a bit of reading by the professors at some of the schools I'd like to attend, and spend more than one or two days hammering out 5 applications.  I am going to take one or two classes because the single most limiting factor was not having access to a university database.  How do I find out which schools have which focus; is there a database somewhere?

[Halcyon23]

@artshop Do you mean the research focus of the schools you apply to? The Leiter Reports have a breakdown of rankings by research focus of the faculty which is the only database I know. The APA had a big pdf online of every single graduate program in the US and Canada that had all the information you could ever want but I can't find it after 30 seconds of searching. May still be around somewhere. Here's a link to their search engine though: https://gradguide.apaonline.org/

[artshop]

7 minutes ago, Halcyon23 said:

@artshop Do you mean the research focus of the schools you apply to? The Leiter Reports have a breakdown of rankings by research focus of the faculty which is the only database I know. The APA had a big pdf online of every single graduate program in the US and Canada that had all the information you could ever want but I can't find it after 30 seconds of searching. May still be around somewhere. Here's a link to their search engine though: https://gradguide.apaonline.org/

Thank you.  I had no idea this site or many of the other resources existed until a week ago.

[lyellgeo]

23 minutes ago, Halcyon23 said:

@artshop Do you mean the research focus of the schools you apply to? The Leiter Reports have a breakdown of rankings by research focus of the faculty which is the only database I know. The APA had a big pdf online of every single graduate program in the US and Canada that had all the information you could ever want but I can't find it after 30 seconds of searching. May still be around somewhere. Here's a link to their search engine though: https://gradguide.apaonline.org/

Wow, this is great for getting a sense of a program's placement rates, thanks for sharing

Edited March 9, 2018 by lyellgeo

[lyellgeo]

7 hours ago, poppypascal said:

 

I think you have to be the best application for a specific member of faculty. So just to say, you might also have an area of specialty that is really popular at the moment, and therefore up against a lot more competition than others.

While this is definitely true, there is one caveat to this as a strategy. As an applicant, one will likely have very little sense of whether any specific faculty member is accepting new students, planning on transferring to another institution, is viewed favorably by the other faculty members, is just difficult to work with, will even be on the admissions committee, and so on, all of which could affect the program's decision. But if one can make their application demonstrate a close fit for 2-3 faculty members (i.e. more specific than a broad area of interest but not specifically tied to one person), that can alleviate some of those concerns. 

Edited March 9, 2018 by lyellgeo

[poppypascal]

54 minutes ago, lyellgeo said:

As an applicant, one will likely have very little sense of whether any specific faculty member is accepting new students, planning on transferring to another institution, is viewed favorably by the other faculty members, is just difficult to work with, will even be on the admissions committee, and so on, all of which could affect the program's decision. But if one can make their application demonstrate a close fit for 2-3 faculty members (i.e. more specific than a broad area of interest but not specifically tied to one person), that can alleviate some of those concerns. 

Agreed, which is why even armed with that info, it's still mostly a question of luck. There are a few people with impeccable applications who get accepted pretty much everywhere, but even they get turned down now and then, sometimes by pretty random places. It's not a quantitative evaluation. It's purely qualitative. I'm not even sure tailoring to 2-3 members is tight enough. I mean, I guess it depends on your area, but for a lot of people, there's one, maybe two, faculty members roughly interested in what you want to do. I'm not saying you have to mention their names and make it patently obvious you're applying to work with them (though some do this I think), but they need to be able to read it and think you're interesting and like the same things as them and feel some kind of affinity. Just having good grades and writing well and loving philosophy unfortunately doesn't appear to be a guarantee with this system. I bet a lot of talent is going to waste...

Some data on which AOIs have fewer applicants would be useful, don't know how we could ever obtain that. If the idea is to maintain roughly the same proportions of people doing phil of mind, logic etc over the decades, might be useful to let people know where there's demand so we're not all crowding into a few specializations. 

[dogman1212]

I can’t say that I am officially shut out, as I have been accepted to NIU and am still waiting to hear back from a number of programs.

I’m surprisingly tranquil about the process right now. I’ve learned that it takes an excellent application in all respects to compete for the few spots that are available, and I understand that my application had a few weak areas. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can probably live a fairly happy and fulfilling life inside or outside of academia, so I’m not very worried about whether or not I get in this year.

In hindsight, I think spending more time fine-tuning my writing sample and getting feedback from more philosophers would have helped the most. I don't think I completely grasped how much philosophers value clarity in their writing and thinking, which may have hurt me in this cycle.

If I receive a funded offer from an MA or PhD program this year, I will likely accept it. If not, I will try to get a job, probably by sending applications to a number of entry-level business jobs and networking. I think it’s unlikely that I reapply in future cycles, but I haven’t decided on that yet.

Edited March 9, 2018 by dogman1212

[Schwarzwald]

48 minutes ago, poppypascal said:

Agreed, which is why even armed with that info, it's still mostly a question of luck. There are a few people with impeccable applications who get accepted pretty much everywhere, but even they get turned down now and then, sometimes by pretty random places. It's not a quantitative evaluation. It's purely qualitative. I'm not even sure tailoring to 2-3 members is tight enough. I mean, I guess it depends on your area, but for a lot of people, there's one, maybe two, faculty members roughly interested in what you want to do. I'm not saying you have to mention their names and make it patently obvious you're applying to work with them (though some do this I think), but they need to be able to read it and think you're interesting and like the same things as them and feel some kind of affinity. Just having good grades and writing well and loving philosophy unfortunately doesn't appear to be a guarantee with this system. I bet a lot of talent is going to waste...

Some data on which AOIs have fewer applicants would be useful, don't know how we could ever obtain that. If the idea is to maintain roughly the same proportions of people doing phil of mind, logic etc over the decades, might be useful to let people know where there's demand so we're not all crowding into a few specializations. 

I'm not sure about the 2017 update, but the 2015 data set Dicey Jennings is associated with on placement gives you information on specializations. It was key to me deciding my AOI for applications.

[Goonasabi]

17 minutes ago, Schwarzwald said:

I'm not sure about the 2017 update, but the 2015 data set Dicey Jennings is associated with on placement gives you information on specializations. It was key to me deciding my AOI for applications.

What is that? Do you have a link?

[psm1580b]

Just for some perspective: Don't take being shut-out too seriously. I was in my early 30's when I first applied right out of my MA. Or, I should say, during the last year of my MA. I applied to 20 schools and was rejected by all. Not a single waitlist. Out of TWENTY. That summer, I took a course to try and raise my GRE score. I also chose a different paper to spruce up into a writing sample. I retook the GRE and got the exact same score. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling particularly super at that point. 

I applied again to 10 schools (ok, so money became an issue), some of which I'd applied to the year before. I was waitlisted at 2 and ultimately accepted at a school that had rejected me the year prior, so ...

I guess the moral of this story is: being shut-out doesn't reflect much upon yourself, and it is no reason to not try again next year. 

Edited March 9, 2018 by psm1580b

[machineghost]

18 minutes ago, psm1580b said:

Just for some perspective: Don't take being shut-out too seriously. I was in my early 30's when I first applied right out of my MA. Or, I should say, during the last year of my MA. I applied to 20 schools and was rejected by all. Not a single waitlist. Out of TWENTY. That summer, I took a course to try and raise my GRE score. I also chose a different paper to spruce up into a writing sample. I retook the GRE and got the exact same score. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling particularly super at that point. 

I applied again to 10 schools (ok, so money became an issue), some of which I'd applied to the year before. I was waitlisted at 2 and ultimately accepted at a school that had rejected me the year prior, so ...

I guess the moral of this story is: being shut-out doesn't reflect much upon yourself, and it is no reason to not try again next year. 

Thanks for the encouragement. That is good to know.

[Gingergin]

2 hours ago, machineghost said:

Thanks for the encouragement. That is good to know.

I tried three years....

[machineghost]

40 minutes ago, Gingergin said:

I tried three years....

With eventual success?

[Schwarzwald]

7 hours ago, Goonasabi said:

What is that? Do you have a link?

Here you go. I hope it can be some help.

[Gingergin]

2 hours ago, machineghost said:

With eventual success?

Yes, no pains no gain.  This seems true to me.

[Hekkue]

26 minutes ago, Gingergin said:

Yes, no pains no gain.  This seems true to me.

were you just applying to Ph.D. programs? 

Three years seem to be a long time. 

Why you did not try to go for a funded MA program instead?