standards of professionalism

[lurkingfaculty]

Hi, I'm just posting to suggest that it is somewhat important to reply (preferably politely) to emails that you receive from department faculty, directors of admissions, etc., particularly when they attempt to contact you multiple times. (The failure of response rate is so high that I am certain this is not some sort of problem with emails going to spam, etc.) First, it's just better to be kind and respectful and polite, and if someone emails you, you should respond.

Second, a more pragmatic argument: If you're beginning a PhD or MA in philosophy, you are entering an academic community in which it is important to be professional and respectful and polite at all times. Suppose you don't want to come to my PhD program, or you aren't sure what you are doing yet. It's a better idea to professionally, kindly respond, thanking the person for the offer and letting them know where you stand (e.g. "I haven't made up my mind" or "I am waiting to hear about potential other offers but am very excited about this one", or whatever).

Many of us have pretty good memories. Someday we might be hiring in your area, or (especially if we are faculty who are taking the time to write to you because you work in the same area as us) might be refereeing your work, or might be talking to you at conferences. Many of the subfields of philosophy are actually quite small. I can't tell you how many people never respond (at all) to offers, emails, etc., (and if you aren't ever responding to the offer, you are screwing your fellow students over, as we then have to wait until April 16th to make someone an offer in your place).

Sincerely, a frustrated faculty member.

[Goonasabi]

Hi frustrated faculty member -

My average email response time is under two hours. May I have immediate acceptance to the program you represent?

Edit: just making a joke. Everything you note is well said.

Edited March 13, 2018 by Goonasabi

[prtrbd]

How "professional" would you say the faculty side of the admissions process generally is? Should future philosophers be holding grudges against specific departments based on how their rejections or waitlists were phrased, for instance? Example: A top department rejected people at 5AM on a Sunday morning by posting a PDF to a new site on which they were required to create a new account, going through an entire password creation protocol. This department, of course, had all applicants' email addresses and phone numbers. Should applicants "have pretty good memories" about such things?

[goldenstardust11]

8 minutes ago, prtrbd said:

How "professional" would you say the faculty side of the admissions process generally is? Should future philosophers be holding grudges against specific departments based on how their rejections or waitlists were phrased, for instance? Example: A top department rejected people at 5AM on a Sunday morning by posting a PDF to a new site on which they were required to create a new account, going through an entire password creation protocol. This department, of course, had all applicants' email addresses and phone numbers. Should applicants "have pretty good memories" about such things?

Once an institution becomes involved, it's quite different. Best to represent yourself well (which is wholly under your control) and adopt a charitable stance towards the kind of bulk e-mails that schools send out on departments' behalf. With over 200 applicants annually at some schools, it's not feasible that the department can reach out to everyone independently and thus the institution itself has a mechanism by which they communicate with applicants once the department has made its decision. 

It's a frustrating process on all sides, but it is what it is and the least we can do is be grateful to the people who have taken the time to consider our applications (imo at least!) 

Thanks to the frustrated faculty member for voicing their frustration. 

Edited March 13, 2018 by goldenstardust11

[lurkingfaculty]

I think it's very important that departments and directors of admissions be polite, kind, respectful, and thoughtful in how they communicate. I agree that they are not always, and I think that sucks. I would say the same thing to them.

One thing to note, though, is that there are some asymmetries in the process: for one, we get hundreds of applications that we have to deal with (I don't think this excuses the above, it's just a thing to note). Second, we often are not permitted to contact rejected applicants until the process goes through the admissions office, and the admissions people often use software and systems that we have no control over. So I'd be hesitant to immediately hold a grudge against a department or faculty rather than the fact that bloated university administrations tend to use crappy systems.

Take care.

[lurkingfaculty]

Another thing to note is that academia, for better or for worse (I think for worse) is, just like most things in life, extremely power-imbalanced: unfortunately, you guys have pragmatic reasons to do certain things (show your best face to faculty) that faculty have less of a reason to do with you.

I'm not defending that the fact that this is true (which I think it is) also somehow makes it right. But I think in this case it doesn't really matter: we should all (faculty, grad students, prospective grad students) just try to be more kind, compassionate, respectful, and professional.

[TakeruK]

3 hours ago, lurkingfaculty said:

One thing to note, though, is that there are some asymmetries in the process: for one, we get hundreds of applications that we have to deal with (I don't think this excuses the above, it's just a thing to note). Second, we often are not permitted to contact rejected applicants until the process goes through the admissions office, and the admissions people often use software and systems that we have no control over. So I'd be hesitant to immediately hold a grudge against a department or faculty rather than the fact that bloated university administrations tend to use crappy systems.

Take care.

I am not a faculty member in this field, but I just went through a process where we hired a summer undergrad student for a research project. Due to our institution's rules and policies, we are also unable to directly contact any of the applicants, even though we have all of their information. Any question to us needed to be redirected to the "right person", and the right person is a not very helpful in answering most of the questions. (To be clear, the right person is a very competent and great person but their job is to manage the hiring process. They are not a researcher and cannot answer any questions about the work that the student would actually do, and we're not allowed to answer either). 

Not only we cannot directly contact the student applicants, there are minimum timelines that must pass before we can enter the next step. For example, we posted the job for 1 week, but even if we see an application from someone we would love to interview for sure, we can't schedule anything with them until the application deadline has passed and we made an official/final interview list. This list then gets approved by the hiring manager and then they schedule the interviews (giving candidates some time to respond to the invite). So everything is drawn out and protracted.

Finally, the 5am email thing is common because in many people management software (e.g. SAP), we input things into the database during the work day (e.g. mark a candidate as accepted/rejected) and nothing happens until the system does its nightly update. Each night, the database takes the input we provide it and then runs its reports and its automatic scripts which produces these auto-generated emails. And for these same reasons, this is why you don't often get personal emails regarding rejections and we are generally discouraged from discussing the (details) of the rejection at all with candidates. 

This is the same thing as lurkingfaculty said, but I just wanted to provide more details and examples  This is my first year post-PhD-graduation and wow, you learn a lot from the "other side". 

[ChamplooC]

I don't know whether late reply will be considered to be disrespectful. Sometimes I got emails from several professors (including the director or ad chair) of a certain department which accepts me, and literally all of them will say something like "Please let me know if you have any question." But honestly speaking, I don't have so many questions to ask. It is easier to come up with some questions (e.g., about the program or the offer) for the director or the admission chair. But it is much harder to come up with some meaningful questions to ask for other emails sent by other professors, especially those professors you are not very familiar with. The reason why I find it so hard because many questions might be answered by browsing the department website or those professors' personal website, while other important questions might not be directed to the professors themselves--e.g., whether you are nice to work with. So I often take time to do some research before I reply these emails. And the workload can be huge when you get a couple of offers and receive a couple of these hard-to-reply emails (I remember, there is one department, I got emails from five different professors).

I don't know whether I am the only person who has this sort of problem. In any case, I know it is definitely rude to ignore emails sent by the departments and there is no excuse for doing that, though I don't know whether late reply will also be unprofessional (for my part, asking stupid questions is also unprofessional). But I just want to share an applicant perspective of this issue.

 

[machineghost]

2 hours ago, ChamplooC said:

I don't know whether late reply will be considered to be disrespectful. Sometimes I got emails from several professors (including the director or ad chair) of a certain department which accepts me, and literally all of them will say something like "Please let me know if you have any question." But honestly speaking, I don't have so many questions to ask. It is easier to come up with some questions (e.g., about the program or the offer) for the director or the admission chair. But it is much harder to come up with some meaningful questions to ask for other emails sent by other professors, especially those professors you are not very familiar with. The reason why I find it so hard because many questions might be answered by browsing the department website or those professors' personal website, while other important questions might not be directed to the professors themselves--e.g., whether you are nice to work with. So I often take time to do some research before I reply these emails. And the workload can be huge when you get a couple of offers and receive a couple of these hard-to-reply emails (I remember, there is one department, I got emails from five different professors).

I don't know whether I am the only person who has this sort of problem. In any case, I know it is definitely rude to ignore emails sent by the departments and there is no excuse for doing that, though I don't know whether late reply will also be unprofessional (for my part, asking stupid questions is also unprofessional). But I just want to share an applicant perspective of this issue.

 

I think it is appropriate to say something like “Thanks for reaching out, Professor X. I will let you know if I have any questions.” I doubt they expect any more than a prompt reply. Contact them again if you do end up having a question.

[lurkingfaculty]

Yes, what machineghost said! A one-line email thanking them for writing to you or whatever would be fine. Later, if you actually do have a question or want to talk to the person, you can get in touch.

 

[ChamplooC]

Thanks for the replied above. That is actually what I am doing now.

Speaking of being professional on the department's side, I hesitated to add this to my previous post, but it happens again today and I feel very upset about that. During the application cycle, I got emails from professors in which my name on the top was misspelled--they mess up the first letter of my family and my first name.(By the way, my name is something like A*** B**. It is short and simple, not that difficult to make it right) This happens for three times. OK, it is still understandable, for some documents put the family name before the first name and that may leave people the wrong impression of my name. .

But I also got emails which were not supposed to send to me, since I saw another accepted person's name on the top of the email. (And these emails were sent by professors, not the program coordinator. And they are all top programs) Although this professor later apologized to me and said that this email was supposed to send to me, I knew that it wasn't--since this professor mentioned that there are good people doing area A in the department while I am sure that I never wrote anything about area A on my SoP. It is still understandable when it happens only once. Unfortunately it happens again. At that point, I realized that probably they forgot to change the name when they copied and pasted the email content before they sent to me. I fully understand that it is impossible for the professor to write different emails to different accepted students, but at least they should double-check whether the name is correct before they send it. And I think this is the sort of thing which might make some applicants feel dissappointed (or not repected).

Anyway, I still replied all these emails politely, and I tried to be understandable. The reason is that, just like what lurkingfaculty said, we are not in a position to do disrespectful things to the professors. Of course, some of these professors apologized for making my name wrong, but some didn't.