Chances with a 2.91 GPA

[ineedwine]

I'll risk being an annoyance and just add that I did come from a small state school. Some 6,000 in the student body if I remember correctly, and we admit literally everyone. In fact, I went there because I had extremely poor high school grades and did terrible on the math portion of the ACT. I just looked up our acceptance rate, and it is 63% (or 89% from another source). My philosophy department was about 5 or 6 professors, one of whom mainly taught humanities and religion classes. The dept. chair is relatively well-known and has published several books and is pretty active in conferences and so on, though I did not get a letter from him. We are not listed in your link.
I consider myself pretty lucky I got in anywhere at all. 

Edited March 8, 2015 by ineedwine

[sidebysondheim]

I'll go ahead and join in too. I came from a generally unknown (though large) state school. Acceptance rate of about 70% with around 30,000 enrolled. Furthermore, the school has a reputation among some for being kind of silly given our unorthodox core requirement program (among other things). SLACs in the community refer to us as a community college. However, my philosophy department I think is quite strong though lacks prestige. That is, a lot of the professors came from good programs and have friends in PGR top 20, 10, and 5 programs, but they themselves don't have major clout with their publishing record (though some of that is changing). My GRE was also sub-par (159v, 152q, 5.0a) but I had a high (though not perfect) GPA. 

 

EDIT-I should probably add that my program does have a pretty good placement record though. We've sent multiple people to UW Milwaukee, at least one to Georgia State, at least one to University of Houston, at least one to Simon Fraser, one was at CUNY at some point (though I don't know if they went through an MA first), another got into all T7 MAs and then got accepted off the wait list at U Conn., one at Carnegie Mellon (Logic, Comp, and Methodology) and someone this year applying with me got into Boston University (their goal school). 

Edited March 8, 2015 by sidebysondheim

[ianfaircloud]

This is such a good thread -- and an encouraging one to people who attended less than the best colleges! I think all of these replies line up with my expectations. It's become clear that pedigree generally gives a boost but that people can "make it" from a variety of backgrounds. If I have children, I'll encourage them to attend strong colleges. Sounds obvious, but my own parents didn't push me in any direction. At age 18, I don't think I realized that the college choice could make much of a difference. (At that time, I hadn't even dreamed of pursuing a PhD in philosophy.)

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

That's a good point Ian- I was told by my parents (and they had no idea, it was a sincere misconception, I think due to the fact that my parents are older than typical for my age), that it doesn't matter at all where you go to college- if you do spectacularly with your gpa and impress your profs, you can get in anywhere! I didn't even think about it until I was enrolled and began to research the realities of grad school and talk directly to my profs that whoaaa- not quite the reality!

[ineedwine]

My parents had never gone to college or really knew much about it, so they didn't push me in any directions at all. I think they assumed that aside from Harvard all colleges were about equal. An 18 year-old from a small town with no college graduates in her immediate family isn't really set up to make informed choices!