Wanted: A new admissions blogger

[ianfaircloud]

This is a good time (maybe a bit late, actually) to say that I'm now confident that I will be unable to participate to the extent as I did last year in philosophy admissions. Many people relied on my blog as a quick summary of what's happening in the course of the admission season. I won't repeat everything here, but feel free to read my longer statement at the blog (https://faircloudblog.wordpress.com/).

 

Here, I will suggest a few things to the 2015 applicants.

 

• First, when you receive funding information from departments, upload that information here. This portion of my site requires little maintenance, so I expect that it will work for users this year as last year.

 

• Second, if you're bored, consult the results of last year's Philosophy Admissions Survey, posted here. The survey gives you 90+ examples of actual successful (and actual failed) applicants from the 2014 season. You'll see immediately how difficult it is to predict how a candidate will do in philosophy admissions.

 

• Third, I hope someone will take my place this season. Maintaining a site like this requires some basic Internet skills, a lot of time and effort, as well as punctuality and good judgment. It may also be helpful that the site manager has a decent reputation among those who would use such a site. Finally, it's enormously helpful that the site manager has actual connections to strong graduate philosophy applicants, as I did last year, and is herself an applicant.
   
• EDIT: Fourth, I recommend that you consult the history of notifications, which I neatly compiled here.

 

I would love to hear from you all this season, even as I busily devote myself to the JD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Please email me at ian dot faircloud at gmail. In the meantime, I truly wish you the very best this admission season.

Edited January 6, 2015 by ianfaircloud

[sidevans]

Hello everyone,

 

I'll be attempting to do something like what Ian did last year in terms of a frequently updated blog tracking which schools have notified applicants of which admissions status. Granted, I'm just putting together the site now, so it likely won't be as polished as Ian's site. But I have a fair bit of time to commit to regularly updating the site, and I'm very much invested in the process since I'm applying for fall 2015. So hopefully some of you will find my site helpful, even though it's quite bare-bones at the moment. It's at http://philosophyadmissions.wordpress.com/.

 

I'd also like to note that I don't intend for this to be my personal site. Ideally, I'd like to pass the reigns to someone else next year, such that the site becomes something like a community-owned resource for the philosophy applicant community. I'd also like to do another round of the Philosophy Applicant Survey after results are in, and may try to get some help on that front from other members of the Grad Cafe community.

 

That's all for now; I'll be on these forums as much as possible throughout the whole process. Good luck to everyone.

[sidevans]

Hello again,

 

Release date predictions are now up here. And I've included some comments on my methodology here.

 

I also want to mention that Ian Faircloud will be a contributor on the site. He's already been a tremendous help, and I think all of us in the philosophy applicant community will benefit from whatever he's able to add. So, many thanks to him.

[reixis]

Hi sidevans,

 

Thanks a lot for compiling this information and for running the blog. This will certainly help us out. Just one question that popped out of my mind after looking at both your list and Ian's previous ones: is there any particular reason for not including UConn in predictions?

[sidevans]

Thanks for noticing that! No particular reason other than that I was using Ian's data, which didn't include it.

 

I've now added in a prediction for UConn at February 5. It's a bit hard to predict, since they've had pretty high variation - January 23 in 2014, February 7 in 2013, and February 23 in 2012. One thing that's worth noting is that each of these dates is a Thursday, so I'm more confident that they'll release on a Thursday than that it'll be right around February 5, and I especially wouldn't be surprised if it were earlier (since that seems to be their trend). Maybe the variation can be explained in terms of changes in their application deadline, but that data's hard to come by. Anyway, hope this helps.

[overoverover]

Connecticut also seems to spread out their acceptances, at least from what I gathered looking through previous years' posts.

[reixis]

Thanks for noticing that! No particular reason other than that I was using Ian's data, which didn't include it.

 

I've now added in a prediction for UConn at February 5. It's a bit hard to predict, since they've had pretty high variation - January 23 in 2014, February 7 in 2013, and February 23 in 2012. One thing that's worth noting is that each of these dates is a Thursday, so I'm more confident that they'll release on a Thursday than that it'll be right around February 5, and I especially wouldn't be surprised if it were earlier (since that seems to be their trend). Maybe the variation can be explained in terms of changes in their application deadline, but that data's hard to come by. Anyway, hope this helps.

Thanks. This year's deadline for UConn is January 15, so I think mid-February is a fair guess given the above variations.