The Long Wait

[mano]

hi everyone, I have a question.

I  checked one of my applications yesterday and saw that my application is still in review of grad. admissions (I applied on January 13, and the deadline was Jan. 15). Is it normal that the deparment didn't begin to review my application yet? (I know you are not experts on this issue but I will appreciate any ideas).

thank you!

[jjb919]

hi everyone, I have a question.

I  checked one of my applications yesterday and saw that my application is still in review of grad. admissions (I applied on January 13, and the deadline was Jan. 15). Is it normal that the deparment didn't begin to review my application yet? (I know you are not experts on this issue but I will appreciate any ideas).

thank you!

 

Hey, for what it's worth, I worked in a graduate admissions office for 2 years while completing my MA. Take what I say with a grain of salt, because each school will do things differently and have their own protocols (the school I worked at had a rolling admissions policy, so that may have had an effect on the way we did things).

 

The status "in review" usually means that the file has gone over to the department for review and has not yet returned. We would send files over to all the departments (including philosophy) as soon as they were considered complete. Each department would handle them differently. Some would start reviewing immediately and would send them back once they made a recommendation; others would wait until the deadline and review all applications together and send them all back in one large chunk. Once they were back at the office, their status would be changed to "pending decision" until the Director(s) of addmissions would have a chance to look them over, approve the department's recommendations, and have them sent to the Dean for a final decision on funding.

 

In short, just because you submitted your application two days before the deadline and it is still under review, does not mean anything bad or foreboding at all. This is completely in line with typical procedures.

[mano]

Hey, for what it's worth, I worked in a graduate admissions office for 2 years while completing my MA. Take what I say with a grain of salt, because each school will do things differently and have their own protocols (the school I worked at had a rolling admissions policy, so that may have had an effect on the way we did things).

 

The status "in review" usually means that the file has gone over to the department for review and has not yet returned. We would send files over to all the departments (including philosophy) as soon as they were considered complete. Each department would handle them differently. Some would start reviewing immediately and would send them back once they made a recommendation; others would wait until the deadline and review all applications together and send them all back in one large chunk. Once they were back at the office, their status would be changed to "pending decision" until the Director(s) of addmissions would have a chance to look them over, approve the department's recommendations, and have them sent to the Dean for a final decision on funding.

 

In short, just because you submitted your application two days before the deadline and it is still under review, does not mean anything bad or foreboding at all. This is completely in line with typical procedures.

I see. thank you!

I suddenly got flurried in fear that the department will never be able to review my application with a full consideration. thanks again.

[kosmo]

It's such a slow day today...

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

It's such a slow day today...

oh lord i know right- i got two emails confirming my app was complete- and i knew it was! And then the worst- I got a call- the location said RIVERSIDE CALIFORNIA- my heart started pounding -- IT WAS A FREAKING TELEMARKETER. Oh god the cruelty!

[kosmo]

oh lord i know right- i got two emails confirming my app was complete- and i knew it was! And then the worst- I got a call- the location said RIVERSIDE CALIFORNIA- my heart started pounding -- IT WAS A FREAKING TELEMARKETER. Oh god the cruelty!

 

 

Arghh I would probably have thrown my phone across the room and broken it if I were you...

[reixis]

I visited Sao Paulo. I really loved fruits there:) however the city was quite expensive.

 

I've been there only twice, so I don't really know the city. Anyway, I've met a couple of Brazilians who have traveled around and they told me that fruits and coffee from here are really good compared to other places. 

 

 

oh lord i know right- i got two emails confirming my app was complete- and i knew it was! And then the worst- I got a call- the location said RIVERSIDE CALIFORNIA- my heart started pounding -- IT WAS A FREAKING TELEMARKETER. Oh god the cruelty!

 

Wow, that's crazy. I wonder how I would react in such situation 

Edited January 31, 2015 by reixis

[overoverover]

I posted on Jan 1 that I felt like we'd hear any day now because it was 2015. I take it back, this month has been excruciatingly long. But tomorrow is February 1, so we'll all hear any day now!

[kosmo]

I posted on Jan 1 that I felt like we'd hear any day now because it was 2015. I take it back, this month has been excruciatingly long. But tomorrow is February 1, so we'll all hear any day now!

 

Except for the weekends. Suddenly, I hate holidays with a vengeance.   

[isostheneia]

A few nights ago (waiting for Chicago to release decisions), I rewatched Apocalypse Now. Somehow, I never realized that it's fundamentally an allegory about graduate admissions in philosophy. So I thought I'd write up some notes on the more interesting points of comparison to learn what this film can tell us about the experience.

 

Background: On its surface level, Francis Ford Coppola's film is set in the Vietnam War, and shows Captain Ben Willard's (Martin Sheen) journey up the Nung River, on orders to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a decorated American military leader who has gone rogue. The farther up the river Captain Willard goes, the more we see the devastating effects of the war, not least in terms of the psychological effects on Willard and other soldiers. The war isn't intelligible as a conflict between good and bad; neither the North Vietnamese nor Colonel Kurtz can be simply understood as the enemy.

 

Basic lines of the allegory: Captain Willard's journey is representative of an applicant's journey through graduate admissions, from his initial orders as the decision to apply, through his journey up the river on a boat of psychologically distressed fellow applicants, to his final assassination of Colonel Kurtz, as the "successful" completion of his mission (one in which the very idea of success is questioned). The military leaders who give Captain Willard his assignment exhibit striking similarities with the status quo of established philosophy professors: they ask him to take the mission, noting that he's highly capable and they need someone like him, but provide him dreadfully little resources, making him fend for himself. And they're fully aware that he likely won't make it through the mission alive, much less psychologically sound.

 

The question of what element of the application process Colonel Kurtz represents is both one of the most interesting and difficult questions in analyzing the movie. In one sense, he represents an admissions committee: by defeating him, Captain Willard would succeed in his mission, just as surviving the gauntlet of an adcom's scrutiny would result in a successful offer of admission. But it's not quite that simple. Colonel Kurtz isn't just a player in the war, but someone who also occupies a space outside the war. After witnessing the perils of the war (the application process) first hand, he tries to remove himself from the process by taking his unit far up the river into Cambodia. He discovers double agents (i.e. defenders of the status quo of the philosophy profession) in his ranks, and executes them. The American brass concludes that his "methods are unsound," and thus that he must be eliminated. Colonel Kurtz is thus something like a professor who, after being groomed for a tenured job at an R1 university, recognizes the failings of the system and adopts radically different methods for advancing the professor. Kurtz leads a contradictory existence, not wanting to contribute to the injustices of the status quo but being unable to change the process without himself occupying a type of hegemonic position.

 

Psychological perils of the process: "Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon." The film opens with Captain Willard lying in a hotel room, waiting for orders. He spends an alcohol-fueled night thinking about his previous tours (this is clearly not his first round of applications), noting that when he's here (applying) he only thinks about home ("real life"), but while he's home, he only thinks about the war. Life is never happy for an applicant, especially during the initial waiting game. Soon into his mission, he encounters Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, for whom the war is merely a game, and who thinks nothing of the innocent people he gleefully kills. (His line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" is perhaps as clear a metaphor as we receive in the movie, though I'm still struggling to make sense of what his now-infamous expression "Charlie don't surf!" means for the application process.) Captain Willard is horrified by Kilgore's approach to the war, but begins to see that it's all too common among the American soldiers. He notes, "If that's how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone."

 

The American bases which Captain Willard and company visit as they travel farther up the river show the devastating effects of the application process, with each being more and more depraved, and losing any sense of order. At the last American base, a messenger tells Willard, "You're in the asshole of the world, Captain!" The messenger is glad to finally give Willard his new information, since the messenger is now free to leave, if only he can find a way out.

 

In a scene that was cut from the theatrical release, Captain Willard and his crew encounter a French plantation in the jungle, a solitary hold-out from the days of the French occupation of Indo-China. Willard asks them why they don't leave, and they claim that they would never leave, that this is now their home. A young woman observes Willard, noting his weariness of the war (despite Willard's stoic resolve throughout the film). She tells him that he's a doubled man, a walking contradiction. "There's one of you that fights, and one of you that loves." As applicants, we're engaged in a contradictory enterprise, fighting fellow students for a spot in the discipline, but loving each other and the field of philosophy nonetheless. The plantation is clearly a metaphor for the isolation of continental departments in the US, the lone holdouts. One wonders whether it further demonstrates the status quo of analytic philosophy that this scene was cut from the movie. To get a sense of Coppola's pluralist vision of the field, we must watch the Redux version in which it's included.

 

When he finally arrives at Colonel Kurtz's fort, Willard doesn't know what to make of him. The man appears at once evil, unhesitatingly executing those with whom he disagrees, and wise beyond measure, clearly distraught by the the war and even the operation he runs. Willard sympathizes with Kurtz's distress, but ultimately must kill him because of the atrocities the Colonel commits. As the two converse about the war, Willard tells Kurtz, "They told me you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound." Kurtz replies, "Are my methods unsound?" With clarity, Willard informs him, "I don't see any methods at all, sir." The eventual assassination scene cuts back and forth between Willard slaying Kurtz with a machete, and the native Cambodians' ritual slaughter of a cow. This symbolizes how Willard does not kill Kurtz out of hate, but out of respect. Similarly, only by destroying the hegemony in the application process, even those who recognize its deep inadequacies.

 

The film ends with Kurtz whispering lines from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and from the epigraph of Eliot's "The Wasteland"), repeatedly saying "The horror... the horror..." The picture we ultimately receive is one of a necessary fight, but in a terrible war.

 

Takeaway: The only emotionally uplifting scenes in the film, which are few and far between, are those of camaraderie between Captain Willard and his fellow soldiers on the boat. The only solace to be received from the process is by bonding with those on a similar mission. But Coppola's lasting vision is not one in which a correct approach to the application process can resolve its internal problems. One can only mitigate damages, never eliminate them. Coming to a state of self-consciousness about the terrible contradictions of the process is admirable, but not enough. After the end of the film, we are left in a state of shock, appreciated that the mission has been completed, but mourning the deaths of those who did not survive and lamenting the state of the process more generally. The film does not imply that the problems with the application process are contingent upon problems with current leadership (though these problems are certainly exacerbated by such leadership); rather, the application process is an inherently horrible, but perhaps necessary, state.

 

I'll end with one of Captain Willard's voice-over observations on the war: "Some day this war's gonna end. That'd be just fine with the boys on the boat. They weren't looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I'd been back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore."

[overoverover]

Well, isostheneia wins the overoverover award for Best Post. Don't worry, folks, there are others (Best Supporting Post, for instance).

[isostheneia]

I'd like to thank the Academy, but I'll hold off until they give me an acceptance (which is obviously a big if).

Edited February 2, 2015 by isostheneia

[ianfaircloud]

A few nights ago (waiting for Chicago to release decisions), I rewatched Apocalypse Now. Somehow, I never realized that it's fundamentally an allegory about graduate admissions in philosophy. So I thought I'd write up some notes on the more interesting points of comparison to learn what this film can tell us about the experience.

 

Background: On its surface level, Francis Ford Coppola's film is set in the Vietnam War, and shows Captain Ben Willard's (Martin Sheen) journey up the Nung River, on orders to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a decorated American military leader who has gone rogue. The farther up the river Captain Willard goes, the more we see the devastating effects of the war, not least in terms of the psychological effects on Willard and other soldiers. The war isn't intelligible as a conflict between good and bad; neither the North Vietnamese nor Colonel Kurtz can be simply understood as the enemy.

 

Basic lines of the allegory: Captain Willard's journey is representative of an applicant's journey through graduate admissions, from his initial orders as the decision to apply, through his journey up the river on a boat of psychologically distressed fellow applicants, to his final assassination of Colonel Kurtz, as the "successful" completion of his mission (one in which the very idea of success is questioned). The military leaders who give Captain Willard his assignment exhibit striking similarities with the status quo of established philosophy professors: they ask him to take the mission, noting that he's highly capable and they need someone like him, but provide him dreadfully little resources, making him fend for himself. And they're fully aware that he likely won't make it through the mission alive, much less psychologically sound.

 

The question of what element of the application process Colonel Kurtz represents is both one of the most interesting and difficult questions in analyzing the movie. In one sense, he represents an admissions committee: by defeating him, Captain Willard would succeed in his mission, just as surviving the gauntlet of an adcom's scrutiny would result in a successful offer of admission. But it's not quite that simple. Colonel Kurtz isn't just a player in the war, but someone who also occupies a space outside the war. After witnessing the perils of the war (the application process) first hand, he tries to remove himself from the process by taking his unit far up the river into Cambodia. He discovers double agents (i.e. defenders of the status quo of the philosophy profession) in his ranks, and executes them. The American brass concludes that his "methods are unsound," and thus that he must be eliminated. Colonel Kurtz is thus something like a professor who, after being groomed for a tenured job at an R1 university, recognizes the failings of the system and adopts radically different methods for advancing the professor. Kurtz leads a contradictory existence, not wanting to contribute to the injustices of the status quo but being unable to change the process without himself occupying a type of hegemonic position.

 

Psychological perils of the process: "Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon." The film opens with Captain Willard lying in a hotel room, waiting for orders. He spends an alcohol-fueled night thinking about his previous tours (this is clearly not his first round of applications), noting that when he's here (applying) he only thinks about home ("real life"), but while he's home, he only thinks about the war. Life is never happy for an applicant, especially during the initial waiting game. Soon into his mission, he encounters Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, for whom the war is merely a game, and who thinks nothing of the innocent people he gleefully kills. (His line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" is perhaps as clear a metaphor as we receive in the movie, though I'm still struggling to make sense of what his now-infamous expression "Charlie don't surf!" means for the application process.) Captain Willard is horrified by Kilgore's approach to the war, but begins to see that it's all too common among the American soldiers. He notes, "If that's how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn't just insanity and murder, there was enough of that to go around for everyone."

 

The American bases which Captain Willard and company visit as they travel farther up the river show the devastating effects of the application process, with each being more and more depraved, and losing any sense of order. At the last American base, a messenger tells Willard, "You're in the asshole of the world, Captain!" The messenger is glad to finally give Willard his new information, since the messenger is now free to leave, if only he can find a way out.

 

In a scene that was cut from the theatrical release, Captain Willard and his crew encounter a French plantation in the jungle, a solitary hold-out from the days of the French occupation of Indo-China. Willard asks them why they don't leave, and they claim that they would never leave, that this is now their home. A young woman observes Willard, noting his weariness of the war (despite Willard's stoic resolve throughout the film). She tells him that he's a doubled man, a walking contradiction. "There's one of you that fights, and one of you that loves." As applicants, we're engaged in a contradictory enterprise, fighting fellow students for a spot in the discipline, but loving each other and the field of philosophy nonetheless. The plantation is clearly a metaphor for the isolation of continental departments in the US, the lone holdouts. One wonders whether it further demonstrates the status quo of analytic philosophy that this scene was cut from the movie. To get a sense of Coppola's pluralist vision of the field, we must watch the Redux version in which it's included.

 

When he finally arrives at Colonel Kurtz's fort, Willard doesn't know what to make of him. The man appears at once evil, unhesitatingly executing those with whom he disagrees, and wise beyond measure, clearly distraught by the the war and even the operation he runs. Willard sympathizes with Kurtz's distress, but ultimately must kill him because of the atrocities the Colonel commits. As the two converse about the war, Willard tells Kurtz, "They told me you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound." Kurtz replies, "Are my methods unsound?" With clarity, Willard informs him, "I don't see any methods at all, sir." The eventual assassination scene cuts back and forth between Willard slaying Kurtz with a machete, and the native Cambodians' ritual slaughter of a cow. This symbolizes how Willard does not kill Kurtz out of hate, but out of respect. Similarly, only by destroying the hegemony in the application process, even those who recognize its deep inadequacies.

 

The film ends with Kurtz whispering lines from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and from the epigraph of Eliot's "The Wasteland"), repeatedly saying "The horror... the horror..." The picture we ultimately receive is one of a necessary fight, but in a terrible war.

 

Takeaway: The only emotionally uplifting scenes in the film, which are few and far between, are those of camaraderie between Captain Willard and his fellow soldiers on the boat. The only solace to be received from the process is by bonding with those on a similar mission. But Coppola's lasting vision is not one in which a correct approach to the application process can resolve its internal problems. One can only mitigate damages, never eliminate them. Coming to a state of self-consciousness about the terrible contradictions of the process is admirable, but not enough. After the end of the film, we are left in a state of shock, appreciated that the mission has been completed, but mourning the deaths of those who did not survive and lamenting the state of the process more generally. The film does not imply that the problems with the application process are contingent upon problems with current leadership (though these problems are certainly exacerbated by such leadership); rather, the application process is an inherently horrible, but perhaps necessary, state.

 

I'll end with one of Captain Willard's voice-over observations on the war: "Some day this war's gonna end. That'd be just fine with the boys on the boat. They weren't looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I'd been back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore."

 

I'll be the jerk who quotes your entire post, only to say that I up-voted it not because it's a great post substantively (though it may be), but because it's so long.

[a_for_aporia]

Just went to my inbox and saw an email from the University of Chicago. I applied there and am expecting to hear good or bad news from them any day. Heart skipped (several) beats. Then I realized that it's some perfunctory email form the graduate school about "choosing the right graduate program"...

 

...I think I'm gonna choose the graduate program which makes me an offer. 

[Page228]

I got that email too, and I didn't apply there. But earlier today I was momentarily startled by an email. "The U of... [my undergrad institution] Alumni Association." Stop it, undergrad institution.

[sar1906]

Has anyone heard anything from any of the SPEP schools besides Penn, Vanderbilt, and Stony Brook? 

[Cecinestpasunphilosophe]

Just went to my inbox and saw an email from the University of Chicago. I applied there and am expecting to hear good or bad news from them any day. Heart skipped (several) beats. Then I realized that it's some perfunctory email form the graduate school about "choosing the right graduate program"...

 

...I think I'm gonna choose the graduate program which makes me an offer. 

 

Got this, too. I can't understand how they possibly thought sending that out now was a good idea. My poor heart.

[kosmo]

Got this, too. I can't understand how they possibly thought sending that out now was a good idea. My poor heart.

 

Same here. Heart stopping...

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

Got this, too. I can't understand how they possibly thought sending that out now was a good idea. My poor heart.

I got it too and I think they did that just to be a tease- seriously!

[isostheneia]

What an incredibly uneventful day. Disappointing.

[tuv0k]

Stanford is killing me!

[Infinite Zest]

Come on Stanford!

[Nastasya_Filippovna]

today has been the biggest no news day EVER!! I was refreshing my phone at work all day for nothing

[ianfaircloud]

UCSB is up.

[Duns Eith]

We have seen two acceptances from Ohio State, both around (or slightly later) than predicted. No other mentions of acceptances, waitlist, rejections... But if 2014 is predictive over 2013, then we could expect more offers later this week or next week.

 

Data:

In 2013, 8 offers were reported at the end of January.

In 2014, 3 offers were reported at the end of January, and 4 more were reported at the end of February.

In 2015, 2 offers were reported at the end of January.

Edited February 18, 2015 by Turretin