Admissions Blog: Hello and Predictions

[jacbarcan]

Howdy everyone,

My name is Jac and I'm taking over the philosophy admissions blog for the 2016 season. I'll be posting predictions within the next couple of days. Similar to the previous predictions, I will be making them by averaging most, if not all, of the release dates made in the past four years. Sometimes if it seems that there is a significant outlier or if there seems to be a different or significant pattern--such as releasing on a specific day of the week or never on the weekends---I will disregard a data point or take into account the closest relevant day. Since the data is so limited, outliers are a bit hard to determine. Hopefully over time though, we'll have collected enough data to make predictions better. 

You can check the blog out here: philosophyadmissions.wordpress.com 

I will be updating everything for the 2016 season shortly. 

Once admissions start to roll in, I will be pretty active on gradcafe.com and the blog. If any of you all need anything at all, please feel free to contact me here on gradcafe.com, by email personally at jacbarcan at yahoo dot com, or by email to the three of us (Ian, Sid, and Jac) at philosophyadmissionsblog at gmail dot com. 

Best of luck to everyone. I hope to see some of you on the other side soon. 

-Jac

[samori]

Great to hear someone is taking over. Thanks for this!

[gughok]

Echoing the thanks above - I know I'll be really grateful to have a bookkeeper of sorts keeping track of everything in the coming month and a half.

For posterity, and in case this might be helpful for us to post, here are my predictions for the places to which I've applied (PhD), based on looking for patterns in the past few years:

UCLA: F10
NYU: F19
Yale: F19
Harvard: F21
MIT: F23
Princeton: M2
Rutgers: M3

I don't remember why I came up with each of the above figures, but I'm sure I had some reason or another.

N.B. "some reason or another" might include "haha these guys look confused af with their decisions through 2012, idk man I'll just choose the third Wednesday"

[jacbarcan]

Predictions should be up for anyone interested in looking at them.

@gughok Mine are pretty similar to your predictions. A few are pretty different but they are the ones that have been all over the place in the past and I decided pretty randomly as well. 

[offyerhst]

Thanks Jac!

[Neist]

18 minutes ago, jacbarcan said:

Predictions should be up for anyone interested in looking at them.

@gughok Mine are pretty similar to your predictions. A few are pretty different but they are the ones that have been all over the place in the past and I decided pretty randomly as well. 

Just a head's up.

Your post is titled "2015 Predictions." Should it be 2016?

Edit: Ah, I see where I went wrong. A little confusing, but I figured it out.  

Edited January 19, 2016 by Neist

[ianfaircloud]

Thanks, Jac!

[jacbarcan]

34 minutes ago, Neist said:

Just a head's up.

Your post is titled "2015 Predictions." Should it be 2016?

Edit: Ah, I see where I went wrong. A little confusing, but I figured it out.  

Yeah. I knew that would be confusing. I'm pretty new to wordpress and I was figuring out my own little way to keep the 2015 predictions while updating the predictions page and creating a link to the old ones.  

[dgswaim]

I just looked at your 2016 predictions,and thought you'd like to know that Mizzou will likely come out significantly later than predicted. The DGS there sent an email to applicants a couple weeks back saying they were extending the deadline for applications to Feb 20.

[jacbarcan]

38 minutes ago, dgswaim said:

I just looked at your 2016 predictions,and thought you'd like to know that Mizzou will likely come out significantly later than predicted. The DGS there sent an email to applicants a couple weeks back saying they were extending the deadline for applications to Feb 20.

Great. Thanks for that. I'm pretty sure it was one of the ones that I had one data point for. I'll blank it out and put a note on the blog.

[Cromulent Flurp]

Thanks so much for doing this. Does the date for Duke take into account that their submission date was two weeks later than last time? 

[jacbarcan]

52 minutes ago, Cromulent Flurp said:

Thanks so much for doing this. Does the date for Duke take into account that their submission date was two weeks later than last time? 

Not at all. Thanks for the heads up though. (I really do appreciate the input since I'm not spending too much time with each school and figuring out if there were any interesting changes in submission dates, graduate admissions chair, or internal admissions calendar.)

Do you know if the 2015 submission date was pretty consistent with even earlier submission dates? I might put up a note so other readers can look out for that if it does come in a few weeks later than predicted. 

[Cromulent Flurp]

No, I only know last year's date was 15 December. Also, Princeton's last year was 31 December or early January, and this year was 15 December, so its notifications might be earlier than usual. 

[jacbarcan]

Good to know. It'll be interesting to see if that makes a difference and hopefully help for next year. It's possible that they still look at the applications at the same time each year even if there is a change in the submission deadlines. (Maybe the graduate school has an earlier deadline imposed on the department.)

[AnotherKantFan]

I'd guess the change in Princeton's submission date was very deliberate, especially because it happened during the admission process and rather unexpectedly (I remember checking the website in October/early Nov and back then the admission date was still 31 Dec '15. So maybe they, indeed, thought that candidates should know earlier to have more time to plan campus visits, and therefore decided to change the admission deadline to be able to send acceptances ~2 wks earlier?

Edited January 20, 2016 by AnotherKantFan

[jacbarcan]

You're right. I remember seeing that change too. I hope you're right that they'll release earlier. 

[AnotherKantFan]

We all hope for that, don't we.  

[bravesball]

Notre Dame sent out an email today saying " The Philosophy Admissions Committee is planning to have reviewed all files and to provide you an update by February 26, 2016". And I assume by update they mean admissions decision.

[samori]

It might be worth mentioning that the email from Missouri says the deadline for consideration of a Graduate Fellowship is January 20 and the general admission deadline / Teaching Assistantship deadline is February 20 so it's possible that a recipient of a Graduate Fellowship might receive an outcome sooner than currently expected. The original deadline (for everything, I believe) was January 15. Last year's results came out quite early so we'll see what happens!

[jacbarcan]

Okay, great. I'll put that up on the blog too. My original prediction is probably still wrong at January 29th.

[samori]

UMass put a message up on their website yesterday (Jan 26 2016) stating "We expect to be making initial offers by March 4".

[jacbarcan]

Thank you. I appreciate all the updates everyone is giving me. 

[philosophe]

16 hours ago, hot.glass said:

UMass put a message up on their website yesterday (Jan 26 2016) stating "We expect to be making initial offers by March 4".

ugh, that's so far out... 

[jacbarcan]

1 hour ago, philosophe said:

ugh, that's so far out... 

Yeah. And my prediction (which came before this information) is for Feb 29

[philosophe]

25 minutes ago, jacbarcan said:

Yeah. And my prediction (which came before this information) is for Feb 29

To be fair they do say *by,* so there's hope yet.