In the past four days, three people have found their way to this blog by googling “Auburn sucks.” So to those of you who were looking for something about Auburn’s suckitude, you’re in the wrong place. But welcome!
[UPDATE: Someone got here today by googling "Hitler UGA".]
First and foremost, I don’t pretend to have anything particularly helpful or enlightening to share about the application process. I only write this out of a desire to (a) perhaps stir up a little optimism among any readers who are putting together their applications and wondering what the hell they should be doing and whether or not it’s really worth it and (b) offer what little advice I have to offer.
Second, I want to make it clear how sincerely I believe that mine is a very rare sort of case. While I do think that I did everything as well as I could, I still can’t help but consider myself extremely lucky to have ended up at UNC. Extremely lucky. So don’t let my story get your hopes up too much.
That said, what’s left of this post will come in two parts: I’ll first briefly tell my story and then I’ll end with some words of advice that you may not hear from other people (or maybe you’ve heard it all before, whatever).
I don’t have a B.A. in philosophy from a well-known college. In fact, I don’t even have a B.A. in philosophy. And the bachelor’s degree that I do have — one with a dual major in Biblical Studies and the Humanities — I got from a place that almost nobody has ever heard of: Atlanta Christian College. ACC has only one professor of philosophy. Lucky for me, he was an amazing teacher (when he wasn’t skipping his own classes to gallivant off to Florida for some surfing, that is).
The administrative higher-ups at ACC respected him enough to allow him to teach pretty much whatever he wanted to teach (in addition to the few classes he had to teach, that is). So he designed several seminar-style courses for myself and a few other students. We’d spend a couple hours each day sitting in his office, drinking coffee so strong I’d get teary-eyed every time I took a sip, and working our way through as much upper-level philosophy as we could get our hands on. And it was during our seminar on Moral Realism that I really think I “caught the philosophical bug,” as it were.
Now, when it came time to leave ACC, I was extremely naive about my chances of getting into grad school. The dreamer in me was under the impression that the names of institutions mean nothing, and that admissions committees judge all applicants primarily on the basis of their writing sample. And since I had what I thought was a pretty decent writing sample, I was rather confident about my chances. In retrospect, I really doubt that anyone actually even read my writing sample. I definitely should have applied to a wider range of programs (I think the lowest-ranked program to which I applied was Wisconsin), but I really doubt that that would’ve helped. In response to eight applications, I got eight rejection letters . . . and I got them all very quickly. My impression is that at least a couple of admissions committees saw “Atlanta Christian College” and didn’t even bother to read on. Of course, I don’t actually blame them; I mean, there’s got to be some sort of screening process when you’re weeding 200+ applications down to just a handful. But at the time, it kinda felt like I was being unfairly punished for not really being sure what I wanted to do with my life until my senior year of college.
Anyway, after I received my last rejection letter, I still had some time to apply to M.A. programs. So I applied to four — Western Michigan, Texas Tech, Loyola, and Georgia State — and got into three of them, eventually choosing Georgia State because (a) they were willing to out-bid the two other programs in terms of funding and (b) it allowed me to stay very close to family.
I did well at Georgia State. And now here I am at UNC, and I couldn’t be happier about it. (I actually still have the rejection letter that UNC sent me the first time I applied here.)
The moral of the story: If there are people out there getting from Atlanta Christian College to UNC, then there’s reason for you to be hopeful. (Well, maybe not hopeful, but certainly not hopeless. Again, I might have busted my ass to get here, but that doesn’t make it feel any less like winning the lottery.)
Okay, so here are a few things to think about when putting your applications together:
WRITING SAMPLE
If you get into grad school, it will be first-and-foremost because of your writing sample, so spend lots and lots and lots of time on it. Generally, the best idea is to use a paper that you’ve already written for one of your classes and either to beef it up a little or trim it down a bit (whatever it might need). Work with a professor or two to improve it. Your professors have a better idea than you do about what it’ll take to impress an admissions committee, so getting their input on your writing sample can be extremely helpful.
Also, for what it’s worth, I was told by my professors that interacting with both historical and recent literature in your writing sample is important. It gives admissions committees the impression that you’re a well-rounded researcher (which you should be), i.e., that you’re up-to-date on the very latest work in your areas of interest, but that you also make it a point to read it all through the lens of its historical context. For instance, I wrote on moral realism and supervenience, so I interacted with people from Moore, Ayer, and Mackie to even a few forthcoming articles. Also, writing on something like supervenience allowed me to draw parallels in other fields of philosophy (e.g., the philosophy of mind), another thing you might try to do.
LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION
Be smart when choosing your recommendation letter writers. If there’s any reason to suspect that Professor So-and-so may not actually like you, then it might not be the best idea to ask Professor So-and-so to recommend your admission to other philosophers. Think about it: Your performance in grad school will reflect either negatively or positively on your letter writers. If you go off to grad school and make an ass of yourself, that raises questions about Professor So-and-so’s ability to discern between great students and asses. Your letter writers know this . . . and they don’t want to embarrass themselves.
Also, as much as your professors would love for you to be successful, and as much as they’re aware that writing recommendation letters is a part of their job, they’d be lying if they said that they enjoyed devoting precious hours of their life bragging to people they probably don’t even know about what a wonderful student they think you are. So do what you can to make their life a little easier. I put together a package for all of them with (a) a list of the schools to which I was applying (with the names of the people with whom I’d like to work), (b) the recommendation forms for those programs that require them, (c) envelopes (stamped and addressed, of course), and (d) copies of the papers I wrote for their classes. For those programs that asked recommenders to submit their letters online, I included an explanation of how exactly it was to be done. Everything was as clear and organized as I could make it.
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
I know, I know. What the hell do you put in your statement of purpose? Here’s what I did:
Paragraph 1: Explanation of the sort of philosophical training I got at ACC (I figured that if I could give admissions committees a sense of the quality of training that I received as an undergrad, they might look past the fact that it was at a place called “Atlanta Christian College”).
Paragraph 2: The role Georgia State’s M.A. program played in making me a better philosopher (here I mentioned my GPA and a couple awards, but I tried to make it sound like I was just (a) confirming what I’d just said about ACC and not (b) just bragging about myself).
Paragraph 3: My research interests and what I’ve done to explore them while at Georgia State (here I mentioned three of the research papers I wrote while at Georgia State, the last of which happened to be my writing sample).
Paragraph 4: Why I’m applying to their program (here I mentioned how my research interests aligned with those of certain faculty members (yes, I named names) and politely complimented them on the overall quality of their program . . . without sounding like I was just kissing ass).
So for each of the many (too many) schools I applied to, paragraphs 1-3 were the same.
HANDLING THE WAITING
Honestly, this was the hardest part for me. I’d so much rather struggle over a writing sample than obsessively check my email every 5-10 minutes for two and a half months.
As hard as it might be, beginning at the end of January, do everything in your power to keep yourself distracted during the days. Treat yourself to lunch, go see an afternoon movie, pick up a hobby, go to that museum you’ve been meaning to visit, etc. And seriously, whatever you do, do not check the “who got in” and “gradcafe” bulletin boards online. I got sucked into that and it drove me crazy. There’s nothing like the feeling of reading that other people are getting into your dream program when you’re not hearing anything (except, of course, the feeling of reading that other people are getting into your dream program as you’re opening your rejection letter).
TERMINAL M.A. PROGRAMS
Because of my experience at Georgia State, I’ve really come to think that getting a terminal M.A. between one’s undergrad work and going on to the Ph.D. is a fantastic idea. It gives you two years to get even better at what you do. It exposes you to new philosophers, whose letters of recommendation might be taken a bit more seriously than those written by your undergraduate professors (after all, they can actually speak to your abilities to do graduate-level work in philosophy). And an M.A. from a respected program can make up for less-than-impressive undergraduate work.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got. And now that you’ve wasted your time reading this post, you should really read Eric Schwitzgebel’s series of posts on applying to Ph.D. programs (which he’s put together into one long entry and can now be found here). He tells you pretty much everything you need to know (and he’s even got experience being on an admissions committee).
There’ve also been a few interesting and potentially helpful discussions on the Leiter Reports blog, such as this one, this one, this one, and this one.
Good luck, people.
I take it that the folk are incompatibilists about determinism and both free will and moral responsibility (that is, they believe both free will and moral responsibility to be incompatible with determinism). But recent work in experimental philosophy suggests that I’m wrong about this. In this post, I want to take some initial steps toward a response to this recent experimental work by raising a concern or two about how it’s being carried out.
The method for probing the folk’s intuitions about the compatibility of determinism and either free will or moral responsibility (or both) has generally been the same across the board: Give the folk an imaginary scenario in which some agent is determined to perform some action and then ask them questions like (a) do you think the agent performed the action of her own free will? and (b) would it be fair to hold the agent responsible for performing the action? And as fate would have it (get it?), a majority of the folk answer that such determined agents do act of their own free will and that it would be fair to hold them responsible.
Here’s an example from a paper entitled “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” by Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. Consider the case of Jill:
Imagine there is a universe that is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions and with all the same laws of nature. In this universe the same conditions and the same laws of nature produce the exact same outcomes, so that every single time the universe is re-created, everything must happen the exact same way. For instance, in this universe a person named Jill decides to steal a necklace at a particular time, and every time the universe is re-created, Jill decides to steal the necklace at that time. (2006: 38)
Participants were asked both (a) “whether Jill decided to steal the necklace of her own free will” and (b) “whether ‘it would be fair to hold her morally responsible (that is, blame her) for her decision to steal the necklace.’” Of those asked, 66% answered that she acted freely and 77% answered that it would be fair to blame her for her action.
Here’s one worry of mine. In the paper mentioned above, Nahmias et al explain why they prefer not to actually use the word “determined” (or “determinism”) when describing the agents in their imaginary scenarios. The worry, they say, is that many people seem to have internalized the assumption that “determined” just means “having no free will.” And so, the very word “determined” might inappropriately prompt readers to answer that the agents did not act of their own free will.
Fair enough. But might there be other words that have this biasing power? I think so. As an incompatibilist myself, when I first read the case of Jill, I was thrown off a bit when I read that Jill “decides” to steal the necklace. And here’s why: Decision-making is a deliberative process, and it seems strange to me to suppose that determined agents can genuinely deliberate. Peter van Inwagen once wrote (and so it must be true),
In my view, if someone deliberates about whether to do A or to do B, it follows that his behavior manifests a belief that it is possible for him to do A — that he can do A, that he has it within his power to do A — and a belief that it is possible to do B. (1983: 155)
Tomis Kapitan echoes van Inwagen when he writes, “Integral to it [deliberation] is the agent’s sense of alternative possibilities, that is, of two or more courses of action he presumes are open for him to undertake or not” (1986: 230). But of course, if determinism is true, then the agent is mistaken in believing that there are alternative possibilities open for him to undertake or not.
If I were to tell you that Tom is a skydiver deliberating about whether or not to fall to the earth, you’d naturally assume that Tom must still be in the plane. Because again, we ordinarily understand “deliberating about whether or not to A” to mean that both A and not-A are actually on the deliberative table. That is, we naturally assume that in order for someone to be genuinely deliberating, there must (at least) be a “Door #2.” But if determinism is true, Tom might as well have already jumped out of the plane. But if Tom’s already falling to the earth (and cannot fly), then Tom might be doing something that feels to him like deliberation, but it’s not the same sort of thing that we ordinarily call deliberation — because again, Tom can do nothing but fall to the earth, so whatever it is that’s going on in his head bears only a superficial relation to his actual behavior. Similarly, Jill might have done something that felt to her like “deciding to steal a necklace,” but the option to do anything else was no more open for Jill as it is open for Tom to stop falling to the earth once he’s jumped.
Just like Nahmias et al (are probably right to) think that the word “determined” might inappropriately influence readers to judge that the agent being described is not acting of her own free will because of the readers’ (contestable) background assumptions about what it means to be “determined,” words like “decides” and “deliberation” might inappropriately influence readers to judge that the agent being described is acting of her own free will because of their background assumptions about what it means to “decide” or to “deliberate.” My hunch is that the folk are under the impression that anyone who is capable of decision-making must be acting freely, since the folk can only make sense of decision-making on the assumption that the agent is deciding between open alternatives. And so, it might be the case that no matter how determined-to-steal you make Jill sound, if you describe her action as the product of a genuinely deliberative process, the folk will have no problem calling her free (just like it might be the case that no matter how free you describe an agent, if you also use the word “determined,” the folk will have no problem denying that she’s free).
So I’m thinking about running some experiments in which these sorts of words — e.g., “decides,” “deliberates,” etc. — are removed and replaced with language that makes it all-the-more explicit that the agent’s action is determined (without, of course, using the word “determined”). If the results swing the other way, i.e., toward an incompatibilist interpretation of folk intuitions, then I think enough will have been done to cast some doubt on this recent experimental work that suggests we’ve been wrong about the folk all along. Or, at the very least, I think it will show that more armchair philosophizing needs to be done (for instance, about whether or not it’s fair to describe determined agents as “deciding to A”) before we go out and probe the folk.
REFERENCES
Tomis Kapitan, “Deliberation and the Presumption of Open Alternatives,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 143, Special Issue: Mind, Causation, and Action (April 1986): 230-251.
Eddy Nahmias et al, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 73, Issue 1 (July 2006): 28-53.
Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
