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.
This looks to be a very good piece of advice for prospective Ph.D. students. I have one question, and I suppose it is a bit of a mystery everywhere I seem to go, do you know how much GRE scores factor in to admissions decisions? As someone who will be applying from Canada, where standardized scores mean next to nothing, this is the major piece of my application puzzle that I am overwhelmingly worried about.
Hi Peter.
I wish I could say something more concrete than this, but the sense that I get is that the importance of GRE scores varies from place to place. Generally speaking, I think that most admissions committees have a kind of “low score limit,” which allows them to shave off a large number of applications almost immediately. And of course, this limit is going to depend on the committee. So while a top-5 program might set their limit at, say, 1400, a program ranked in the 40’s might set it 1100 (or perhaps even a bit lower).
Now, of course, there are special circumstances in which these numbers are almost completely meaningless, but having spoken with a few former admissions committee members, I get the sense that this is more-or-less a standard procedure. (See this post on John Basl’s blog for some further confirmation.)
The other way in which your GRE scores might affect your application is somewhat more positive. Once you’ve been admitted to a program, if your GRE scores are high enough, you might get extra fellowship money (provided that the rest of your application is equally as impressive). When admissions committees appeal to the school for grants and fellowship money, it’s a lot easier for them to brag about your scores on a standardized test than to try to explain how well you seem to understand Leibniz’s Monadology.
For what it’s worth, due to some really, really bad advice I was given on how to study for it, I did relatively poorly on the GRE.
[...] PhD students. Try del.icio.us or a Google blog search and you’ll come up with quite a few. Although I haven’t seen as much specifically geared towards religious studies / philosophy [...]
I’m just wondering if anyone has some insight as to where someone with my profile might get in. I have a philosophy GPA of 3.4 from a prestigious liberal arts school, GRE 1210 (V 620, Q 510), and strong rec letters & writing sample. The low GRE and GPA are a big concern.
Here’s my tentative list of schools, by Philosophical Gourmet ranking (different for PhD’s and MA’s):
PhD
-Brown (16)
-University of Maryland, College Park (29)
-Georgetown (40)
-Arizona State (44)
-Boston University (50)
-Northwestern (53)
-Emory (54)
-Boston College (unranked)
MA
-Tufts (1)
-Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (5)
-California State University, Los Angeles (9)
Anything I should just cut off the list as hopeless? I would’ve written off Brown as impossible, but the admissions committee member I contacted said that students with a similar profile had been accepted before… (though he won’t be on the AC this year). Georgetown and Maryland have been particularly encouraging to me in email correspondences.
Any ideas?
Maya,
This is late, so I doubt you’ll revisit the blog in order to read my response. But I’ll respond anyway.
You’re right. The GPA and GRE scores are probably worth being concerned about. But there are a few optimistic things that can be said:
1. Sometimes, if your current professors think that your GPA and/or GRE scores are not an accurate reflection of your philosophical aptitude, they might send emails to some of the higher-ranked departments to which you’ve applied to say something like, “Hey, don’t overlook Maya So-and-so’s application. She’s got a 3.4 GPA, but trust me, that has nothing to do with her ability to do philosophy. Give her sample a read.” Now, I don’t know what your relationship is like with your letter-writers, but this may be something to ask about … especially if there are good reasons for thinking that the numbers are not indicative of the sort of graduate student that you’d be.
2. And speaking of “good reasons for thinking that the numbers are not indicative of the sort of graduate student that you’d be,” if there are any such things, you’d be well-served to mention them in your statement of purpose. For instance, depending on your situation, you might say, “My grades in philosophy classes started off poor because I was unsure that philosophy was something that I’d be interested in doing. But ever since I began taking my philosophical studies seriously, I’ve been making nothing but A’s.” Or, “I’ve always been the sort of person that performed exceptionally well on tasks when I was given some time to reflect, but since standardized tests like the GRE don’t allow for much reflection, I’ve generally done just ‘average’ on those sorts of tasks.”
3. This is only my relatively uninformed opinion, but … I’d imagine that the numbers are really only a concern with respect to your chances at Brown (and maybe UMCP). I can’t imagine that your numbers would automatically exclude you from consideration at any of the other programs you list, including the M.A. programs.
For the record, I think Georgetown’s awesome. Personally, I think it’s head-and-shoulders above every single program you list, except Brown. If you get into Tufts or UW-Milwaukee, they might work as a springboard into a higher-ranked Ph.D. program, but … an acceptance from Georgetown would be tough to turn down (assuming, of course, that you’re not so lucky with Brown).
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
Correction: GRE quant is 590, not 510.
And Milwaukee is ranked 2, not 5 (grad school apps are frying my brain).
[...] http://commonsensephilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/phd-applications/ [...]
Hi, how can I contact you?
I want to start, a list of philosophy BLOGS. A small presentation of the thing, a library or address book. But one question I don’t know is, how to contact people through blogs, I’m not familiar with this medium.
If time permits, I want you to make a post here,
http://dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net/conversation-f8/
It will get stickied and start a list of philosophy blogs. You could write a small intro too, like “Here is a index and library of PHILOSOPHY blogs ….”
Already an index of BBS is here,
http://dissidentphilosophy.lifediscussion.net/conversation-f8/the-community-of-ephilosophers-philosophy-bbs-sites-t9.htm
Kind regards,
- Niki