Some of My Thoughts on the Application Process

I’m not sure whether I have anything really unique to say about this subject or not, but considering the facts that it has come up recently on this blog and others, that I’m new to this blog, that I got my undergraduate degree from a school in Florida (FSU), and that my application efforts were in some way successful (I am now in the PhD program at Berkeley), I think my experience may at least be relevant. At any rate, here are some of my thoughts:

The Good News: It’s Possible

As much as it may seem that it’s impossible to get into a good graduate school unless you knew you wanted to enter academia since beginning high school and chose a philosophy major right away, this is simply not true. At least it isn’t universally true. As I said, I went to FSU. FSU is not a bad school, and some well-known philosophers work there. But it has only recently (barely) made it into the top 50 of the gourmet report, and it isn’t generally considered the top school in Florida. In addition to this, I didn’t decide to do philosophy until my junior year. Nevertheless, I somehow ended up getting accepted into a top 15 program. So, at the very least, such a thing is not unheard of.

The Bad News: Getting Into a Good School is Difficult, and Partly a Matter of Chance

That being said, such a thing is very rare. I am the only one of the incoming class at Berkeley that is not from a top 20 school, and over half of the new students are from the Ivy League. I don’t think that I need to get into any of the statistics about just how competitive graduate schools are or how little admission even says about future success. For this sort of thing, check the post by Eric linked to a few days ago. I will stress, though, how much is due to subjective factors and luck. I consider myself a fairly intelligent guy, but I don’t think there is anything especially impressive about my intellect or my philosophical abilities. I applied to 12 programs spread out across the gourmet rankings. I applied to four in the top 15 and was accepted at one, waitlisted at one, and rejected by two. I applied to five ranked between 15 and 30 and was admitted at two, rejected by three. I applied to three ranked between 30 and 50 and was admitted at one and rejected by two. As you can see, there doesn’t seem to be any possible rhyme or reason to this pattern. I was accepted at a few good ones while outrightly rejected from several clearly lower-level schools. The only way I can explain this is by luck - perhaps enough people were afraid to apply to the really good schools to make them less competitive than some of the slightly less good ones (whatever that means), or perhaps (more likely to be the case) some people on some of the admissions committees happened to be more impressed by my writing sample and my letters than others (I don’t think there can be an objective weighing of these things).

So What Did I Do?

Still, it might be thought, I couldn’t have gotten into a top program entirely as a matter of luck, so what else did I do? Well, mainly, I just tried to do as many of the things I could in a short amount of time to make my application look good. I worked hard enough to get A’s in my classes (with one B+). I found out which professor could give me the strongest recommendation, and I took a class with him and asked him specifically if I could write a longer final paper for the class to possibly use as a writing sample. This way I got a good writing sample written and I also developed a relationship with an important philosopher. I also took the opportunity to write an honor’s thesis and I studied hard enough to get a good (though by no means great) GRE score. This is all I had time for, but it was apparently enough, and I would recommend anyone applying to graduate school to consider doing these things.

However, if you are still early in your undergraduate career, there is a lot more that can be done. Write papers and try to present them at graduate student conferences. I think these look impressive on applications and they allow you to start building relationships with other young philosophers and some professors at other schools. Start your writing sample early so you can really work on it, and take the GRE early enough to retake it if you need to. If possible, take some graduate level classes.  Andrew Bailey, who runs a philosophy blog called Ratiocination, came from a much smaller school called Biola, and he got into Notre Dame. However, he was committed to philosophy from the beginning and did so much that I would have been amazed if he didn’t get into a top school. You can check his reflections on the application process here and here.

Well, I’m not sure, as I said, if I’ve added anything new to the list of tips and tricks or not. At the very least, I hope to have shown that with hard work and a little luck, it’s possible to get into a top program from a less-than-top school. And hopefully that is an encouragement to some of you.  As for job prospects, I’ll let you know in about six years.