On applying to philosophy grad programs

Advice for the young'uns

It’s the beginning of October, meaning the first of the philosophy PhD applications will be due in a couple months! When I was applying, I was immensely helped by the grad students who gave me advice, and I’m happy to pay that help forward. I figured it might be useful to just compile a post on the process with everything I know for those who might find it useful.

A bit about me: I’m currently a 6^th year PhD student at Harvard, and I did my philosophy MA at Tufts. I did my undergrad at the University of Michigan, with a major in math, a fake major in physics,¹ and a minor in philosophy. I applied to MA programs for 2018, and PhD programs for 2020. I say this only because it is relevant information, but my applications were relatively successful; I got into all the MA programs I applied to, and almost all the PhD programs I applied to.

If you read my post and still have questions, please do ask in the comments! I’ll probably forget to mention a lot of useful info, so I’d love help knowing what to add to the post. If you’re a grad student or professor or otherwise have relevant information and you disagree with my advice or think I paint an incomplete picture, please leave a comment and say so.

Some disclaimers:

1. Again, I applied to PhD programs for 2020, so I don’t know how dated my information might be. I don’t think it should be too dated, though.

2. Take everything I say with a grain of salt; scientists tell me that n = 1 is not a good sample size. In general, if anything I say encourages you to make a certain decision, check with others. Every department does admissions however they want, nobody truly knows how things work in general, and mine is just one perspective on how things work.

3. I am an American and I applied almost exclusively to American grad programs. Things work quite differently elsewhere; if you’re applying to non-American programs, this post will be of limited use to you. If you’re a non-American applying to American programs, I think most of what I say should be applicable to you, but I have no knowledge of whether applying from abroad introduces special complications.

4. In most cases, if you’re going to do a PhD, you’re basically putting your life on hold for 5+ years. What you do in those years should be intrinsically rewarding, but do not forget that shifting the rest of your life—the family you might have, payment on loans, missed salary and raises—is a serious cost. Additionally, people say the job market for being a philosophy professor is hell, so, in my opinion, only do a PhD if you think you wouldn’t regret it even if you didn’t keep pursuing academia.

5. Importantly, this is not a guide for how to choose which program to enroll in, once you get into some. In particular, the criteria for figuring out where to apply are not good criteria for picking where to go. You’ll have a lot more information to go on once you get accepted to various places. Perhaps I’ll write a post on choosing from among offers in the future.

I’ll go over: whether to consider going for a masters before a PhD; how to figure out which departments to apply to; what application materials you’ll need and how important each element is; and how to have the best materials possible where it counts.

1. Masters vs. PhD

The advice here is simple: no matter who you are, you should always shoot for doing a PhD without having done a masters. The only good reason to do a masters instead of a PhD, if you have the choice, is if you don’t get into a particularly good PhD program and you think you could improve your chances by getting a masters first.

In addition to putting your life on hold for an extra two years, there’s the money issue. Generally, masters programs don’t pay well. In contrast, good PhD programs give you enough money to conceivably live on. Tufts and the Oxford BPhil² will net you negative money, probably. When I was at Tufts, the amount of tuition I had to pay was around $30,000, and then there’s living expenses. You got some payment for teaching, but not nearly enough to cover that. At other MA programs, you do get a more sizeable stipend; I recall Northern Illinois University giving me an offer that I believed would be enough to live on, and I don’t think I would have had to pay tuition. But, still, meager money.

I think the funding situation is bad enough that you should not do an MA unless you expect serious benefit from it after the program has concluded; mainly, that would be getting into a better PhD program, which could totally happen. Do not put off doing a PhD program just because you think you’re not ready, even if you, like me, didn’t do your undergrad in philosophy. Let the PhD programs decide if you’re ready; you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about being behind the BA and MA havers; if you’re good enough to get into the PhD program, you’ll probably be good enough to catch up.

This is a serious mistake I made. Since I didn’t have a major in philosophy, I figured I had no shot at a good PhD program, so I didn’t apply to any out of undergrad. I don’t know if I would have done well if I did apply, but it was at least worth a shot to find out. Learn from my mistake! I loved my time at Tufts so much, but as concerns my overall life, it would have been better to just start at Harvard in 2018 if that were a possibility.

Nevertheless, if you are applying from undergrad, I definitely advise applying to at least some MA programs, at least as a fallback. If you have a major in philosophy, your default expectation should be to do a PhD program next, but apply to Tufts and a couple other MAs as a fallback. If you, like me, are coming from another field, then you should be more MA-heavy in your applications. Apply to four or more MA programs, then throw in at least two of your dream PhD programs, and at least a couple near-dream program. Only apply to PhD programs that you would choose over an MA. And by all means, if you have the time and money for application fees, apply for more.

2. Where to apply

If you’re applying to MAs, the advice is easy. Look at the masters programs listed here. Apply to Tufts and the Oxford BPhil. Look through the other MA programs mentioned, and select the five or so (or fewer, if you have a BA) that have the best placement rates and a faculty that matches your interests reasonably well. Considerations other than placement into PhD programs—such as how well the department fits your interests—won’t matter that much, though. You’re still figuring out your interests, and you’ll still be figuring them out when you’re off in a PhD program, and most of these departments will be reasonably broad. Consider, also, funding.

Now, there are so many philosophy PhD programs, all with varying quality and areas of interest, how can you decide which to apply to? The answer is simple: look at the Philosophical Gourmet Report. People talk shit about the PGR, but I think that’s mainly for complicated sociological reasons; when I was applying, the information itself was solid.

There are two main criteria you should worry about when deciding where to apply: the quality of the department, and how well-suited the department is to your interests. So, first, figure your interests out. It’s very likely that they haven’t solidified yet, but you need to go off imperfect information. I’d say do your best to find at least three distinct areas of philosophy you could see yourself working on, and take into account whatever uncertainty you have. If you’re super uncertain about your interests, then you should favor applying to departments who are good at a broad range of subfields. Second, quality: honestly, I got by just using rankings as a heuristic. A heuristic: once you come up with a list, probably run it by a few professors who know you, and they might have good suggestions for how to modify the list. For my part, I made a list only by using the PGR as a guide for selecting the best-rated departments that suited my interests (as well as my prior knowledge of which philosophers I’d like to work with), and then all my professors thought my choices made sense. There’s only one program that I applied to that I wouldn’t have applied to if not for their advice.

And of course, if you have special information regarding what departments would be best, such as its location or its having a super awesome philosopher you’d love working with, then take that into account.

So: look at the PGR, and especially look at their rankings by area. Note that a program very good for your area might not be high in the overall ranking; Carnegie Mellon is ranked 35 overall, but they are #1 in decision theory! Using these rankings, pick a good distribution of programs strong in your preferred areas, and with various positions in the rankings.

You should definitely err on the side of applying to programs better than you think you’ll get into. How worthwhile it is to get a philosophy PhD heavily depends on your career prospects afterwards, and it’s not unlikely that studying at a less-good department simply isn’t in your overall interests. I know, you’re young, you’re not thinking about whether you’ll wish you had a family earlier when you’re in your thirties; I’ve been there. But you need to try to think about that.

Now, you ask: “Okay, apply to good departments that fit my interests. But how many?”

I’m sorry, but you need to apply to a lot of programs. I applied to thirteen PhD programs, and this should be about what you expect; even more would have been reasonable. This will be a serious cost; the application fees are expensive, usually more than $100 (though cheaper for MA programs). But you need to apply to as many as you can reasonably afford (unless you can afford like, twenty; you probably don’t need to apply to more than twenty). It is not uncommon for a person to apply to a lot of PhD programs and then get into just one top-notch program. Some people do consistently better than others in admissions, but for a lot of people there’s a ton of luck involved.

I should note, here, that many programs offer to waive their application fees under some circumstances. Each program will have different criteria, which you will be able to see on their website. Look at each program’s criteria, and get as many waivers as you can. Even if you don’t think of yourself as poor, you’ll very likely be eligible for some, and each ~$100 matters a lot.

Concretely, if you have a BA or MA in philosophy, I’d advise applying to at least five top-10 programs and five 10-20 programs. Then add in some lower-ranked programs that are super well-suited to your interests, and then you have your list to give to your professors for advice.

If you do not have a BA or MA in philosophy, I’d advise applying to around five MA programs, and ideally at least five PhD programs: ~3 from the top 10, and ~2 from the top 10-20. And, of course, more is always better, pace application fees.

For sure, the specifics with my numbers can vary depending on your circumstances. If you’re in love with decision theory, then consider Carnegie Mellon a top 10.

3. Your application materials

Here they are, ranked in order of most to least important:

1. Your writing sample

2. Your writing sample

3. Letters of recommendation

4. Personal statement

5. Your transcript

6. GRE scores

7. (in some places) Your CV

I cannot overemphasize how important your writing sample is. When I was in undergrad, I heard a professor say “Only two things matter: your writing sample, so they can see how good you are, and your rec letters, so they know you wrote it.” This is true in spirit, if not in letter. Getting an A in a philosophy class is not hard. Getting professors to say you’re wonderful is not hard. The writing sample is the way the application committee can see whether you’re good at philosophy.

What people say is that the writing sample and the rec letters are the only two parts of your application that can count positively in your favor. Your personal statement, your grades, your GRE scores, whatever—these will count against you if they’re particularly bad, but you will not get into a top 10 program with an unimpressive writing sample just because you killed it on the GRE. For my part, my undergrad GPA was a 3.82, and I got 159V/165Q/5.0 on the GRE (that’s 83rd, 86th, and 92nd percentile, respectively). Good, but not enough to impress anyone on their own.

Only some places require a CV; this is nothing to sweat, nobody expects for you to have anything to put on a CV yet. In addition, more and more programs are no longer requiring the GRE. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by now, only a handful of programs did.

There isn’t much to say about anything but the writing sample, rec letters, and personal statement. Yes, you should try to get good grades, and try to do well on the GRE. But they’re not what’s going to make or break your application (unless, well, they’re bad enough to break it). Almost all your time spent preparing for applications should be focused on your writing sample.

4. Working on your materials

4.1 Recommendation letters

I don’t have much to say here. Most programs will require around three letters of recommendation, and they should be from professors you worked with in undergrad/your masters, preferably philosophy professors. And, obviously, find ones whom you think will write good letters; letters that are positive, and not just positive in a way anyone could be about anyone. A good letter has to provide evidence to the committee that you’re good at philosophy. You want someone who knows your work so far, and who will be able to say specific things that make you look good. And the more you’ve worked with a professor, the better; then they will have more things to say that make you look good.

My advice: find professors of yours who gave you the most glowing comments on your term papers and in-class comments, and ask them for letters. Be sure to give them plenty of time in advance, at least a couple months. For a lot of philosophy classes, only the TA will have read your papers; if possible, get letters from professors who themselves have read your papers, unless of course you have special reason to think someone who didn’t read your papers would be a good fit (e.g. if they made especially glowing comments about you).

When I applied to MAs, I had letters from two philosophy professors and one math professor. Again, I’d advise sticking to philosophy professors; things were probably more lax for me because I was only applying to MAs, which you should not do. When I applied to PhD programs, I got letters from three philosophy professors. One of them was from undergrad, the other two from my masters, and I figured the latter two would be good because they had positive comments on the papers I gave them.

4.2 Personal statement

Here is a good blog post on the personal statement. Just note that this is not like an application essay for undergrad. You’re not writing a heart-wrenching tale to show what a unique and interesting individual you are, and you’re not writing about your extraordinary accomplishments and how you overcame the odds to attain them. Your goal is just to give the committee information about who you are qua potential PhD student. You’re just giving them information. So, talk about your philosophical interests, your academic history, what you’ve studied, the sorts of things you might want to study in your PhD program, etc.

Some people tailor their personal statements to the department they’re submitting it to, so a slightly different one for each application. In my opinion, this is very likely a wasted effort. I did minimal personalization—only changing formatting as required, and saying in a couple of them that there’s someone in the department I’d love working with—and I did fine. But, again, n = 1.

I figure that I may as well post my whole personal statement. This should give you an idea as to what information to include. It’s about 750 words in total.

Although my interests are still broad, my focus mainly lies in metaethics and practical reasoning, epistemology, philosophy of language, and Kant. I am largely interested in questions regarding the nature of our obligations as rational beings (both in the practical and epistemic domains) and how they can possibly have authority over us. More specifically, I am interested in the nature of normative judgement and how that sheds light upon the nature of our rational obligations. I am also interested in how parallels between practical and epistemic normativity can inform one’s approach to the latter. On these topics, I have been most interested in the contemporary work of Christine Korsgaard, Robert Brandom, and Allan Gibbard.

Outside of metanormativity, I have enjoyed engaging with questions regarding two-dimensional semantics and other issues surrounding mental content, as well as questions regarding the semantic properties of epistemic discourse, the latter being the topic of my writing sample.

I first became interested in metaethics the summer before I began at Tufts, especially focusing on constructivist and expressivist positions and how they make sense of the connection between normative judgement and action. I took an introductory metaethics course during the Fall 2019 semester with [redacted], which allowed me to pursue such topics further. I wrote my term paper on the relationship between noncognitivism and motivational internalism. Motivational internalism is a thesis about moral judgement often used to motivate noncognitivism, as it is arguable that no cognitivist thesis can satisfy such a constraint. However, one may feel that the thesis is implausibly strong. In my paper I argued that a more plausible weakening of thesis, given by Korsgaard in “Skepticism about Practical Reason,” is sufficient to support a specific form of noncognitivism.

Related to my interest in practical reasoning and epistemology, I enjoy engaging with Kant’s work and the surrounding literature (and, to a lesser extent, the work of the other German Idealists). During the spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to further explore such matters when I took a course on Kant’s ethics at [redacted] with [redacted]. I wrote my term paper on the issue of how Kant established the authority of the moral law in Part III of the Groundwork, in particular regarding the nature of the “circle” he identified in an initial argument he gave leading up to his actual argument. Contra Allison and Korsgaard, I held that the circle consisted in the fact that the authority of the moral law was tacitly appealed to when Kant asserted that we cannot act but under the idea of freedom. Kant changed his approach for establishing the authority of the moral law in the second Critique, and I argued that my interpretation is supported by his ultimate position. That is, my interpretation yields what one would expect to be the actual problem with the initial argument if we take Kant’s settled position for granted.

In epistemology, I have mainly been interested in the nature of epistemic justification and the semantics of knowledge ascriptions. My writing sample is on the latter. In it, I argue against one hypothesis about knowledge ascriptions called subject-sensitive invariantism, according to which it is possible for one individual to know a proposition p while another individual with the same evidence does not know p, as a result of non-epistemic differences in their circumstances (e.g. what is at stake). Recently, I have been growing more interested in the work of Sellars and those influenced by him.

I started my undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan with the intention of ultimately pursuing a career as a mathematician, and I double-majored in mathematics and physics. I had previously had some interest in philosophy, but it began to wane towards the beginning of my undergrad. I rediscovered the field in my third year when I took an introductory course with [redacted], and I quite rapidly grew more passionate about it as I took more of Michigan’s philosophy courses. About a year later I ultimately decided to pursue an academic career in philosophy instead of mathematics. Having switched fields so late, I decided to first obtain an MA in philosophy in order to better prepare myself for pursuing a PhD, which landed me at Tufts University. My interest in the field has only grown stronger since then, and I look forward to continuing my studies.

Thank you so much for your time in considering my application. It would be an honor to be admitted, and I look forward to hearing your decision.

(God, reading that was painful.)

4.3 The writing sample

This is basically everything. And the advice is simple: show the committee the best philosophical work that you are capable of.

You should be working with faculty on your writing sample. Obviously, it should all be your own work, but you need to get feedback from professors. I’d advise having one professor you work relatively closely with, i.e. with whom you go through a few rounds of drafts and revisions. Then, show your writing sample to a couple other professors and get their thoughts on it. Ideally, get feedback from as many people as you can, and make sure they know it’s for a writing sample.

I would not advise starting from scratch. Hopefully, you have a term paper you’ve written that you got positive comments on; start with that, and do a lot of work developing it into a writing sample. Often times, a term paper will be around 10 pages; your writing sample should probably be at least 15 pages, if not more. Mine was about 25 pages; a fair bit above the limit for some programs, but they didn’t end up complaining. So, you’ll want to develop your paper beyond what it was as a term paper. It could be helpful to ask your professor for additional sources you might benefit from engaging with.

Mostly, that’s it. Find your best term paper; work with at least one professor through some drafts and revisions; and then you’re done. The only hard part is doing all of that well, and that’s up to your own dedication and talent.

Regarding your topic: based on my experience (again, n = 1), I’d recommend making interesting and novel arguments about a relatively narrow and easy-to-control topic. My writing sample was me giving a (to my knowledge) novel kind of objection to Subject-Sensitive Invariantism. Let me tell you about SSI. People worry about skepticism; I seem to know who the president is, but oh no, I don’t know if he had a fatal heart attack in the last five minutes, so it seems I don’t know who the president is. On similar grounds, I don’t know anything! David Lewis had the idea that we can get the best of both worlds: how high a standard you have to meet to know something depends on context. In a normal context, I “know” who the president is. In a context where possibilities like him dying in the last 5 minutes are salient, I do not “know” who the president is. Now, some came along and said standards don’t change based on the context of the person who is ascribing knowledge (i.e. the speaker of the word “knows”), but rather the context of the person being talked about. I say, “Bob knows p.” Lewis says that my statement is true if Bob can rule out all the ~p possibilities relevant to me. Proponents of SSI say, rather, that what I say is true if Bob can rule out all the ~p possibilities relevant to Bob. And I say SSI is wrong, because on their view, if a skeptical scenario is salient to me and I don’t know whether p, I should still be able to say “If p, then Bob knows p but I don’t,” which would be crazy.

(Pending demand, I might consider posting my whole writing sample in a separate post on here)

By the time I was done, I was so sick and tired of talking about what assertions are felicitous. I don’t care about words. But it’s not the excitingness of the topic that mattered; what mattered is that I gave good and novel objections to SSI. Professional philosophers write about SSI, and I am not to blame if boring topics are popular. My job was to talk about what philosophers care about, and do it well.

In sum: do not think you need to utterly revolutionize our views on the profoundest of philosophical questions. It’s sufficient to find a small nook in the literature, some easy-to-manage position or argument that some people care about, and make good arguments. Going extra-ambitious with your subject matter probably just introduces unnecessary risks. But, again, this is just one consideration among many; your sole aim is to give the committee as much evidence as possible that you’re good at philosophy.

One worry people have is whether they should pick a topic that’s close to what they want to study, e.g. having a writing sample on epistemology when you say in your personal statement that you want to do political philosophy. There might be extreme cases where this matters (e.g. if you want to do political philosophy and you submit a WS that’s just formal modal logic), but in general, I doubt it matters. The committee knows you’re still developing your interests, and I imagine what they’re looking for are skills that are the same across areas. At any rate, I doubt you should expect your choice of topic to matter to any degree that’s relevant compared to how good the arguments are. If you want to study Kant, and you’re choosing between a killer epistemology paper and a meh Kant paper, go with the former.

One nice piece of advice they gave us at Tufts is to really kill it in the introduction, which should be 2-3 pages. The committees have to sift through hundreds and hundreds of applications, and you need to convey as quickly as possible that yours is one of the ones worth taking seriously. In your introduction, you should introduce the topic as briefly as possible, and then give the reader an idea of what exact sort of argument you will make. Obviously, you can’t fully make your argument in the intro. But, as far as possible, it should be clear from the introduction that the argument you’re making is good and interesting and novel. They should expect to be able to read the rest of the paper and get the really-exciting thing you portrayed in the introduction. Here is the introduction to my writing sample:

Subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI) is a hypothesis regarding the concept of knowledge which claims that what it takes to know a proposition can differ for individuals in different circumstances. For example, according to SSI, one might need more evidence than is usually required to know that acetone contains oxygen if being wrong about such would have disastrous consequences. Consequently, the theory predicts that a sentence like “Alan knows that acetone contains oxygen but Carol does not” can be true even in cases where Alan and Carol have the same evidence that acetone contains oxygen. This is a strange consequence of the theory, since such an utterance would ordinarily be taken to imply that Alan has some evidence that acetone contains oxygen that Carol lacks.

It is well-known that SSI’s predictions fail to be reflected in ordinary judgements about knowledge in cases like the above. This fact by itself is not decisive against SSI, as no theory can be expected to fit all of the data perfectly—it is to be expected that speakers might e.g. err in certain cases, so that even a “correct” theory will not account for speakers’ judgements in all cases. Nevertheless, while we can tolerate some amount of departure from speaker use in evaluating semantic theories like SSI, the error which would need to be postulated in order to save the theory is quite pervasive and implausible. Consequently, I will argue, SSI is an unappealing hypothesis regarding the nature of knowledge ascriptions.

In order to situate my discussion of the theory, I provide exposition and motivation for SSI in §2. My evaluation of the theory will occur in §3 and §4. In §3 I introduce two unexplored considerations against the theory, with the aim of establishing that speakers usually judge knowledge ascriptions as though the same standards apply to everyone, contrary to SSI. First, I discuss knowledge ascriptions embedded in conditionals. In certain situations, SSI predicts that sentences of the form ‘If q, then S knows p but T doesn’t’ can justifiedly be asserted in some cases where S and T have the same evidence. I then go on to show that the theory cannot avoid having consequences of this sort. Second, I briefly discuss sentences of the form ‘S might know p, but T doesn’t’, where S and T are assumed to have the same evidence. It can easily be shown that SSI sometimes predicts such claims to be assertable in cases where they ostensibly are not. Both of these arguments confirm the idea that speakers apply epistemic standards to others in a uniform manner.

Having an idea of the extent to which SSI fails to accord with the apparent truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions, we will then be in a position to discuss proponents’ defenses of the theory in §4. Because SSI fails to straightforwardly account for speakers’ judgements about knowledge-related claims, it must be shown that these errors in judgement would plausibly occur even if SSI were true. Proponents of the theory attempt to do this by pointing to known or plausible psychological biases and explaining how they would lead us to mistakenly speak as though epistemic standards are to be applied uniformly.

I examine two such “error-theoretic” defenses of SSI, given by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley, and give novel responses to both. According to Hawthorne, speakers deviate from SSI as a result of assigning overestimated probabilities to possibilities salient to them. This account is inadequate because while it correctly predicts the individual knowledge ascriptions people make, it does not capture the assumptions about knowledge under which speakers reason. This defect becomes apparent when we examine what sorts of inferences are ostensibly valid. According to Stanley, speakers deviate from SSI as a result of focusing on the wrong question. For instance, when I try to consider whether Terry knows p, Stanley claims I might mistakenly focus on the question of whether he would know p were he in my circumstances. I argue that such an error can only be expected to occur if we attribute to knowledge a role incompatible with the truth of SSI, so that speakers’ error ultimately remains unexplained.

As a final preliminary note before beginning: this paper concerns the concept of knowledge insofar as it is used in ordinary circumstances. For our purposes, theories like subject-sensitive invariantism are to be evaluated as hypotheses regarding what speakers take the word ‘knows’ to mean. If SSI is true, then we expect speakers to e.g. only assent to those knowledge ascriptions which SSI predicts they are in a position to know, justifiedly believe, etc. Thus, the theory will be evaluated by giving examples of assertions whose appropriateness or inappropriateness (by ordinary standards) is clear, and seeing if SSI’s predictions match up. I will therefore speak of assertions being (in)felicitous or (in)appropriate, and it should be understood that such evaluations are to be taken relative to the conventional standards which govern ordinary conversation.

(My God I hate my past writing so much. I promise you can do this better than I did.)

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I said a lot, but I’m certain that there are some useful things I could say that I forgot. So again, let me know if you have any questions (or skepticism, disagreement, etc.) in the comments! I hope this post will, at least, give those who are unfamiliar with the process some footing so that they know the next steps to take.

1. I had accumulated enough classes for a minor in physics, so I went to the advisor to declare my minor, and he informed me there is a major called “Interdisciplinary Physics” in which I could double-count a number of my math classes and have it count as a physics major. So, I get to tell people I have a degree in physics even though I never did statmech. Lucky me!

2. The BPhil is a British equivalent of a master’s degree. The name is as is for historical reasons, as I understand.