<p>Just when you think you are out of the application woods, the oldest starts up the graduate school search. S is considering continuing his study of Philosophy to a Master's or PhD level. I know he is now looking for schools with his specialty, but how many is a reasonable number for applications? He will be a strong candidate.</p>
<p>This seems like a whole different animal than the undergrad school search. (I can't believe I'm about to immerse myself in helping with yet another search!)</p>
<p>I don’t know what area your son is looking, but we found the process daunting. There were no “safety schools”. Even the schools that we thought were “safeties” only admitted 10-15% of applicants. </p>
<p>My son only applied to PhD programs and all were funded programs. He applied to a mix of top schools and what we called “safeties” (but they weren’t really safeties). I think he applied to 12-15 schools. </p>
<p>He was a strong applicant: 4.0 GPA, GRE 800 Quantitative, 770 Verbal (rare for a STEM), and a near perfect subject GRE…excellent LORs and very good research opps… He was accepted to all of his schools, but I think that his V score was a nudge (since all schools commented on that…typically STEM students have V scores in the 600s.)</p>
<p>So, depending on the discipline, I would suggest a number around 12-15</p>
<p>Keep in mind the application fees are around $100 per. I had nothing to do with son’s list, except provide credit card #.</p>
<p>My son applied to 12. The grad school applicant pool is relatively self-selective, since you are applying only to the field in which you have excelled. Thus, there are many top students competing for each place. And as mom2collegekids said, even the “safeties” take less than 15% of applicants. Since admissions decisions are made by professors rather than admissions officers, a student’s acceptance is conditional on professor preference. If a professor in a certain subfield is ready to take on more grad students and the applicant’s interests match up with that subfield, then the applicant may have a better chance than another candidate. Thus, you may be surprised to see your child be accepted at “reaches” but not accepted at “safeties.”</p>
<p>@sylvan8798 I’m going to enumerate (a habit from writing so many lectures…).</p>
<p>1) Basic issue is which degree and for what purpose? If your son wants to teach and do research in philosophy in a university context, he needs a PhD. Even in an applied field in philosophy (e.g., medical ethics), credibility comes from a doctoral degree.</p>
<p>2) As I told my son when he was considering the possibility of earning a PhD (following my path, so to speak), if you cannot get full financial aid (fellowships, assistantships), you are probably not suited to a PhD program. Find another career. Financial aid is much more difficult to get for master’s degrees, except when the masters is earned by students enrolled in a PhD program. IOW, a “terminal masters” isn’t a good way to get financial support in a subject such as philosophy. (Some professional masters programs might offer financial aid but basically universities expect to make money from such degree programs and don’t offer much aid.)</p>
<p>3) Whereas your son probably had a couple of hundred colleges and universities from which he could earn a BA with good basic training in philosophy, he would likely be wasting his time and effort and treasure if he enrolled in a PhD program outside roughly the top 25 ranked programs. Only these programs are likely to be able to offer substantial financial aid. And only having a PhD from one of these programs (the more highly ranked, the better) will offer decent job and career prospects upon graduation.</p>
<p>4) University careers in philosophy are very difficult to establish. There isn’t a large market for PhD’s (philosophy programs usually have only a small number of faculty members), and the road to tenure and a career is long and difficult. WHERE you earn your PhD really matters in the competition for entry-level appointments in tenure-stream positions.</p>
<p>5) Given the first four points I’ve made, an applicant needs to focus on applying to the best programs in philosophy with a focus as well on the subfields within philosophy in which he is interested. He needs to identify top scholars in top programs with whom he would like to study. He may find a particularly good fit in a program that has an overall ranking in, say, the second decile (11th-20th) of ranked philosophy doctoral programs. In that case, while looking at and considering applying as well to the highest ranked programs (top 10 or 15), he should also target his applications by subspecialization. Being able to link his interests to particular faculty members by name and research-teaching focus can help in the admissions process. How would he make that link? In his career statement in his application.</p>
<p>6) I have some advice about how to prepare applications to doctoral programs (I have served as a graduate director and department chair so have a lot of experience with this), but I’m sure you’ll get good advice from others here. The most basic point is that grades and test scores really matter but so does the career statement – the rationale for studying philosophy including why this department/program is a good fit to one’s interests.</p>
<p>I applied to 12 also, and it turned out to be a good number because I only got accepted to 1 school that I almost didn’t even apply to.</p>
<p>^That’s a lot of help, mackinaw, thx. It looks like we have to do some research. </p>
<p>We were told by DD2’s college that for med school it’s typical to apply to 12-15 programs. Cripes.</p>
<p>Your son has three excellent resources right on campus- and you will do him the biggest help if you direct him there and then bow out.</p>
<p>1- His faculty adviser. This is the person who will be writing the recommendations (and picking up the phone if so motivated to endorse your son’s candidacy) and will know whether the “right” answer is five schools, ten schools, or- in some cases- no schools. A good faculty adviser can take the kids who won’t be able to get into a top program and gently redirect them. As a parent, you just don’t have that expertise.</p>
<p>2- The person in career services/career development responsible for Master’s/PhD admissions. This is the person who maintains the admissions statistics for the university and can show who got in where and with what credentials.</p>
<p>3- The department chair in philosophy. Even if your son hasn’t taken a class with him/her, I don’t think anyone should apply to an academic grad program without getting time with the department chair. This person will know faculty all over the world and can help your son clarify what his goals are in getting an advanced degree. I am stunned by the number of kids I know who apply to PhD programs without meeting with the department chair. Then five or 6 or 7 years later they are surprised to learn that there are zero jobs in their field. Or that the “hot” field is X and they wrote their dissertation on Y. Find out NOW what the employment prospects are likely to be, and what your son can do to maximize the chances that he is one of the happy minority.</p>
<p>As a parent, I cannot imagine having the expertise or the national perspective on an academic field to advise your kid. I know young grads who apply to two PhD programs and get accepted to both (as their faculty adviser told them they would) and I know kids who apply to 15 programs and get into one- with no funding. This shouldn’t be a parent led project, even if you are an academic in the field your son is pursuing.</p>
<p>^I think you make some very good points, although I never trust these things completely to the wiles of others. Situation is further complicated by the fact that S wants a more gay friendly city. I will corner him on the nature of his discussions with the faculty.</p>
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<p>And a good number of kids apply to more than 20 med schools. </p>
<p>My oldest son applied to five law schools. Got offers of admission to two. Got waitlisted by one. Withdrew his apps to two, because he accepted a scholarship offer to one. That said, not only is it expensive to apply to law/med/grad schools, but remember the time it takes for each application. While there was a general application to file to those law schools, he still had to write different essays with different prompts in some cases. So if you apply to 12 to 15 grad programs, you could have a lot of essays to write, and that is very time-consuming.</p>
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<p>While it is good advice to ask faculty and department chairs for such information, that information needs to be corroborated with other sources like talking with current grad students who aren’t cherrypicked by the grad departments concerned, especially those nearing graduation on the academic job market. </p>
<p>Whether the department chair really has CURRENT knowledge of faculty in the myriad subfields a given aspiring PhD student might be interested is really a YMMV deal. There’s also plenty of Profs in both undergrad and in grad school itself who are either in denial of the real state of the academic job market in their respective fields or completely clueless. The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed has had many articles discussing such faculty over the last couple of decades. </p>
<p>This even extends to academic conferences where I recalled an article clearly illustrating this denial at the abysmal job market in a humanities field when one long-established Prof reportedly said in an MLA conference that grad students on the job market can go into writing for TV shows/Hollywood films. Ridiculous not only because academic writing is very different from creatively writing for TV/Film, but also because the competition to get such jobs is just as stiff, if not worse than odds of landing a tenure track position in that humanities field. </p>
<p>As for knowing what is a “hot sub-field”, that’s expecting department chairs/faculty advisers even in the grad programs to be clairvoyants. Especially considering what is considered “hot” can change rapidly to the point what was considered a “hot field/subfield” at the beginning of one’s grad program may not be when one’s working on/finishing up his/her dissertation 5-9+ years later. </p>
<p>Several friends in PhD programs at top 8 programs in their respective fields have ended up having their grad studies involuntarily extended because of this issue and having to change topics midstream which rendered most research for the prior topic irrelevant for the new topic they needed to pursue. A few ended up dropping out of such programs for such reasons, especially considering the average time from matriculation to completing a PhD in many fields, including some sciences is hitting 8+ years even without any interruptions from having to change topics because what was “hot” at the start of the program ended up being not by the dissertation research/writing stage. </p>
<p>Letters of recommendation are they key to PhD program admission. They don’t need to be from famous people, just faculty who know him well and can write about his accomplishments and what makes him an asset to the program to which he is applying. I know this is not what you asked, but in my experience on graduate admissions committees, it is really important.</p>
<p>I do question why “Masters or PhD”. I am just not sure what one would do with a Master’s in Philosophy. The application should not admit to any indecision on this question.</p>
<p>I agree that letters are a key (and I should have put this in my list). The letter writers should know the applicant well enough to document his or her unusual or strong abilities and explain what motivates the applicant. If the applicant has a senior paper or thesis, the faculty member who directed that should be one of the writers. But letter writers don’t have to be from the same discipline.</p>
<p>Cobrat, I agree with you, but I think you agree with me as well (not that I’m keeping track).</p>
<p>A kid applying to grad school in the humanities can’t expect a department chair to be clairvoyant. But it would be a huge lapse in due diligence NOT to at least have a meeting (or two) with the current philosophy department chair to discuss this kids future. Don’t show up in an English PhD program expecting to write a dissertation on feminism in the work of Jane Austen and then be shocked to discover that there are at least 50 students completing their PhD’s right now on this very topic (just in the US, god knows what’s in the UK and Canada) and another 300 moving through the pipeline (years 1-6) all hoping to gain a faculty position in either the department of Women’s Studies or the English department.</p>
<p>Not going to happen. And the Chair of the English department at- let’s call it Swarthmore or U Chicago, shall we? will be aware of the popularity of this subject- even if he or she doesn’t know the exact number of the Jane Austen cohort moving through grad school today. And that same chair is also likely to point to his or her own institution- and comment that there is likely to be exactly one open faculty position next year in English, zero in two years, and possibly one more in the next four years as someone retires. And the open faculty position will likely go to someone who is a scholar of contemporary fiction, possibly with an interest in “the immigrant novel” since WW2.</p>
<p>These numbers are more sobering than the “scary statistics” which of course are available to anyone with an internet connection. Sobering because it’s too easy to decide that you can buck the macro numbers, but to look your department chair in the eye when he or she says, “You would not be a candidate here” it’s tough to stay in the place of denial.</p>
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<p>There’s also a danger in pursuing a topic no one else is pursuing if the reasons for that are due to it lacking support due to institutional or funding source politics. </p>
<p>This element of academic/institutional politics within many fields field and in each particular department to account for as well which could explain why someone working on a topic which isn’t worked on by other folks won’t be considered a good prospective PhD topic or worse, facilitate a given individual’s landing a tenure track job after graduation. </p>
<p>I’m worried for a few friends as they insist on working on topics which are unlikely to get them much institutional or outside funding, much less landing a tenure-track position for those very reasons. </p>
<p>What’s he going to do with the degree when he gets it?</p>
<p>I ask for two reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I learned from my son’s experience (he was a graduate student in computer science), that even if a student has a teaching or research assistantship, it may not be enough to cover the cost of living. A student may wipe out his savings, find it necessary to take on an extra part-time job, or even go into debt. This is not a disaster in computer science because there are jobs at the end of the tunnel. But in philosophy, you can’t be sure.</p></li>
<li><p>Consider the opportunity cost. Even if the financial support is adequate, the years that a student spends in graduate school in philosophy are years when he could have been developing a career in something else. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>I think you should look at becoming a professor as almost like being an actor or athlete. A lot of really hard working and qualified people aren’t able to get jobs as professors. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try if you’re prepared for that though, which is sort of what a lot of people seem to imply when they talk about how bad the job market is. And I’m in computer science, and a lot of my friends have had trouble getting jobs in academia. Yes they’re able to get jobs at Google and Microsoft, but they’re not much more prepared for those jobs than when they were undergrads.</p>
<p>I think it’s fine to get a master’s in philosophy if you’re trying to improve your application to PhD programs, and I assume that’s what the OP’s son is doing. I was talking to someone at a high ranked philosophy program though, and he mentioned that he felt as if the faculty in his program sort of neglected the masters students for the PhD students. Apparently there are some masters programs that are better at placing their students in PhD programs, though their own PhD programs aren’t as highly ranked. So I’d try to be careful in choosing which masters programs to apply to. Apparently it’s common to post placement records of masters students in philosophy (I haven’t seen similar lists for other fields).</p>
<p>Warbrain is 100% correct. Academia is a very tough gig, filled with (very smart) PhD’s working as adjuncts (part time, no job security or benefits.) On top of that, philosophy, like many fields in the humanities, is waning, and there are fewer and fewer jobs as universities limit programs and/or combine departments. </p>
<p>To increase his chances of getting a tenure-track job he needs to have a PhD from a very reputable program/university. To increase his chances of getting into a very reputable PhD program/university he should be among the better students in his department, have excellent LORs and perhaps a publication (he should check for publications run by grad students. It’s a step lower than a professional publication, but still shows initiative and accomplishment)</p>
<p>Finally, most big universities will be in gay-friendly areas. That shouldn’t be as much of a consideration for your son as rank. </p>