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“Departmental Visits” for Prospective PhD Students

Brian Leiter

A student recently accepted to graduate programs in philosophy wrote to me inquiring about the "role of post-offer ‘departmental visits’ in the decision making process."  S/he continues:

I, for one, was totally unaware that these visits had become a central part of the procedure; I had no idea that departments were spending money flying prospective students all over America!  My experiences were very mixed, and I personally witnessed a number of other prospectives having similarly weird experiences.  I’m still not confident that I have a handle on how to best ‘use’ these visits when making a decision, and I’m similarly unsure about whether I think they’re altogether a good idea.  (I think that there is a good chance that some departments are just much "better" at staging these visits than are other departments, and I doubt that an ability to stage a nice visit has much to do with the quality of the education a prospective is likely to receive!)  Anyway, I wonder whether you might at some point include some commentary on these visits in the Report, or at least make mention of how central a part of the process they’ve become.  It also might make for a good blog discussion at some point.

Comments are open; please avoid discussion of particular departments, and non-anonymous postings will be very strongly preferred.  Post only once; comments may take several hours, sometimes a whole day, to appear.

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29 responses to ““Departmental Visits” for Prospective PhD Students”

  1. Jacob T. Levy

    One of the most important things prospectives can get out of the visits is the chance to talk with other grad students. In the brochure, every department is the most exciting and collegial, interdisciplinary work is always strongly encouraged, every faculty member can advise twenty different subfields worth of dissertations, and every grad student is fully funded until completion. Talking with current grad students is the most likely source for information about the real morale, advising situation, course availability, funding, time to completion, and so on. They've got reason to be some fraction more optimistic than reality, but as long as the prospective student goes on a couple of different visits, he or she should be able to get some comparative information.

    Purely substantive academic questions are often better dealt with by e-mail, but for learning what a department is like as a place to live for several long and hard years, I think visits are irreplaceable.

    Reply
  2. nick bujak

    I just finished up all my graduate school visits, albeit for English, rather than philosophy. Other than having a lot of fun, I "used" the visits not so much to interview faculty, whose academic reputations in a large part speak for themselves, but to interview the other students. The way I see it, I'll be learning as much from my cohort as I will from the professors, so their quality as thinkers was very important for me.

    Also, I imagine that unhappy graduate students would not be very good at "staging" happiness. If there are a bunch of unhappy graduate students, chances are that there is some structual feature about the program that makes their unhappiness likely. This, presumably, is something that you wouldn't be able to glean from a department's website or overall reputation.

    On a similar note, you want to make sure that you can get along with the other students.

    And, finally, the other graduate students will be able to tell you things about the program, and particularly the faculty, that you won't find anywhere else. You will find out how accessible professors are, who is odious, who is helpful, and what their various expectations are. This latter consideration is very important: if you want to work with a superstar in your field who is never available and not helpful to her students, well, you might want to consider going somewhere else.

    Reply
  3. Eric Schwitzgebel

    I'm inclined to agree with the quoted student (though without much concrete basis, I suppose) that ability to host a good visiting experience probably correlates poorly with quality of education, except to the extent you learn specific, concrete facts (e.g., this advisor's students rarely finish, Wittgenstein is/isn't taken very seriously here). In particular, the amount of time a professor spends meeting with students for recruitment purposes tends to correlate poorly with time dedicated to advising actually enrolled students. Many people will attest that they never got such good attention, felt so respected, or had such good conversations with faculty as when they were being recruited.

    That last point brings out, however, one great reason to go on a grad school tour, independent of its effectiveness in helping you make your decision: It may be one of the most interesting, informative philosophical experiences you'll ever have. I remember feeling, after my grad school tour back in 1991, that I suddenly had a much broader perspective on the field. I met dozens of interesting people, was exposed to a vast range of new ideas, had conversations I still remember. All that is much more important than keeping strictly on top of your current classes, given that an A vs. a B won't at this point have any effect on your career.

    Reply
  4. s. liao

    I think campus visits are best used in a negative role: you should not use it to decide what school to go to, but you should use it to decide what school to rule out.

    As previous commentors have said, the effort of making you feel wanted and showing a good intellectual atmosphere over the course of three days is a bad indicator of the effort people will put in for you for the next five to six years. On the other hand, if a department cannot even make you feel wanted and show a good intellectual atmosphere for three days, that is probably a good indicator of how you will be treated in the next five to six years.

    I think the same holds for conversations with current graduate students. If they are very forthcoming about the negative aspects of the department, then that is probably a bad sign. But the opposite is less clear.

    Reply
  5. Aidan McGlynn

    Nick Bujak writes above:

    "The way I see it, I'll be learning as much from my cohort as I will from the professors, so their quality as thinkers was very important for me."

    I think this point is hard to over-emphasize – the other students on your problem will very likely be the philosophers you interact with most over the next 5 or so years – and the other commentators in this thread have rightly stressed that this can make campus-visits very worthwhile even if one gets a somewhat distorted picture of other features of department life.

    Let me bring up an obvious point, not mentioned yet. You're not just picking a Graduate program, you're also picking the place you're going to live for the next half decade or so of your life. And there are very few remotely adequate substitutes for seeing a place for yourself, and making a decision about whether you'd enjoy living there on that basis.

    Reply
  6. Catherine

    I went on 8 campus visit when I was deciding on a grad school.

    Yes – the visits are mainly useful for getting the low-down from other grad students. For example, what's the situation like for women grad students, and how many women students are actually in residence at the department (easy to fudge on webpage lists)? Does the person you want to work with have a reputation for being awful to work with? How many students have finished, while working with him/her vs. how many of his/her advisees have quit? What's the common knowledge about who's planning to leave soon?

    Grad students can be a lot more candid in person where there's no paper trail.

    I also found it useful to get a sense of the town where the school is. If you've always lived in a city, some places might be too small or isolated. If you've always lived in a place with trees, some cities might be too concrete-jungle. etc. You might think that a city in Texas, for example, would be backward, but then you might visit Austin and have your preconceptions changed!

    On the other hand, visits sometimes yield bad information. I had faculty members lie to me when I was visiting, in a way that influenced my decision. Most egregiously, one said in April "I'm planning to be here for good; I grew up here, my kids are in school here and I'm strongly loyal to this institution", but I found out later that he was already looking to leave (and did leave, six months later).

    I think in general faculty members are quite honest during admissions; I'm just noting that there were a couple of instances where this wasn't so — cases where getting extra information at a campus visit actually misled me.

    In deciding on a grad program, students should be especially aware of the likelihood of faculty departures. My Leiter top-20 department had something like 50% of the faculty change during the 6 years I was there (starting in late 90s), including several of the people I had been drawn by when I was a prospective. Given the conventional wisdom that you should choose a program based on the faculty, this makes it hard to know how to advise prospective students.

    Reply
  7. Brian Leiter

    A 50% turnover is extremely unusual, and while I can guess the department to which Catherine is referring, it's worth noting that no other department has come close to that among the top 20 or so, and even outside the top 20, I can think of only one that may be in that situation.

    Reply
  8. anonymous

    The quoted student writes, "My experiences were very mixed, and I personally witnessed a number of other prospectives having similarly weird experiences. I'm still not confident that I have a handle on how to best 'use' these visits when making a decision, and I'm similarly unsure about whether I think they're altogether a good idea. (I think that there is a good chance that some departments are just much "better" at staging these visits than are other departments, and I doubt that an ability to stage a nice visit has much to do with the quality of the education a prospective is likely to receive!)"

    As the grad student representative who helped arrange the visits for several prospective students to our department this year, I am curious–and concerned–to know what "weird" experiences some prospectives had on their visits. I can say that my job consisted mainly in arranging for the visitors to meet with grad students and faculty, sit in on classes and seminars, see the campus, and, time-allowing, see the town. Students, faculty, and staff certainly aimed to be good hosts, but I would not characterize our hospitality as "staged." The aim is to best facilitate the visitor's receiving an accurate impression of life in the department, both intellectual and (to some extent) social. We try to answer the prospective student's questions about studying in the department, about life at University X and in City X, and about how the prospective's more specific philosophical interests (if she has them) are covered in the department. Although we want to show our strengths to our visitors, I don't know anyone in the department that would withhold relevant information to a prospective student that might incline the prospective away from coming here.

    I also agree with some of the other comments that an impression of the department should be based on the aspects of one's visit that are difficult to stage: the collegial atmosphere among and between students and faculty, the classroom and seminar dynamics, the observed philosophical talent of the faculty and students (as expressed in informal conversation and classroom interaction), and the expressed and observed morale of current students.

    Some places might indeed be better at facilitating prospective visits. (And a lack of hospitality should be a red flag.) But this is at most one necessary condition of a good visit.

    But, again, I am sincerely interested in knowing what weird experiences some prospectives had on their visits.

    Reply
  9. Alex Skiles

    As all of you must know: Virtually all of the top departments in philosophy, in addition to those who receive initial offers, will "wait-list" a much larger number of (by almost any measure) equally capable applicants. What might be less well known is that some of these departments will also invite the top wait-listed applicants to visit. And what might be still less well known is that some of these departments invite wait-listed candidates to visit along with those who receive initial offers.

    Needless to say, the question of the "role of post-offer 'departmental visits' in the decision making process" ought to be answered on behalf of this subset of applicants. A very real concern is that top departments are judging whether a wait-listed applicant merits an offer partially on the basis of facts having to do with their visit (e.g. Did s/he seem genuinely interested? Did the applicant "perform" as well as one might expect from his/her writing sample? Did the applicant bother to show up at all?), rather than on their submitted application. Such a practice is, to put it mildly, dishonest and unfair.

    I'd like to know what others have to say about this practice, in particular about (1) whether it occurs, (2) if so, whether or not it ought to occur, and (3) if it ought to not occur, how departments can do better to assure wait-listed applicants that it doesn't.

    Reply
  10. harry b

    We invite students to visit, and I have to say that we are not that great at staging things. The most valuable information oyou are going to get is i) what the place looks like and ii) how the graduate students feel about it. When I was admissions chair I put all our prospective students in touch with 2 or 3 grad students who, I thought, had their finger on the pulse of the department, and specifically selected them for that and the fact that I thought they would be straightforward with prospective students. I suspect that a visit, as someone above said, is not much use in deciding where to go, but is a lot of use in deciding where not to go. Most places are not so desparate to have you come that they are willing to deceive you much. I find Catherine's story believable but puzzling — why did he care whether you came, if he wasn't going to be there?

    I recently had a chat with a dean at another institution, who expressed to me amazement at how entreprenuerial prospective grad students were, and at the level of competititon there is among institutions to get them. I also find this surprising partly because, I should say, I don't think we (as a profession) are that brilliant at selecting them.

    Reply
  11. Matt

    For various reasons I never visited grad programs when I was applying to them so I don't have first-hand experience. But one thing they would seem to be useful for to me is getting a feel of the facilities. Obviously this should not be _very_ high up on the list of things you choose a department for. But, whether there are sufficient computers available for grad students, whether there are offices and how many people must share them, if you have to pay for printing and photo-copies (especially for classes!), if the library is well stocked, if the department is physically comfortable to be in, if there are places close to or on campus to eat/drink/get coffee, and so on can all make a huge difference in the stress level during one's graduate student career. It's a stressful enough time without having to share an office with 15 other grad students, having no where to hold office hours, and having to grovel to get a photo-copy made or get a piece of letter-head. You can learn something about those things in a visit. Again, these should obviously not be the main things you consider but in close cases they are worth thinking about.

    Reply
  12. Mark Schroeder

    I personally got a lot out of visiting graduate programs, when I was admitted seven years ago, and I think there is a lot to get out of them. The number one reason has already been mentioned: the chance to meet current graduate students. Not just because they can give you the low-down, but because they're going to be the ones you're learning from most over the next 5-7 years, and because you see what it will be like to be in the program, by seeing what it is like for them.

    Number 2 hasn't received any comment: most departments have faculty with high profiles within the department who don't have similarly high profiles in the field, sometimes simply because it takes a long time to develop a high profile in the field – especially one that you are in a position to recognize after a typical undergraduate degree. I wrote my dissertation with an advisor who I didn't know anything about before my campus visit, but suspected afterwards that I might like to work with, and it worked out brilliantly. Similarly, though it may be a bad idea to plan to work primarily with someone early in their career because their letter will not do as well for you down the road, junior and other younger faculty can often be doing the most exciting current work in any given department, and can play an important role in your education.

    Third, although you may not be able to get a sense for how available a faculty member is by how available they are during recruiting week, you certainly can get a sense for how easy they are to talk to. Philosophers run the spectrum from ordinary sociable people to the other kind, and that can affect what learning from them is like, in ways that it's worth being aware of.

    And fourth, but certainly not to be discounted, it is particularly worth while being able to meet other prospective graduate students in your incoming cohort – whether they end up being your colleagues over the coming years, or at another institution. You can learn a lot from seeing how they think about their decision process, and those are important connections to have over the coming years, as those people will be at a similar career stage as you go forward and experiencing similar challenges.

    Reply
  13. John Fischer

    I guess I am more sanguine than some others about what can be learned, specifically about faculty, from a campus visit. Yes, you can learn about faculty publications and academic reputation without meeting with faculty. But there's more to a successful working relationship with a faculty mentor than this! There is the matter of chemistry, which is very important, and I think personal interaction during such a visit is a helpful guide to this difficult-to-articluate phenomenon.

    Granted, first impressions can be misleading, and I suppose some faculty might put more effort into recruiting than mentoring someone succesfully recruited. But I think this can be found out by asking graduate students who work with the professor.

    On balance, I think such visits can be very useful, but surely cannot be the sole ingredient in one's decision.

    Reply
  14. Paul

    I am sort of skeptical of individuals' ability to assess the usefulness of these visits. After all, each person goes through this process only once, and no one has the opportunity to assess the opportunities that were turned down. It is, after all, an empirical question whether people who take advantage of these trips are happier with their choices, or whether there is a particular way of using the trip to arrive at a decision that one will find satisfying over time. There is no data on this issue, nor is there likely to be. The only thing I am aware of that is even remotely analogous is research suggesting that employers who do not conduct interviews are happier with their hires than those who do. The obvious reason for this would be that the interview creates unhelpful noise. (I am not endorsing this research- I am just saying that it exists.) While the decision to attend a particular grad program is crucially different from a generic employer looking for an employee, one could imagine an analogous problem (a student subconsciously chooses a program because of the particularly good cheese dip at some reception, etc.)

    That being said, the visits can be a lot of fun. And maybe they are useful in alleviating some fears or anxiety that one might feel before stepping into an unfamiliar setting in a new role.

    Reply
  15. Catherine

    I find Catherine's story believable but puzzling — why did he care whether you came, if he wasn't going to be there?

    I think he was doing his best for the department, out of a sense of professional responsibility. That's not to say that he cared whether I in particular came – just that he was helping generally with recruitment. As far as I know he didn't dislike the department per se; there were external factors that were causing him to seek a move. The issue came up because I asked him directly about his plans, since I had been warned that faculty moved a lot.

    (Also the name Catherine is fake, to obscure which department I am talking about.)

    I should say that I really enjoyed going to as many campuses as I did. People were extremely helpful and nice, and it was great to get a sense of a range of places. Travel money was not as much of a limitation for me as it might be for others. Also, I did manage to say some spectacularly stupid things (eg "obviously not-P") in front of people I later learned were very famous (eg for holding that "obviously P"). So such visits can be good for a laugh years down the line.

    Reply
  16. Matt

    As mentioned earlier, no single person can have much to say about this particular topic, as we all have relatively limited experience. I visited two departments this year and chose one of them. The visit was a part of the decision, not a small part but by no means the most important factor.

    The opportunity to discuss department culture with the graduate students was far and away the most important feature of my visits. Most departments will tell you that you can finish in 4-5 years, but a conversation with grad students will give you the facts. You'll also get the important opportunity to sit down and talk to people who could be a very important part of your life for those years. If you are deciding between two (or more) schools, availability of faculty and number of potential dissertation advisors are two very important factors in the decision. You can look at publication records all you'd like, but an actual conversation with the faculty may reveal whether or not they're actually interested in those things they were publishing about 5 (or 10, or 20) years ago. You also might found out that a faculty member publishes on topic x (say, medieval philosophy), but holds a huge side interest in topic y (philosophy of film!).

    Reply
  17. Ignacio Prado

    I can only speak for myself, but my visit to Texas was crucial to securing my commitment and comfort level with the department.

    I had, for example, one refreshingly candid conversation with a faculty member that put me at ease about my choice. I attended a seminar that was well-organized and executed.

    I also believe that the kind of facts Aidan McGlynn mentions should be central to one's choice.

    Reply
  18. David Velleman

    Here is a problem with visits, and a piece of advice for visitors.

    When you visit a department, virtually everyone you meet will ask which other programs you are considering. Upon hearing your list, most will be unable to resist the temptation to make remarks about the other programs. Sometimes these remarks will be impressively uniform across the profession. Here at NYU, for example, our prospectives tell us that wherever they go, members of other departments report that NYU faculty pay no attention to graduate students. "Word on the street" is that our faculty are indifferent and inaccessible. (There is lore that circulates about other departments, too, but I'll stick to the case of my own department.)

    Now, this particular piece of lore about NYU is just plain false. I recently moved to NYU after 22 years in a department that is widely recognized as lavishing attention on its graduate students, and I cannot see a shred of difference in this respect between the two programs. (Both are first-rate.) Nevertheless, a prospective student who visited N departments this year will probably have heard on at least N-1 of his visits that graduate students are ignored at NYU — the one exception occurring, of course, if he happened to visit NYU itself.

    When prospectives visit NYU, they find that our students are very happy with the way they are treated by faculty. But this first-hand testimony doesn't necessarily undo the damage of what they have heard elsewhere. They arrive with a negative preconception, and although it is undermined while they are here, it is subsequently reinstated by what they hear afterwards.

    I am not claiming, by the way, that the NYU department is blameless in this regard. We are probably no better than others at resisting the temptation to talk ourselves up by talking others down. But here is my advice to prospective students visiting graduate programs: make clear to your hosts that you are interested in what they have to say about their own program, but not in what they have heard "on the street" about others. If prospective students made clear that they are turned off by "trash talk", the quality of information that they obtain would greatly improve.

    Reply
  19. Rob Rupert

    Catherine and Brian L. refer obliquely to one department with a high turnover rate. Here is a second example. I applied to UIC in 1986, and at the time, extant rating systems placed it in the top 20. In the ten years to follow, the turnover rate at UIC was 50% or higher. The list of faculty members who left while I was enrolled includes Paul Teller, Anil Gupta, Michael Friedman, Mark Wilson, Shelly Kagan, Graciela De Pierris, Edwin Curley, Carolyn McMullen, Gerald Dworkin, and Richard Kraut (although Richard’s departure might have come a bit later). Additionally, Penelope Maddy and Irving Thalberg were listed as faculty members on the material I was sent in 1986, but were gone when I arrived in the fall of 1987. Thalberg passed away, so of course, I am not criticizing him — or anyone else on the list, for that matter. This is simply the way the profession works. (It should be noted that I took nine years to finish, which increases the window I’m using to calculate UIC’s turnover rate. Then again, it’s not so unusual for students to take a long time to finish.)

    Point is, there can be high turnover rates, and there are signs to look for on your visit. If a rostered faculty member is visiting elsewhere, inquire further into the matter. This was a prelude to departure in some of the cases at UIC. Here are some other questions you might ask, directly or indirectly, answers to all of which have some bearing on the likelihood of faculty moves: Is the administration supportive? Is the university (or the state, if it’s a public school) facing fiscal problems? Are faculty members happy and stable? Is the person you want to work with going through a divorce? Does the faculty member you want to work with at a big-city department have children approaching school age (and whose parent might want to move them to a college town)? I know this is getting down to the nitty gritty, but the more information you can get, the better.

    Remember, though, you can always move. Under some circumstances, transferring is the best thing to do. One of my fellow first-years at UIC, Tim O’Connor, transferred, and doing so worked out very well for him.

    Reply
  20. Christy Mag Uidhir

    What are the legal issues with regard to departments rescinding offers to prospective students? To be sure, campus visits may be horrific for prospectives, but I can also imagine that visits could prove horrific for departments as well.

    Reply
  21. harry b

    A quick, and obvious, amendment to David Velleman's comment – while you should ignore bad things you hear at one department about another, you might pay closer attention to good things. When I have hosted students I have seen my job as helping them to make the best decision for them – and while I have never encouraged someone to go elsewhere, I have sometimes given them useful and positive information about elsewhere.

    Reply
  22. Ignacio Prado

    To David Velleman's point:

    "Nevertheless, a prospective student who visited N departments this year will probably have heard on at least N-1 of his visits that graduate students are ignored at NYU –"

    Having heard this rumor and knowing several NYU grad students, I can confirm that the rumors of the rumor are true and, as far as I can tell, the rumor is false!

    Sincerely,

    Ignacio Prado

    Reply
  23. Patricia B.

    Alex asks whether departments who invite wait-listed students are surreptiously interviewing them. I don't have an answer to that, but I wouldn't be surprised. In my own case, I have pretty good evidence that when I was invited to campus as an accepted-but-not-funded candidate, I was judged as to 1) whether I was worthy of funding and 2) assuming a positive answer to 1, how much funding would it take to get me to come (i.e., how much wooing did I need)? I passed #1, but apparently came across as too eager — and an available fellowship was awarded to NO ONE that year. Instead, I received a TAship.

    I will say, though, that in other respects my visit was very worthwhile. One campus I went to the students were extremely stressed out and unhappy with various aspects of their program. At the school I went to, the students in my area of interest were a lot happier, and spoke very highly of their advisors — I later came to agree with their assessment.

    So, my take would be that visits are very worthwhile, but that not-yet-funded or wait-listed candidates should be wary about visiting, or on their guard if they do.

    Reply
  24. Ignacio Prado

    Regarding this quotation from Catherine:

    "I think he was doing his best for the department, out of a sense of professional responsibility. That's not to say that he cared whether I in particular came – just that he was helping generally with recruitment. As far as I know he didn't dislike the department per se; there were external factors that were causing him to seek a move. The issue came up because I asked him directly about his plans, since I had been warned that faculty moved a lot."

    I should add that this attitude seems to me widespread: that students are better served by noble lies than simple, transparent information (especially when the information is, as in this case, non-evaluative). I find that the attitude is strangely paternalistic, tribal, and analogous to the silly things that go on in major college sports recruiting, but perhaps there can a new discussion devoted to this topic.

    Reply
  25. bill wringe

    A very real concern is that top departments are judging whether a wait-listed applicant merits an offer partially on the basis of facts having to do with their visit (e.g. Did s/he seem genuinely interested? Did the applicant "perform" as well as one might expect from his/her writing sample? Did the applicant bother to show up at all?), rather than on their submitted application. Such a practice is, to put it mildly, dishonest and unfair.

    Why exactly is this either 'dishonest' or 'unfair'?

    You could, I suppose, say that it was dishonest if departments were claiming that the only thing they considered were submitted application materials. I'd certainly hope that any department that was treating a campus visit as a kind of extended interview was non-deceptive about that fact. Is there any evidence (as opposed to 'concern') that that's not the case? If so, I'd think that a 'name and shame' response was appropriate.

    But if the department is transparent about what they are doing where's the problem? Universities are often making an investment of time and money in student's education: shouldn't they be allowed to assess those who they are going to be making that investment in on a face-to-face basis?

    Or is the suggestion that students who have been waitlisted are being told, falsely, that they have been or will be offered a place. If so, that's a genuine shocker, and it would be a service to all those of us who are ever asked for advice by students on graduate studies to know where those places are. But again, what's the evidence that this is happening?

    Of course, there's one thing we need to be clear about.Students are differently resourced, and offering a place to one student rather than another because the first could afford to come for a campus visit while the second could not (or the financial commitment involved would be much greater for one student than another) would be unfair.

    So if one criterion that's being used is 'was the student interested enough to come for a visit.' But again, what's the evidence that this is being used as a criterion? Surely most people in the profession are smart enough to see that as well as being unfair, using this sort of criterion won't get them the best students either.

    Or aren't we? (and if so, what happens to us in grad school or our years in the profession to blind us to this, given that applicants to grad school seem to be acutely aware of how problematic this would be, to judge from the claims about 'serious concerns'). And again, what's the evidence that we aren't?

    And notice that I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be such evidence – there's plenty of evidence that professional philosophers do and believe other dumb things. And the evidence could be of various sorts.

    But as David Velleman's post illustrates, rumors of all sorts can fly around without any sort of evidential basis. Worse still, people making major decisions can give more credence to them more credence than they deserve.

    Reply
  26. Barry Lam

    Just to put the "high turn-over rate" issue together with the issue that David Velleman brings up…

    My experience is that the rumors about various programs that are spread on prospective visits, and also spread by faculty advisors to undergraduates, arise from a reliance on outdated anecdotal evidence. Especially when one's own department has some interested in the truth of disparaging claims about other departments, it is easy for recruiters to give advice about graduate programs on the basis of outdated anecdotes than to keep up with changes in the graduate programs and faculty at the various departments, especially considering high turn-over issues as well as changes and improvements in graduate programs and graduate education among the newer PhD philosophy programs. Similar considerations hold for faculty advisors, only because we do not spend our days keeping up with developments in graduate programs and faculty.

    In this sense, I think that PGR and campus visits to a particular program should actually be given a lot more weight than the advice of faculty advisors, which is more susceptible to out-dated and anecdotal information. Students will have to be wise enough to discard any disparaging comments about other programs as self-interested babble.

    Reply
  27. Catherine

    I should note that one of the things that surprised me most during my visits was that faculty were generally *not* willing to disparage other departments. Only a very few people said anything negative at all, and it was often things like "I understand they've had some funding trouble for senior students, that's something you should ask about when you visit" (ie, a recommendation of what to look into), or "probably we would be a better fit for you than department X, because we have three people in your area and they have only one" (ie, empirical claims). Much more frequent was the response "Oh, those are good choices. I visited department X a few years ago and it struck me as being very collegial. And what a nice town it's in." or whatever. This impressed me hugely; when a department was unwilling to badmouth others, it left a *very* positive impression about that department.

    Reply
  28. AnonataUC

    Yearly, we had students visit our program. I think one wants to be very careful what one believes about a program from a visit. I witnessed grad. students lying about professors and their habits. One in particular was notorious for not returning work, missing office hours and meetings, and being vindictive. This faculty member was praised by numerous students who were largely in fear of potential retaliation from the faculty member.

    Some of us were not afraid to mention our experiences (good and bad), but we were clearly in the minority. It seems to me that some students feel compelled to lie because ultimately it says something about her and what might be perceived to be a bad school choice on her part.

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  29. David Ebrey

    I found that you can learn a lot from how the people in a department sell their department. It helps you learn what the department's values are.

    Do they boast being able to finish in five years or do they boast giving you time to develop a more mature project?

    Do they emphasize how you can focus quickly on your dissertation or do they emphasize how you get a chance to find what really interests you?

    How much do the students and faculty associate themselves closely with a particular area? In some places the ethicists seem very distinct from the non-ethicists; similarly, in some places historians of philosophy are kept quite distinct from those doing contemporary philosophy. Do you want a place where boundaries are more free-flowing or do you want to be in a place where the ethicists stick to themselves?

    I've found that these sort of values often are easiest to figure out in person.

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