Update -- Rats and Rats Edition

My progress updates are getting pretty irregular, but there you go; at least I'm still blogging a lot more than I usually do.

I got word back from two schools, UC Davis and U Oregon, and I was accepted to neither. Davis I'm not too surprised about, since UC's in general aren't accepting a lot of PhD students but get quite a few applications, but I am very disappointed that I didn't get into Oregon. It isn't a super exclusive school, and one of my recommendations was from a former student at UO who spoke to my fit with that school in particular. Also it would have been a great program for me, a great city, and still close to all my West Coast friends and family. Ah, well. I am even more glad now that I got the acceptance from Albany first, since I'd have been worrying a lot more if the order were reversed.

The remaining schools are Connecticut - pretty competitive, pretty good program, nice location; Michigan - more competitive, super good program for me, not so keen on the location; and Rochester - I already got into one SUNY school so that might help, they had a weird form that I filled in badly so that might hurt, cool dual-PhD program.

As you may notice from this list, none of these schools are on the West Coast. This means that whatever school I end up going to, I'm going a long way away, which is not cool.

As for whether to go at all, at this point I'm leaning pretty heavily toward "yes". The reason why I've moved to this side of the fence from directly on top of it is because I realized two things:

1) as I had been thinking in the back of my mind without bringing it forward, it is probably a really bad decision financially to get this degree. There is very little work out there teaching philosophy, you'll be surprised to find out, and the opportunity cost of not just continuing to work at my current much-higher-than-a-fellowship salary would take years to make back even if I did get some associate professor gigs for a bit more money than I make now. The smart thing to do would be to not quit, get land, and try to reduce my monthly expenditures as much as possible. If learning a skill is important to me, it should be skills that will always find a ready market even if coming to the US and studying English here becomes much less popular. Such choices might include everything from an RN degree to a Master Brewer's certificate.

2) I want to do it anyway. Learning more about philosophy is something that makes me happy, as is speaking to people about it. Also, to be a bit grandiose, I think that I could actually do some good through writing and teaching with a degree that I can't do now -- I'll get into exactly what I would do some day when I'm a bit tipsy and so don't feel embarrassed to speak of such things. Meantime the point is that I would get a bigger audience than my classes now. Also-also, it would just be nice to have the conversations I'd have for five years.

I'll keep everyone updated as other schools come in. After they do my next move is to set up opportunities to meet professors and see the school(s?) and plan my May vacation.