Applying for Ph.d. programs

Applying To Ph.D. and M.A. Programs in Philosophy
An informal overview and guide

These notes were developed over the years for the annual "Applying to a PhD program" session for Simon Fraser University Philosophy MA students. This offers a perspective on how to prioritize your time and energy, and think in general terms about the process of applying to do graduate work in Philosophy. Because the notes were intended for MA students, they are more focused on PhD applications. There is a section specific to MA applications.
Update: it has become more complicated for many potential applicants to weigh decisions about US-based PhD programs, both in terms of potential personal safety along a variety of parameters, and for reliability of funding offers over the time period of the PhD. There is no general answer to this issue. I will add updates here, in anonymized form, as I hear more details from students in different parts of the country, from different countries, and with different demographic features (queer, visible minority, etc) in the upcoming months. In the 2024-2025 application cycle, it became clear that there was not any good long-term way to plan, given that things can change, for the worse or for the better, in mere weeks. This means, doing what you can with the current information you have, being prepared to update plans in light of new info if need be, and also, accepting that there is no one who can genuinely tell you what the situation will be like in e.g. a year or five. So the notes below don't explicitly address these new features of the PhD application landscape.

Considerations: Is a Ph.D. in philosophy right for you? Some considerations

Substantial financial outlay: application fees, paying for GREs, and visiting potential schools
Job placement considerations: it is great to get a single job offer, but there is pretty much no control over where exactly that job is. A lot of highly contingent factors will affect your eventual job placement. It is not pure luck; but there is always chance involved in e.g. which schools are hiring that year, in what areas they are hiring.
Geographic considerations: how important to you is it that you get to live in certain geographical areas, political orientations, etc.
Two body problems: getting one job is hard enough. Getting two people a job in the same geographic area is notably excruciating. Remember the selection effect: even if you have interacted with couples in Philosophy departments who have successfully solved this problem, what you are not seeing is all the couples who did not solve it, who live apart from one another, who have one person who left academia, who split up, etc.
What your eventual job actually consists of: not like grad school. Getting a job as faculty involves a lot more teaching, and a lot more administration. It is not just getting to do your own research all (or even most, or even some) of the time.
What grad school is like: this is now a kind of professional job. You will need to transition to thinking of yourself, and behaving, as a responsible professional that is part of a (very weird) team. This is not like going to more undergrad classes and writing more undergrad papers.
Ph.D. programs usually involve 3 courses plus TAing, or 4 courses when not TAing, per term, without use of extensions to complete term papers. The pace is much higher/more intense than undergraduate degrees usually are, or than the SFU MA program. It is pretty all consuming - you might have some time for some kinds of hobbies on the side, but expect that this will be your central occupation during this time.
Other personal factors: there are long periods between positive reinforcement incidents; there are major personal differences in how much criticism one wants to or is willing to undergo.
Be very honest with yourself about what your reasons are. Are you not sure what to do with yourself, have positive memories of your philosophy courses, and want more of that? Be aware that this may not be what grad school in philosophy provides, and you may just be kicking the decision down the road: you still may have to confront the question of what to do, but, several possibly excruciating years later.
[Those with an undergraduate degree] If you are unsure about academic philosophy as a path, consider an MA, especially at an MA-only program (so, not a program with both MA, an PhD, where they may think of their MA program as a selection method for their own PhD program, and where they may not have experience or interest in helping you apply to other PhD programs)
Especially for SFU MA students: while you are in graduate school, consider: how much do you love teaching? How does TAing work for you? Do you have lots of ideas about how to set up this course even better? Or do you feel like it is a drain, and you sort of resent your students for taking up your time? Most of what you do as a faculty member, realistically, is teach. Many people dramatically overestimate how much of their time will be spent doing philosophical research (e.g. reading and writing). Check in with yourself about how much your teaching gives your energy after a good session, versus costing you energy. It is also ok to figure out that professional academia is not for you and exit gracefully with an MA. This is generally much more humane and self-esteem-preserving than passing a prospectus and discovering you just can't or won't make yourself write a dissertation, or managing the dissertation and then not finding a job, or finding a job you don't especially enjoy and getting ground down by it, etc
If possible, go to at least one major conference. Does this seem like fun, like you really wish you also had friends you'd met at other conferences that you could now talk philosophy with here? When you go to sessions on topics other than your main interests, do you still finding them (at least some) intellectually stimulating?
Background: many professional philosophers come from families where other members were already involved in academia in some fashion. It can be a fantastic job for some who have no family background in that whatsoever. But also, be aware that it can be harder to imagine what it would actually be like, to have this as a job, if you haven't had family who did it. Consider finding a professor with a similar or comparable socioeconomic and cultural or geographic background, and asking some detailed questions. Getting advice from someone who comes from a very different background than you can end up with advice that, unbeknownst to them, does not actually apply well to you. Having already worked other kinds of jobs outside of academia is, often enough, quite a boon when you are in grad school or go on the job market, because you are much more likely to have a clear sense of what jobs involve (sometimes people end up as professors having never held any job outside of academia). I think this makes you much more likely to appreciate what is awesome about being a professor, as a job, because you have a clearer sense of perspective/comparison.
For example: often-encountered advice involves formulations like, if you can do something else, then you should do something else. This is given in the spirit of trying to steer away not-sufficiently-serious students from thinking that a job in philosophy is a path of least resistance. In practice, though, this advice hits prospective applicants very differently coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Every person in philosophy can, realistically, do something else. No one is incapable of doing anything else. This advice is more like unintentionally coded to upper 20% SES backgrounds: if you can do something else (that satisfies your family and is sufficiently socially respectable among your SES peers), like law school or a medical degree etc., then do that, rather than becoming a professor. If not, become (unspoken: by settling) a professor. But this sounds different when, for example, your comparison job options things like waiting tables, or being a high school teacher, or a tradesperson, etc. Then you know you can do other things, because you likely already have. So be careful about the 'can' in 'if you can do something else, then do' if you have a well developed sense of what, actually, you are capable of doing. You may yet end up doing well in philosophy and enjoying this job, and may in fact be much more aware than others from different SES backgrounds of how being a professor is actually a really great gig (if you can get it)
Here is some other advice instead. If you get to the end of the PhD, and do not end up getting a job in philosophy, would it still seem like a worthwhile thing to have done? If you don't get that job as a professor, what is your back-up plan? It may be that you want to do it genuinely for its own sake, not because you want to achieve some SES-situated position of social acceptability and don't have other ideas. In that case, a PhD may be great. If you have a back-up plan now, what you would do if you don't do a PhD, that back-up may still be there when you finish a PhD. If that is the case, and you are willing the play the minor leagues even if you don't get drafted for the major league, you may really get a lot out of a PhD, and finding a program with the right fit for you personally (not just some abstract notion of prestige) will be a central focus.
One final note that comes up every year. How you think and feel about all this in October or November may differ, sometimes extremely, from how you feel about it in April when you have an offer, some offers, no offers, in hand for a PhD place. It is very hard to be the kind of honest with yourself that involves digging out whether you are doing this as a form of validation, especially in terms of which schools you choose to apply to. If schools are on your list because you would like them to be places that say yes to you, then 1) chances are they may be a poor fit for you personally, 2) you're probably wasting that application fee, because things like fit do make a difference to acceptances, and 3) this will be hard to see about yourself in April when you realize that you did not get a yes to any school, or to a school that fits. It is both hard but also very important to consider: if you are applying for top ranked programs, with the idea that if you don't get into those, you would rather not go, consider that your self in April might have a very different view. Future-you might really have preferred to have some option, even if not top ones, and be left with none because of current-you deciding not include more schools. If you are looking for validation of your worth as a philosopher by applying with the hopes of getting good acceptances, then, this is not actually a good reason to go to a PhD in philosophy.

PhD. Versus MA programs

MA-only programs usually help students prepare more for applying to Ph.D. programs.
Some/many, though not all, MA programs at places with Ph.D. programs use their MA as a testing ground for who to accept into the Ph.D. program. Be aware that these can be difficult to toxic environments in which to work. You may feel, and may rightly feel, like you are being put in competition with your fellow cohort members. You may feel like this is the only program you could attend for a Ph.D., because that is the tacit assumption of faculty around you, and then you will not be in a good position to apply effectively to other programs. You may not be in a good epistemic position to decide if continuing in academic philosophy is a good fit for you.
If you are coming from a background without a full major in philosophy, an MA can be a good way to get up to speed across a range of subfields in philosophy.
If you have majored in Philosophy at SFU, and done A-level work, and especially if you have completed the Honours program, you will likely find MA programs a step backwards. Good SFU philosophy majors who go to Ph.D. programs consistently report that they are at or ahead of cohort peers who have completed MAs, in terms of background education in philosophy.

Elements of an application: Overview of the 3 main elements, plus other materials

Writing sample is a focused piece of your best philosophical work, making an original point (not just exegesis of another author) that is free-standing and shows that you know how to effectively construct the trajectory of an argument
Personal Statement or Statement of Intent: this is a 1-2 page focused statement on you as an applicant. Not actually personal-personal, it is more of a "my professional trajectory so far and how it will continue in your program."
Letters of recommendation
These three are part of every application. The writing sample is far and away the most important. Then, letters of recommendation (where what matters most is detail), then, personal statements.
There are also CVs, transcripts, and often GRE scores, plus sometimes (optional) teaching evals or info

Personal Statements and Research Statements

This is North America specific. UK PhD programs want a research statement that is more like a dissertation prospectus.
It is something like: here is the trajectory that got you here, in terms of what you studied, why you moved from field A to field B, what your time in the SFU MA has highlighted about your strengths as a member of a philosophical community.
Not really, what can they do for you? Leave out that paragraph at the end. They assume you find their program a good fit, because you paid to apply. Instead, consider: what can you do for them? This is less about why the program is what you are looking for, and more about what you bring to their program. What are your distinctive features as a philosopher at this level, which you bring to a community of other philosophers? Admissions committees are crafting a cohort of new students, with an eye towards getting people who contribute to that community. Why should you be in that carefully crafted cohort? What will you add to it? This is more helpful for the admissions committee and also a helpful reflective exercise on your self as a philosopher.
Show that you have reflected on yourself as a graduate student, no longer an undergrad and not yet faculty, and what your strengths are as a member of a philosophical community. There are far fewer signposts or "you must do this" requirements in grad school compared to an undergrad program. You are expected to do things because it is a good idea to do them, not because someone told you that you had to. What intrinsically motivates you as a philosopher?
Situate, explain, if there are gaps, etc, in your record. Keep it brief, not TMI. No need to apologize – this is your chance to simply note that there is something they may notice, give a short bit of info about the background, and then give them reason to think that whatever was an issue in the past is no longer an issue. Lots of people have mental health issues as undergrads, for example. You can note it briefly: as you see on my transcript, I struggled in Year X as an undergrad. However, with a better treatment plan, you can see how my grades went back up and stabilized there. Etc.
Not an already-written dissertation description. Too much detail on a specific project makes it into a review of that project, not an assessment of you as an addition to their philosophical community. Leave open that you understand that your interests as a scholar are likely to shift and/or clarify in graduate school. It is not a place to demonstrate that you can write in an informed way about a particular topic. Leave that for the writing sample.
Not a list of your AOS/AOC interests. These blend together when committee members read a stack of 100 applications. Your current area interests are not enough for your file to stand out from the pile. This reveals nothing about you as a candidate beyond the broadest of areas. So many statements are mostly lists of topics applicants are interested in. This tells someone very little about you; it mostly reflects which courses you happen to have already had, or are currently taking.
This statement is about you. Not about your profs. No need to list courses you have taken and what you wrote on, or found interesting. That makes your statement more about the profs you had, and what they happened to put on a syllabus; it is not helpful for understanding you as a student.
This is not a proposal to work with some one person or even several people. Unless you have specifically and repeatedly engaged with a faculty member in that department, who has expressed interest in having you come work there, [see update below, also] it is best to not mention specific individuals. They might have gotten a job offer and be leaving; they might not usually work with grad students and their colleagues know this; they might be overloaded with supervisees; they might be trying to move to a new subfield and not want to supervise on that topic anymore. Naming someone makes it sound to the admissions committee as if working with So-And-So is why you want to go there, such that if you can't they should just reject you. Unless this is what you genuinely want to communicate, leave it out.
[An update on the previous bullet point: there are some programs, which I think are still in the minority, where students are expected to note explicitly a supervisor and then the admissions committee argues over which applicants to which supervisors get admitted. My thoughts after a long time working on admitting grad students, then helping place grad students: Programs which do this, you are harming your own cohorts and grad community. This is a deeply sub-optimal way of doing admissions in philosophy and you should consider other approaches. For applicants: there is no reliable way to tell which programs expect you to note a supervisor, and which don't. In some places it seems to vary year by year depending on who is on the admissions committee. You have no control over this; it is an extraneous stochastically noisy part of this process. My advice still remains that in general, it is better to note that you want to work in certain broader areas, like early modern philosophy or philosophy of science or formal epistemology, and leave it to the committee for the rest. If applicants really want to try putting down some names, don't go for the biggest, most famous, most senior person. Who was hired in the last 5-6 years and is probably under0utilized as a supervisor, and may have more time and energy for you? Figure that out from the dept webpage]
Schools are usually good in specific areas, such that even if a faculty member working there leaves, they will hire someone else working in that area, because it is a priority for them. Try to highlight those areas in your statement. One good tip for figuring out where a department wants to be heading is to see who they have hired recently, in the last five years. That shows where they have put their future research priorities.
Assess your areas in a way that is not so specific it looks like you only want to go there if one particular person will work with you, or so broad that any school counts. Neither overfocused, nor underfocused (yes, it’s hard).
It is safe to say that pretty much no one gets into grad school because of a stellar statement of intent. But people do get cut because of their statement. An effective statement gets your application past the first cut. Applications get cut because the applicants sound like they are not a fit with the program, the program has too many grads already in the declared areas, the named philosophers are too busy to take you on, or you display an unrealistic idea of what grad school and academia involve.
If you mention an interest in something unusual, and say that you would like to continue doing it, you might think this is a "hey that would be nice but no big deal" thing. To an admissions committees, on the other hand, it looks like you are saying this is what you are looking for, and because they do not have that niche area, you then look like a poor fit for their program. Only mention these more niche interests if they are genuinely a make-or-break for you for a program. For example, an interest in Chinese philosophy, or Indian philosophy, or early medieval philosophy, Islamic philosophy, philosophy of medicine, etc. If you note, in your statement, that you have interests in this, it is now something you thought so worth mentioning as an interest that it looks like a central part of your philosophical identity. You may have lots of interests, but don't have to mention all of them; this is not the venue for it. If you do want to mention it, but also would go to an otherwise good PhD program that lacked anyone working in it, phrase is carefully. You have already developed a small strength in this area, perhaps, and will bring that to their program (rather than essentially asking the program to help you develop in that area, for which they have no faculty).
Best way forward: write a full draft early. Get something out there, even if you cringe through the whole thing. Expect your first draft to be awful. It only needs to exist. Then, get some feedback on it, and make it somewhat better. Then do that again. Then again. It is not long; aim for 4-6 iterations of improvement from that original awkward draft.
Finally, remember that admissions is a lot of work for committee members. Don't hide the awesomest parts of your background by only mentioning it in the CV, or by underdescribing it because you don't want to brag. This isn't bragging: this is effectively communicating something about yourself that they do in fact want to know. Don't make it like giving them a quiz on yourself: they don't want to have to put the CV next to this for cross comparison purposes. Take the big items on the CV and helpfully reinforce them nby also noting them here. This helps: they can think, aha! I do remember that CV, this is that candidate. Don't make them work harder - they will not be able to memorize all your details as they read your materials along with dozens to hundreds of other applications.

Writing sample: This is the single most important part of your application

Your best philosophical work. You don't have to love it the most, nor does it have to be the paper that solves All the Problems in this area. It has to be full of some genuine argumentation, not just nit-picking, and show that you know how to handle literature, and offer a meaningful step forward in a discussion. Responding to a response to a criticism is borderline: that can be too small of an original contribution, because sometimes the original criticism wasn’t especially good.
Not merely exegetical: should involve an original point.
There is some flexibility about the formatting requirements. For instance: 1.5 instead of double spacing generally looks better, even if they ask for double spacing. Make it easy for older faculty to read it, which means not too-small font (nothing smaller than 12 point) nor too-tight lines (nothing smaller than 1.5), nor too-spread out so lots of page flipping is required. Put your last name in the header or footer so no one has to flip to the front to remember whose paper they are reading. Put an abstract that actually lays out the key argument moves and the original conclusion up front.
Polish the abstract and introduction: make that prose sparkle, with every word saying exactly what it should, and pulling its weight.
If someone only read the first 2-3 pages, would they get your argument structure and conclusion? That might be all you get before someone who doesn't work in this area stops reading. And it might be enough! if you have done a good job in constructing a tight argument that you can provide in condensed form with highly polished prose where every word makes a difference.
If you find yourself wanting to do more to make your application more competitive, go for this first. Time spent on this will always go farther than time spent polishing other elements (like CV or personal statement or studying for the GRE).
It is best if it is in one of the broad areas in which you want to work, even if not in the narrower area(s). If your best work is in an area that you have no interest in pursuing, you should work on something else as a writing sample. Make something else your best philosophical work. This is your one chance to really convince them that you can do next-level work in the areas you are interested in. It is very hard (though, not impossible) to convince a committee of this when you send in a writing sample in a different subfield. This may be not your most-central area of interest, but it should at least be in the ballpark; there should be a reason that this is the writing sample you are sending to this program. For example: if you want to work in social epistemology, it can be somewhere in epistemology, or even metaphysics, or phil of language, etc. But it is harder if it is a history of 17th century science paper, to adjudicate whether you could also write well in epistemology. make it easier on them, not harder.

Reference letters

At least 3, and 3 is also a good number (more is often worse). Don't ask for more unless there are clear background reasons, such as a undergrad prof you continue to actively be in touch with.
Details matter in these. That is most of what goes into a letter. Find people who have lots of details about you: more courses taken, if you TAd for them, did an RAship, etc.
Asking a prof you met at a colloquium or conference might help, but only if they actually have detailed, specific things to say about your philosophical skills and knowledge. If they can only give a description of having met you once at a conference, and you seemed nice enough and asked a good question, then this weighs your application down, even if they are quite famous. These letters are not just about the names, they are about the details that the writer can provide regarding you as a possible graduate student. They may also be writing for a number of other applicants, and programs often compare letters from the same person, to see who So-and-So is most excited about. If you barely know this person, they simply are not in a decent position to put in specifics. More details, from people who know you as a student better, make for stronger letters than short letters from big names who don't really know you.
Once a letter is written, it is pretty easy to update. If you apply one year and end up applying again, don’t feel bad asking for an updated letter [also see section on Helping Letter Writers]. It can be very helpful to be quite clear on what you are hoping for in terms of updating. We can just update the date on the top; or we can add a couple sentences noting what you have been doing since graduating, etc; or you might want something more in-depth. Giving guidance to letter writers on this issue is very helpful.
It is ok if one of these is from outside of academia. If you have been working somewhere for a couple years since graduating, someone who knows you well at work can often write a great letter. Give them quite specific guidance on what you are looking for: what are the skills you have, which can port over into academia? Organization skills, how you do with tight timelines, clarity in writing even for short items, ability to be self-directed, etc. Generally you need at least one academic reference, preferably two, minimum.
It is good to have letters from your most recent educational stop. So if you have an MA, at least one person from that school should write. For MA [2 year programs] applicants to PhD programs, ideally all three should come from the MA program. If you have actually kept in discussion-contact with a prof you had as an undergrad, one could come from them.

Formatting actually matters. This gets dismissed by many applicants as superficial. But it actually conveys information and helps people find that information. Make it easy to visually scan and find section breaks. Make it easy to see how many items are in a section, maybe with bullets; put more spaces between bullet items than between multiple lines for the same bullet.
Imagine a person like me, squinty and dry eyed after looking through a couple dozen of these, trying to figure out what the important items on there are, but missing something important because it looked like part of the previous bullet point. Be compassionate to this poor dry eyed reader: make the formatting show them where the important parts are, guide them through it, guide them to the big-ticket items you are most proud of.
There are many good examples online. Take major categories from those, but remember that you are not a job candidate, and should not have the content of a job candidate. You should have a lot less! No one expects publications.
State research interests, but remember that an AOS is loosely thought of as something in which you have published at least one paper and/or are qualified to teach independently at the upper division undergrad level. It is not equivalent to research area interests. Research interests are more than sufficient for an application to a PhD program. If you put them here, no need to go over them at any length in personal/research statement.
Having undergrad journal publications, and even grad school journal publications, is not necessary, and may not help (at all). Remember that your writing sample is what matters; they have no expectation that you have already published, and low quality publications may sometimes hurt.
Add a sentence or two for items that others may not fully know immediately. Brief descriptions for most items will really help. For an RAship, what you did: what were the tasks? For a fellowship, the amount and/or what it was for.
Educational History, including degree name, major, any honours.
If you have an MA, list supervisor and name of professional paper project. If it is different from your writing sample, you can put the abstract there as well.
Any awards, including fellowship awards, only if these were semi-competitive. For travel funding at SFU, for example, or the SGES, everyone gets it, so it does not count as an award.
List of courses TAd, including a brief description of duties and a one or two sentence overview of the course itself (no one will know what Phil100 is). The term “TA” refers in many other schools to someone who merely grades papers, so make it clear that you ran independent tutorials and held office hours.
Any presentations you gave, including title of presentation, conference or organization, dates, and city (work in progress talks don't count).
For ‘nontraditional’ students, which means anyone who has taken a year or more between undergrad and grad work, this is a great place to situate that time. You can add some section or info about what you did. This does not have to just summarize the job(s) you held: it can slice out just what is of interest/use to a PhD program, in terms of skills that would be relevant in academia. It can also be just a short neutral note: on parental leave, for example.

GRE scores, TOEFL or IELTS

Book a test-taking slot long in advance: they fill up [these now vary a lot by location; some countries still require you to go to a testing location, some don't]
They matter, in that you need at least a certain minimum score, for schools that evaluate them. This avoids getting cut: you don’t get in based on GRE score.
Many universities continue to require them, even when the departments themselves don’t use the scores. A department may not have the leverage to tell the university that they do not want these scores. So, until departments all generally get together and make them optional, you may just have to do this but that does not mean the department itself takes this to be a notable part of your application.
Point of diminishing returns: it may be your application gets more benefit from increased time on the writing sample, rather than an extra GRE study (Study just as much as you need to, but not more)
When the application form asks what other schools to which you are applying: there are different views on this question. You never have to disclose; you can choose to do so. [I think it is unnecessary, intrusive, and often part of the default University application portal not specific to the department, so, no need to respond]
For many students, even though you have been in Canada for several years, you still must submit a TOEFL or IELTS test score. I recommend doing the test again, rather than re-using the one you used to apply to SFU. Your scores will improve, and many US institutions are especially concerned about this. The Duolingo tests do not count as an acceptable substitute at this time.

Personal Logistics

This process can be time consuming. Keep a spreadsheet so you don’t miss dates.
Start the online applications early – they can take a very long time to complete. It is a marathon not a sprint (or: you do better when you aren’t having to sprint!)
Prepare long in advance for a time when you might be able to visit schools. Comparing even your top two schools is a very valuable investment of time and money in your own future.
Have a pleasant distracting hobby! So you can avoid spending time on places like Grad Cafe etc. They will suck out your soul, and not improve your success.
Side note: avoid places like Grad Cafe etc. like the plague. When I was grad chairing, I encountered posts that were explicitly made up, and that I knew were made up because they involved SFU. Once someone posted that the SFU first round offers had gone out. But I was the sender, and had not sent a single one. Do not let other anonymous posters give you that kick in the gut feeling. Just avoid.
Plan to apply once. Avoid 'trying it out' one year, with a few applications or without a fully ready package, with the idea that if it is not successful, you will just re-apply again the next year. The process is extremely time-consuming and very energy depleting, and sometimes schools at which you did not succeed do in fact remember your name (especially if you made it onto the waitlist). You will harm your chances in application round 2 by having submitted a less-than-your-best portfolio in application round 1. [once you are in PhD program, this advice applies even more so to the job market. Do not do a 'test run' where you just apply to a couple of jobs. Wait till you are fully ready, and then do it properly. Applying to any jobs requires more time and energy than actually doing your dissertation. Spend that time improving your dissertation, instead of putting that on the back burner to put together a less-impressive job application. Going on the market a little is like saying you are going to swim in the ocean, but just a bit. You are just as wet as if you swam longer.]
If you apply to Ph.D. programs based primarily on geographical considerations (such as, applying to UBC because you want to stay in the lower Mainland), recognize that this may be you subconsciously taking a first step out of academic employment. This is not necessarily bad! It may be how you come to recognize that you have different priorities than what it would take to become an employed academic philosopher, such as being willing to relocate anywhere. If this is a priority for you, don't feel bad about it; see it for what it is, a clarification of your valid priorities. Getting a Ph.D. can still be a rewarding endeavor, and develop great skills that port to other lines of work, even if you do not want to do the full academic job market. Alt-ac is a term that lumps together a vast number of really amazing job and life opportunities.

Choosing a list of schools

For a moderate chance of success, expect to apply to 15-20 schools. More is better.
If you only apply to 5-6, understand that this is itself a risky manuever.
Taking Philosophical Gourmet with many grains of salt. Some years ago, there was a mass exodus of reviewers from this because of concerns with its orientation and the way it was running the numbers. The quality of the rankings varies a great deal.
Apparently rank-ordered lists cover over big differences and invent difference where none really exists. The difference between a school in the teens and in the twenties is almost non-existent, for the purposes of these scores. Think in terms of clusters, and consider the specialty rankings carefully.
The Gourmet ranks research reputation of individual faculty members. This is an entirely different metric than “how good are they at cultivating new scholars.” Occasionally it is inversely correlated – some faculty have so many publications precisely because they do not spend time mentoring junior people. The Gourmet report is not an effective measure of Ph.D. education opportunities. Research profile makes very little difference to your overall experience there.
It does matter to have good colleagues in your program: fellow graduate students are a huge part of your Ph.D. education, and many of your most important developments as a philosopher will occur with, and because of, fellow grad students. So on a visit, be sure to also see what the atmosphere is like, and how well it seems like you will be challenged and recognized in that program with the other grad students.
Atmosphere matters; fit with professors and style of graduate education matters
You may turn out to not fit with a prof you think would be perfect to study with. They may end up leaving the program. Think in terms of programs not people (unless you have concrete personal experience with someone)
You may end up having the best philosophical discussions with someone who looks, from the website, like they are not in any field you are interested in. You just can't tell. Find some discussion magic and go there.
Considering job placement: be careful about the kinds of inferences you draw. Departments have a lot of incentive to skew these, and no standardized procedure for reporting. They may have one student who 'ruins' their numbers because they need a very specific kind of job (like in Canada, etc.). You do not want to be part of putting pressure on programs to put pressure on their own graduates to not ‘ruin’ their placement statistics. That works out poorly for everyone. It is not something to hold against a department that they supported a graduate who decided to pursue employment outside of academia. Such people show up, in the placement stats, as not having a permanent position, but they are not a good inference tool for applicants to use for their decision-making.
Sample sizes are too small for % differences to matter: it is not the case that, choosing between a school with an 87% placement, and one with a 76% placement, you stand a better chance of getting a job at the 87% school.
Once you have some acceptances in hand in the spring: ask about their placement procedures. These are much more illuminating than their overall placement rates.
Remember: an X% placement rate does not mean that you personally have an X% chance that you will get a job if you go there. Each grad student takes advantage of different opportunities in grad school, and these carve out your own path. You affect your own placement by taking advantage of these opportunities, early and often. Resolve that you will take advantage of all these opportunities, most of which are entirely optional/not mandated, rather than merely predicting from the general stats.
Aim high, middle, low. You get clarity about where you are really willing to go and how much you really want to stay in this field, if only the 'safety' school accepts you. Sometimes you discover you aren’t that set on it; sometimes you are extremely thankful you added that school and you resolve to knock it out of the ballpark once you get there. Any program in the top 50 ranked programs in the US, or moderately well known in the EU/UK, is still difficult enough to get into that it should not be dismissed.
Make sure you leave yourself room to have your priorities genuinely shift and change. You-now have a hard time imagining what you-in-spring getting acceptances and rejections will choose. Sometimes students initially sniff at schools where they eventually end up, get a very good education, and become successful members of the profession. If you really want to be in this field, this means making sure you have options in terms of acceptances, which means not just all top-ranked schools, or all top plus one middle.
If your priority is more getting into a top school than going to some school that is a good enough fit for you, consider that there may be something like self-image satisfaction playing more of a role than genuine determination to be a professional philosopher.
I recommend compiling this list of schools among the last items: it doesn't take that long to put together a list of schools, and doing it early often means fiddling around and adding/subtracting in ways that take your time and attention away from the more important aspects of your application. Do the writing sample and personal statement first.

Helping your letter writers help you

Ask weeks in advance; preferably, a month or more.
Remind them of useful details: what did you present on in their course? What did you write your term paper on? Did you get a good grade? Did you TA for them and do well? Plus anything else you’d like them to note. Put this in an email.
Give them a single definitive list of schools, ordered by and labelled with due date for application, in a single email. Don’t do this till that list is completely definitive. If that list changes, let them know, also by email, so they don’t wait for a link from a school you later decided not to apply to. They cannot simply memorize all this for each student, or remember that thing you mentioned in the hallway two weeks ago.
Best: a table or bulleted list, in the body of an email, ordered by deadlines with earliest deadlines first.
Keep track of when those deadlines are coming, and when your letters have been submitted. Send a cheerful reminder “just a reminder, my first deadline is coming in a week” etc. Faculty get swamped and it is easy to accidentally lose track of the deadlines.
If the link is only sent to letter writers after you have submitted all your own materials, then do NOT wait until a day or two before the deadline to submit your materials. Faculty generally do not have the time flexibility to get it in on exactly the one day you left them when you submitted it at midnight the night before it is due. Treat those deadlines as something like a week earlier than they actually are, so you don’t have late letters because a letter writer was in a meeting all day, or had a sick kid, or was on a work trip, or just trying not to check email every day over the holiday, etc. This is especially important around the holidays/end of term and break between terms.
If a deadline is pending and someone still hasn’t submitted their letter, email them and ask if they need the link re-sent. Many emails with links to upload letters can get lost or go astray. SFU IT services [for example] has unpredictable patterns of deciding certain school email addresses are spam and filtering them out before they make it to faculty inboxes.
Call on the grad chair [or other faculty member in the same department as the late letter writer] if you still need some help getting someone to submit a letter in on time.
Make sure you get letter writer info correct: name spelling, email address correct, use their office address, etc. You should fill in that info on the forms, even if it is optional. I’ve had at least one student spell my last name incorrectly and I got zero emails with links. Triple check the email address!
It takes a long time to enter all the info you need to, on each application form. Sometimes forms crash. Please do not do this right against every deadline: if you space out all the links we get one by one, it maximizes the chances that something will wrong, and adds an extra admin burden to your letter writers to keep track of links as they trickle in. Set aside some hours and do a whole batch of applications at once.

Choosing among acceptances

Cannot get a sense of a program from their webpage.
Cannot get a sense of professors from their written work.
About 50% of students change their initial preference ordering after campus visits. Budget for the time and money to do this. It is years of your life.
With a 50% mind-change rate, deciding to not visit (or doing something comparable and live-action virtually) is equivalent to flipping a coin to make your choice. Don't flip a coin - visit.
Avoid the tendency to ‘cuddle with numbers’ by using statistics to make hard choices among acceptances. Sometimes you just have to choose, and no amount of number crunching will decide the best program. You have to find the one that fits you best and commit with suboptimal info.
Have to assess fit for you. No rankings can yield that. Going to a somewhat lower ranked program may mean you do better on hte job market later on, than just going to the highest ranked program you get into. Fit may not mean that you feel comfortable there; it means this is a place where you will be able to get what you need in terms of high quality graduate education and mentorship. Where will you be challenged in ways that will make you a better philosopher? But not in ways that are just toxic environments. And sometimes programs that feel good, where people seem to really get along, also may not challenge students as much, encourage them to go present, etc. You have to find a place that will challenge you, in ways you can rise to.
Sometimes a program might feel like a good fit because the people there feel comfortable. Make sure this is not a matter of being in a place like the one you grew up in/people you grew up with. Sometimes hard, new places really stretch you more than the easier softer answer. Becoming a professional academic is a fantastic way to have incredibly interesting conversations with people from all over the planet, on topics you have in common. Challenge yourself – where will you grow the most?
Talk to lots of faculty. Often the one person with whom you click and have the ‘magic’ in discussion is not someone who seemed likely based on their faculty research profile. Often enough, the person whose work you are so excited about is working on something different now, or just doesn’t have great discussions with you. Look for that magic in discussion.
This is probably the only city where you will not get a job after the PhD (unless you leave academia for non-academic work). Don't pick a program because you love the city, campus, etc.
The single thing you should not use to choose between programs is funding offers. This sounds counterintuitive to many: isn't more money better? Grad school is tough already, why wouldn't money be a factor? As someone coming from a background with zero family financial support, paying my own way, often with jobs like waiting tables: do not choose based on funding. You should forego a couple thousand dollars a year now, to go a program that will help you grow as a philosopher. Because there, you will actually increase your chances of getting a job, and a better job too. Do not forego the lifetime earnings of that better job, for a couple thousand a year for five years.

Other questions? FAQ

HPS and LPS focused programs may have different standards or expectations for incoming students. In some, it is almost a requirement that you already have a bachelor’s degree or higher in some science field. Promising to learn some science while you are there will not cut it for admission. Consider if this program is worth that application fee if you don't have this background.
Grad Café (and other sites/for a like it): Avoid it like the toxic plague it is. [Grad chair note: I can confirm that false information about offers from SFU has been posted there.] It is not noisy data; it is just noise (and pettiness), not data.
First round versus waitlist offers: sometimes applicants feel slighted when they are not a first round offer; or they think this might make them second tier students if they go to a program where they were not a first round offeree. This just isn’t true. There are so many incredibly capable and qualified applicants who never make it off the waitlist in the first place. Even making it to a waitlist signifies that a school thinks you are well qualified to go there. They don’t put you on the waitlist if they think otherwise. Also, no one remembers this by the summer: faculty are not memorizing each year’s first round versus waitlist offers, and usually forget this immediately (within seconds! for some of us) of not having to think about it because admissions are done.
April 15: you don’t have to take up to the last day, if you already know where you’d like to go. No benefit to waiting. You never have to decide before this date, either. If someone gives you an earlier date, let your grad chair or supervisor know. This violates APA guidelines that all reputable programs have agreed to adhere to.
If you are on a waitlist: consult with your own grad chair, supervisor, etc. and make sure you are checking email frequently if you are waiting for a potential last-minute offer. Sometimes these come with very little advance notice, so you need to be ready to make a decision with potentially just 2 hours of time. Do the thinking in advance.
There is no ‘winning strategy’ that will work for every program, or consistently work at the same program year after year. Different professors sit on admissions committees each year, and even on that committee, different people weight different parts of the application in very different ways. You can’t game that by trying to get them to take away some crafted impression. There just is no single consistent response; there are a lot of very different people. So, the best way to approach this overall is to make sure that your application materials accurately reflect you as a philosopher in training as well as it can, and trust that the programs where you fit will see that.
Remember that when you get a no, it is not a judgment on you personally. This is a noisy process, and sometimes, you might have not fit there and the committee based their decision on that.

Applying To Ph.D. and M.A. Programs in Philosophy​An informal overview and guide

Applying To Ph.D. and M.A. Programs in Philosophy
An informal overview and guide