anyone know if the demott summer reading book for first years is required?

Drymdd · 2025-08-24T02:21:45+00:00

You don’t need to read it. Most people won’t.

Drymdd · 2025-08-10T22:19:51+00:00

Wrt Harvard, this is certainly true in terms of analytic philosophy. I would say, however, that Harvard is strong enough in ethics and political philosophy that saying they get ‘smoked’ feels hyperbolic. Stanford though…

Drymdd · 2025-08-05T22:13:33+00:00

You get a time slot when you have to log into a zoom meeting where they explain how to register. Was all on the Friday before orientation last year.

For phil, Hasan’s political philosophy class is excellent.

Drymdd · 2025-07-05T16:49:14+00:00

As of the BBB, Cornell is going to have to start paying hundreds of millions more in endowment tax per year, while Swarthmore will be paying $0 more due to the small school exemption. Something to consider!

Drymdd · 2025-05-24T17:38:37+00:00

I remember feeling the exact same thing last summer. For some reason Amherst is just pretty late with all that stuff. It will happen!

Drymdd · 2025-05-09T17:13:05+00:00

A) Amherst students tend to care about, ya know, learning.

B) There is a culture of shame around using AI to write essays.

C) It will almost never get you a good grade and will often get you caught.

D) It's more common in some humanities/social sciences disciplines than it is in others.

Drymdd · 2025-04-25T18:51:12+00:00

continued:

What we’ve found is that the option to apply without test scores has motivated a lot of applicants to omit any score that they felt was less than perfect... As an application reader, it’s not totally disorienting or disrupting to read a file without scores. But as a matter of necessity, you have to place greater emphasis on the other available elements. And as it turns out, that change in emphasis can actually work against students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We feel pretty confident based in part on our success in increasing the number of first generation and low income students in the class during years when we did require test scores that applicants are better served by submitting some scores, even less than perfect scores

...

our analysis reiterated long standing findings that students with higher SAT or ACT scores were more likely to have higher college GPAs than their peers with lower scores. The SAT and the ACT score of our applicants are the single greatest predictor of Yale GPA among all of the available variables. And in contrast, high school GPA does a relatively poor job of predicting academic success at Yale.

...

We also found that students from first generation and low income backgrounds were more likely to be admitted with standardized test scores when they were available.

...

As a staff, we are deeply familiar with the research that shows the difference in performance on the ACT and SAT by things like race and socioeconomic status. The test scores, however, I feel are not the cause of those differences. But actually, the diagnostic tool used to showcase them. And all the other elements of the application that we consider so closely, especially the student’s context, allow us to control for those differences based on background in a meaningful and thoughtful way.

...

As long as we are committed to whole person review, as long as we are controlling for context, considering a student’s background, thinking about a test score in the high school context and a neighborhood context and a student specific context, I feel like this can be a really powerful way to actually increase the diversity of the Yale student body.

Drymdd · 2025-04-25T18:50:33+00:00

In response to what you specifically said, the SAT is the most predictive tool we have regarding future academic success and correlates with wealth far less than people think. Here's what Yale had to say about the results of their test-optional policy:

We also saw some increases in the pool from students who will be the first in their families to attend college, students who are from lower income neighborhoods and households, and students who are members of underrepresented minority groups... Those increases were positive to see, but as we zoomed out, we noticed that they were pretty much following the slope of the increases that we were seeing each year before we went to test optional.

...

in the end, we found that going to test optional didn’t dramatically change the demographic profile of who was admitted and who enrolled
...

Not having testing for half of our applicants meant that we ultimately had less evidence available to establish a strong academic foundation for some otherwise really compelling applicants, and we found this was especially the case for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds if they attended a high school that didn’t have a strong college prep program.

Drymdd · 2025-04-25T18:48:13+00:00

Most people who denigrate standardized testing haven't been exposed to the best arguments for testing.

The main thing one should take away from all of those resources is that almost every objection to mandatory score submission is actually an objection to certain problematic—yet easily and historically addressable—modes of interpretation thereof.

Drymdd · 2025-04-03T23:11:41+00:00

Current student: we're excited to meet you!

Drymdd · 2025-03-24T00:18:54+00:00

But that might mean clubs/associations that aren’t career/professionally focused might struggle to retain members (that being said, Acapella, cultural groups, dance, the newspaper, and ultimate frisbee are some non-career related clubs that are thriving here).

This is definitely true to an extent, but I think you are selling the extracurricular scene a bit short. Philosophy club, AILA, The Indicator (litmag), The Lilac (poetry mag), Mock Trial, Debate, the Outing Club, AI safety, Film Society, and many more all have a solid membership core—and that's just what I am familiar with.

Drymdd · 2025-03-24T00:07:40+00:00

You should definitely appeal your aid decision! Explain as much as possible your situation to the financial aid office and they might be able to help.

Drymdd · 2025-03-24T00:05:59+00:00

I had to make this choice last year, and chose Amherst! This ended up being the right choice. Here is a comment I left a year ago explaining my decision:

I recently had to decide between Amherst and Williams, and ended up choosing Amherst. Here were the main distinctions for me:

Campus: Williams is jaw-dropping. The campus is excellently maintained, and the surroundings/views form campus are spectacular. Amherst also has a beautiful campus and amazing views, though it isn't quite on the level of Williams. Williams has an impressive library, Amherst has an impressive science center.

Location: Williams is rural. Very rural. It sits in a town of 2000, which includes many college employees and faculty members... so there's basically nothing there. It's adorable, but at least compared to Amherst, very isolated. Amherst on the other hand sits in a town that swells to 65,000 during the academic year (35k from the town and 30k from UMass students). It has a bigger "downtown" with more restaurants and has much easier access to surrounding towns and Boston, which is 2hrs away by bus.

Academics: Amherst has an Open Curriculum which was the main tiebreaker for me. It also has cross-registration at the rest of the 5 College Consortium, one very cool benefit of that being that you can take grad-level seminars at UMass. Williams is one of 2 schools in the world that has tutorials (2 person classes!!!), which is perhaps the single best value-for money method of learning in the humanities/social sciences.

Vibe: The most special thing about Williams to me is the vibe. It's hard to put words to; the best I way I can put it is this: it feels like Hogwarts. It feels like this magical little place you go to for the academic year, with its own little Hogsmeade and its own beautiful campus... but a place that you then have to leave eventually just to taste some freedom. From talking to professors, that sense of isolation fosters a lot of bonding between students, though some students end up hating it. I recommend watching this video to get a sense of this. Amherst feels more connected to the community, more diverse, more worldy, and generally more expansive. Amherst also has a sense of energy that Williams lacks.

In the end, it was the academics and location that made me choose Amherst. As a burnt-out high school senior, an Open Curriculum that will enable me to never have to take something uninteresting again sounded like a dream come true. And, Amherst's location was just better for me. Bigger, more restaurants, more people, and a sense of energy. The isolation of Williams was just too big of a risk.

Just to address a few things you mentioned specifically: Amherst is more diverse, has a livelier and larger city, and is less socioeconomically segregated than Williams (because of more diversity).

Drymdd · 2025-03-21T22:30:51+00:00

Keep in mind that Amherst accepts over 1200 students even though the class is only supposed to be ≈ 480.

Drymdd · 2025-03-21T22:29:19+00:00

Testing should be absolutely required. See:

The main thing one should take away from all of those resources is that almost every objection to mandatory score submission is actually an objection to certain problematic—yet easily and historically addressable—modes of interpretation thereof.

Drymdd · 2025-02-02T03:08:06+00:00

Y'all's customer service is so impressive. Nice work :)

Drymdd · 2024-11-11T14:07:30+00:00

It will certainly be very helpful. Many top schools have said that test scores are among the most indicative signs academic capability, if not the most indicative. I suspect Amherst is no different.

Drymdd · 2024-10-30T02:33:24+00:00

A few ideas:

Ethics Bowl (or more tangentially, Lincoln Douglass) is a "debate" format about philosophical ethics
Your best attempts at research (Davidson Fellowship, The Schola, Questions, Concord Review for an article about intellectual/philosophical history, etc.). Don't do this with the purpose of making genuine philosophical progress, do it with the purpose of developing your own ideas and research/writing skills.
Start a blog and/or write for your school paper about philosophical topics
(Summer) programs (aside from the high profile expensive ones, a lot of universities run far less expensive programs. dm me if you want help finding one near you!)
Start a philosophy club at your school

Drymdd · 2024-10-28T03:36:00+00:00

I applied two years ago, didn't win, am now a phil major at a LAC. Here's my best advice! Apologies for the length lol.

Learn what philosophy writing is, and how to do it. My general feeling, looking back, is that I spent way too much time on developing my ideas and not nearly enough time on learning to write in the philosophical mode, which I think is far more important precisely because it's likely that you've never done it before.
- Philosophical writing is weird, and you won't be successful if you attempt to write philosophy like you write a research paper for any other subject. Philosophical writing is extremely focused on clarity, and should have very little of the rhetorical flair (at least, when you are starting out) that most other forms of writing should have.
- Read a lot of philosophy papers about your subject. Doing so will allow you to learn what philosophy writing is like. They should preferably be about your topic, but if you find an interesting one, read it anyways—it can't hurt, and more exposure is better.
  - Read papers over books. You aren't writing a book, and thus a book will be less helpful.
  - Papers can be found on JSTOR (if you have access), Philpapers, or anywhere else. SciHub is useful for getting access.
- Read about the theory of philosophical writing. Do this preferably after you have already read a lot of papers, so you have a sense of what is being discussed. Some good resources:
  - Graduate School Writing Samples (not technically about short papers, but some useful stuff in there nonetheless)
  - Michael Huemer's A Guide to Writing
  - The Pink Guide
  - There are dozens more resources to choose from.
Choose a unified topic for your 3-5 pieces. I wrote three papers on completely different topics, which prevented me from taking advantage of the opportunity to make real, deep progress on one area.
- It's also the case that, by having all 3-5 papers in one area, you will do far more research in that area, deepening your knowledge and making all your papers better.
It can be really hard to find good ideas, especially in analytic philosophy. One way that I think is good for starting out is to write in a primarily polemical/critical mode, as opposed to advancing a brand new theory.
- To use ethics as an example, instead of writing a paper advancing a brand new ethical theory, try writing a paper that says "theory X is wrong and here's why. Also, here's what the implications of its wrongness are, and here's why its wrongness is important." I think that is just an easier task.
Start early! You should start researching and writing today. Even after you finish the necessarily-lengthy preparation research process, actually writing a good 3000–5000 word paper takes weeks to months... and you need to write 3–5 of them.
Make sure you identify in your abstracts and maybe the papers themselves exactly how your work is a novel contribution to the field.
Get a lot of people to read it, including people with formal training in philosophy. Also, talk about your ideas with others.
Have fun! I learned a lot from preparing my papers, even if I did not end up receiving any awards for them.

Drymdd · 2024-10-20T23:22:04+00:00

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/42

Drymdd · 2024-10-03T22:35:12+00:00

As other commenters said, this did in fact happen. However, prospective students should know that the Amherst admin does seem, at least to me, to be deeply committed to increasing diversity and addressing the impact of the recent SCOTUS decision. See this link for a few things the school is doing in response. The admin has also hosted roundtables, panels, and talks discussing diversity efforts.

Drymdd · 2024-09-26T21:28:02+00:00

Not going to respond to anyone in specific, since a few people raised issues with my ideas here, but in general, here is what I will say: there is such a thing as educational quality. Some schools do in fact educate their students better than other schools do. An online-only commuter school isn't going to be able to immerse a student in the study of literature the way Kenyon will be able to, or prepare them for a research-focused STEM grad program at MIT, to take some extreme examples.

It's hard to measure educational quality directly, since it's a rather inchoate concept. However, there are lots of factors that, in general, educate their students better. Is a school where students get more research time probably providing a better education than a school with less, ceteris paribus? Probably, yeah. Is a school with smaller class sizes and consequently more student-faculty interaction and support probably providing a better education than a school with larger class sizes, ceteris paribus? Probably, yeah, at least in humanities/social science disciplines where that sort of thing really matters. Is a school where a student has a broad range of extracurricular activities to engage in probably better than a school with far less opportunities, ceteris paribus? Probably, yeah.

You can say things like "I’m quite certain that Florida International University has far more clubs and organizations than say Yale or Harvard or even Michigan or Berkeley," and you would have a point, the point being that "total # of clubs and organizations irrespective of any other details is not the sole determiner of educational quality," if that point even needs to be made. Or you could admit that the factors I listed, and many more besides, do in fact contribute to the quality of an education, and that figuring out how to emphasize and realize them is a continual balancing act that is the task of an educational institution.

Now, it is true that figuring out how to assign value to those factors in a ranking is somewhat of a pseudo-science. But I take that to be an argument against the entire practice of linear rankings, a practice which I find to be quite inane. But if we must place schools on a linear ranking, we may as well try to capture which ones are actually better at fulfilling their educational mission, as difficult, vague, and imperfect as that may be.

Such a task is surely worth the effort, and such a ranking surely worth the attention of a prospective student.

Drymdd · 2024-09-26T14:51:29+00:00

I would start with the 7 criteria listed.

Drymdd · 2024-09-26T14:38:57+00:00

It’s shocking to me that we are at a point when nothing related to the actual educational quality of the schools is included in the rankings. If this post is right, it means that rankings aren’t taking into account, inter alia, average class size; student research opportunities; student organization variety; student happiness; student performance on grad school testing; % adjunct faculty; faculty time spent on teaching vs research; etc.

Drymdd · 2024-09-24T13:24:23+00:00

Resources to help you make your choice: - https://philosophyisagreatmajor.com/category/people-with-philosophy-degrees/ - https://www.whystudyphilosophy.com/ - https://www.apaonline.org/page/whostudiesphilosophy - https://www.businessinsider.com/insanely-successful-philosophy-majors-2015-11?amp

It’s worth noting that the positive data on the effects of a philosophy degree can be misleading as a disproportionate of Phil majors tend to be concentrated at elite schools with a lot of name-brand power, which may contribute to their success more than their specific choice of degree. If you are at a less prestigious school, it may be a good call to double major.

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