Grad school, etc.

I have now changed my 'final list' of schools; here it is now, this time for sure:

NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, MIT, UCLA, USC, UMass, Colorado, CUNY, UC Santa Barbara, UVA, Rochester, UNC.

I have all of the applications submitted and most of the supplemental materials in. I'm just waiting for letters from one more person and then I can mail everything in and forget about this stuff for a month or two (when the rejection letters start rolling in).

I feel like my application will be fairly strong. My letters, I think, will be pretty good, and two are from professors not at my undergrad school. One of those is from someone from the summer seminar I attended in July, so that should help. My GPA is strong, and I'll have degrees in philosophy and mathematics. My GRE's could be better, but they are hopefully high enough to be ignored. I am happy with my writing sample; I think it's a good paper on the growing block view of time. It engages some (very) recent literature (some papers from 2007), which will be nice. It's only 11 pages, but a professor I've been in contact with from a top 50 department (where I will be applying) liked the paper and did not think that it was too short.

I'll be presenting this paper at Rice University in February at a conference, and I presented about half of it at a conference at U of Louisville in November.

Speaking of the Louisville conference, it was an interesting experience. The students from Louisville that I met were all very nice, but had completely different interests than I do. I mentioned a paper by Ted Sider, but they hadn't heard of him. Later, I mentioned a paper by David Lewis, but they hadn't heard of him either. They seemed to be more into Foucault, feminism, and other social issues.

I'm keeping an eye open for some other conferences so I can submit my philosophy of math paper (or part of it). I think it's pretty good, so I'd like to see if other people think so.

Maybe now that I'm on Christmas break, I'll post some things about philosophical puzzles/ papers/ books I'm reading.

What I'm reading over break: (i) A book on General Relativity, (ii) Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, David Lewis, (iii) the first couple sections of A Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, (iv) starting Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.