By Trevor Hedberg
Back in 2022, I announced that I was working on a comprehensive guide to graduate school in philosophy. I am happy to announce that a full draft of that guide is now available.
I had three main goals in writing this guide. First, I wanted to provide a cohesive and thorough overview of every major element of graduate school. To my knowledge, no such resource exists for the discipline of philosophy. The information that exists is mostly scattered across various philosophy blogs posted within the last decade. I believe this is the first time so much material and information has been consolidated into a single source.
Second, I wanted readers to be able to read about their topics of interest easily rather than having to hunt through the entire document. To facilitate this, I formatted the document using three layers of headings to create a robust, easy-to-navigate table of contents. Just click on your section or subsection of interest, and you’ll jump straight to it. As with most digital documents, the text is also searchable using the Ctrl + F command.
Third, I wanted the document to contain lots of references to additional resources. I did not want readers to be limited to just my perspective on these subjects. To accomplish that and avoid cluttering the text with formal citations, I primarily used hyperlinks in the main text and in footnotes to direct readers to other web pages and articles. For that reason, this guide is best read on a digital device connected to the internet.
My hope is that some of you reading this will give it a look at some point in the future. You might even have some suggestions for additions or revisions. If you want to provide any feedback on the guide, there are two ways to do so. First, you can send an email to [email protected] with the phrase “7 Years Later” included in the subject line. Alternatively, you can visit this Google Doc version of the guide and leave a comment at the part of the document where you think a change should be made. (The linked table of contents still works in this version but is a little clunkier than the other version.) I will be especially grateful for those who point out broken links – I am certain that some have escaped my scrutiny.
My plan is to gather all the suggestions for changes in Summer 2025 to update the content where needed. I do not expect a ton of you to read the whole thing, but if there’s a section that interests you, don’t hesitate to give it a look and drop a comment.
While I still have work to do on this guide, I hope it will nonetheless prove a useful resource for graduate students in its current form.
Just want to say thanks so much, Trevor, for passing this along. I'm a first-year PhD student (almost a month in now!), and I've been finding it very emotionally taxing and bewildering trying to fit my short-term goals into some cohesive long-term planning. This text is a Godsend for that. I just did your five-year plan exercise, and that has really helped me focus on the short-term goals, while, in the background, having calming, soothing proof that they fit into the long term. I'll keep it by my side throughout the journey. Very generous of you to write up and share!
Posted by: First year PhD student | 09/21/2024 at 12:09 PM