As “Brian Leiter writes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/deciding-betwee.html, many students are currently getting offers to PhD and MA programs. Several students will have multiple offers, and will have very important choices to make in the next few weeks. I want to largely echo what Brian says about the dangers of various departments, and just add a few cents worth of comments.

The best advice Brian gives is right at the end. He says, “The way for a prospective student to discover [exceptional departments for graduate study] is to talk to lots of current students.” I agree. The single best thing any student can do between now and when they have to choose a program is to talk as much as they can to current students at the departments they’ve been accepted to. There are really three reasons for this.

One thing is that, as Brian says, there are a lot of factors that make a big difference to how well grad school will go, but which you really can’t tell on paper. The only way to tell how much it improves your education to have philosophers X, Y and Z in the department is to talk to students of X, Y and Z.

Second, departments change a lot, and quickly, in important informal respects. The morale of the department, the levels of infighting, the sense of ownership that students have of the department, can all change on the basis of events that may seem relatively trivial to outsiders. If your professors say “I was at school S six years ago, and it was terrible for these reasons…”, they may well be correct about how things were then, but incorrect about how things are now. Having up-to-date information is vital, and current students are the best source for this.

Finally, no matter where you study, you’ll end up spending a lot of time with other graduate students. You’ll probably end up learning as much from conversations with other graduate students as with the faculty. So you want to get a sense of how much you’ll enjoy, both informally and professionally, having these graduate students as your colleagues for the next several years. You’ll be colleagues with the current first years for four or more years, so get to know them a bit, see how much you want to be their colleagues, and see how much you’ll learn from them.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be in a much better position to make a decision than anyone who could advise you. That’s because you’ll know more about how the grad programs are actually currently running, and what the grad students who are currently there are like. I think Rutgers will do pretty well by this measure, since the program seems to be running very well, and the students are unbelievable. But I don’t know what the relevant comparisons are like, in particular I have no idea how good students are at all our peer departments, and I suspect there are very few people who do. If you’re a prospective graduate student then at this stage, there’s no substitute for spending as much time as possible at various departments, and especially with current students.