University of Pennsylvania

From Wednesday to Saturday I visited the city of Philadelphia and in particular the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. I was lucky to have planned for a relatively long stay here, as the city and the department are both great.

I spent Wednesday just checking out the city, including a visit to its Museum of Arts at the recommendation of my first host Chris, and I attended a lecture on social norms by Professor Bicchieri. Thursday was rather hectic, as I met a number of professors, current graduate students and prospective, at the same time was making appointments for Friday with professors outside the department that I was recommended to, and after dinner moved to my second host Reed. Friday brought more meetings, including an almost two hour discussion with Professor Cristina Bicchieri, who would most likely be my adviser here. There was also a guest lecture by Professor Patricia Churchland, a famous philosopher of science, a little (prospective) grad student party and a move to my third host Lindsey. Saturday I found some time to meet with Jack, whom I studied with at the LSE and who lives near Philadelphia.

Professor Bicchieri made it clear that if I were to come here, I would primarily be helping her work out the theoretical foundations of a universal utility function that can be used to describe and predict behavior in experiments. This work would be done in close cooperation with professors at UPenn’s excellent Department of Economics and its business school, Wharton. As the head of the PPE program, Cristina has close ties with these people and I met two of them, Professors Dillenberger and Kimbaugh. I also met with the friendly neighborhood logician Professor Scott Weinstein and with Professor Michael Weisberg, an enthusiastic and talkative guy interested in the model-world relation, in particular in philosophy of biology.

To my surprise, Cristina spent some time criticizing her former department: Carnegie Mellon. Most relevant for me are her claims that the only person there willing to work with me on decision theory is Horacio and that they are virtually unable to place grad students in philosophy departments. I hope to learn more about these claims by communicating some more with the people at CMU and a friend of Cristina’s who was also formerly at CMU, Peter Vanderschraaf.

The financial package seems more than adequate at $24,000, although this is also the most expensive city I’m visiting. Grad students tell me it’s more than sufficient though. Everyone receives the same package so this is no cause for rivalries. There is also the possibility to earn free housing if you are prepared to live in undergrad dorms and serve as counsel to them a few hours per week. Chris is using this option.

Office space is again far from optimal. The grad students are packed into windowless rooms, and first years don’t even get their own desk, instead claiming some space in the nice little library that is part of the department.

The course load of the program seems reasonable. One must take at least twelve courses, about ten of which should be done during the first two years. Distributionary requirements will force me to take at least three history of philosophy and two ethics courses. Potential disadvantages here are the restriction on taking courses outside the department for credit (maximum three) and the lack of breadth of subjects among the faculty (e.g. no metaphysics). Michigan has a much larger faculty, while Carnegie Mellon has the Pitt Philosophy and Pitt HPS departments to draw from.

These considerations are only important if I want to get a tenure track position at a philosophy department after my PhD and if I want to have some of these missing fields as areas of specialization/competence. Unfortunately I have no idea about this. I guess philosophy of science and logic would be more straightforward AOCs for me than metaphysics though.

The teaching load I think is rather light at UPenn. One is expected to TA a course only in the second and third year, and then teach as a lead instructor for one semester in the fifth year. I’m expecting the teaching load to be heavier at the three schools I have yet to visit, as they are public rather than private universities, but we’ll see.

My two most likely advisers, Professors Bicchieri and Weinstein, both don’t have any graduate students currently. This is a blessing and a curse, as they will certainly have enough time to work with me, but it’s also likely that I will not be able to have in-depth conversations about my work with the other grad students (unless Hanna decides to come here).

It looks like there will be enough room to attend conferences and get some of the expenses paid for that (although I can’t remember whom I asked this). My question about spending time at another university met with some surprise. This is clearly not common here, but it should be possible, in particular in the fourth year, and they did not seem actively opposed to the idea.

Professor Domoltor made a curious remark in saying that only about 30% of grad students have a publication to their name when they are defending their dissertation. They do usually publish parts of their dissertation later, and the professor may have had a long timeframe in mind, but still. Reed found this hard to believe and so did I. I forgot to ask Michael or Cristina about this. Perhaps an email is in order here. Cristina does seem to publish a lot with (former) students and other co-authors. I wonder if she is in favor of single-author publications by grad students. I guess I should ask her this, too.

The faculty apparently get along reasonably well. I heard some rumors about a rivalry between two faculty members, but neither of them I’m likely to work with so that won’t affect me. In order to recreate something like the lively academic climate in Pittsburgh, I think I may need to be a little more proactive, attending PPE seminars and the like.

During my visit I met all of the first year grad students and many of the older ones as well. All of them were great, and we had a lot of fun together. The first years were a bit stressed about a logic exam on Friday morning, but they more than made up for that the rest of that day, and I feel like I really clicked with them. It would be great to be working with them for the next five years or so.

All of this is not making my choice much easier. Still, I’m looking forward to see what Ann Arbor has to offer.