<p>it would have all ended if i was able to pay for umich’s deposit: i wasnt because i dun have an american bank account. but that incident gave me two more days and just in these two days i had a second thought: i searched cvs of current graduate students in top philosophy departments and found that there was a shocking lack of presence of umich students and in contrast there were three people from reed—a high number for such a small college. </p>
<p>i know this is not a really reliable method—many graduate students didnt state where they finished undergraduate studies. but at least i found some interesting facts(among the approx. one third who stated their origins of BA):1,there is a fair split between students from public and private universities.2, reed has a larger presence than umich 3, many of umich’s peer schools(especially unc and uc berkeley) are major contributors to those programmes.4, graduate students come from all sorts of colleges, lsa,big us, ivy league—everyone has a share. </p>
<p>point 2 and 3 threw me into confusion again. although reed has only a slight lead(3 over 2,but the two from umich are all in, well, umich—which means none outside umich), if size is taken into account the result is really significant. well at the same time i can also see that people from big state universities do have a great chance in getting into such programmes.</p>
<p>one good thing is that i do not treat this dilema as a life or death matter any more—point 4 shows that personal efforts rather than school reputation may be more important.</p>
<p>hope this long post doesnt put you off~im not driven crazy by this thing yet. i think i would need some more days to think through all of these again~~~what do you guys think about my analysis? is it reliable to any extent?</p>