The Philosophers' Cocoon

4 responses to “Is there a stigma against grad transfer students?”

1. give it a shot

   August 25, 2023

   There seem to be multiple questions packed in here, but in all cases, I find it hard to imagine anyone–or at least anyone reasonable–being upset about transfer applications.
   I can’t imagine faculty being upset that grad students at their own institution are applying to transfer. Liking someone entails wanting what’s best for them, and given the brutal reality of the job market, faculty understand that it’s best for their students to go to top programs if they can. Among reasonable faculty members, the worst would be being sad to see someone go while understanding why they must. Among unreasonable faculty, there might be some narcissistic coveting of students (which, woefully, is not uncommon), but those kinds of faculty members will be difficult to work with in many other ways and are best avoided in most cases.
   I have no idea whether the tippy-top PhD programs (say, top-three) look on transfer applications with much skepticism. I’ve known numerous PhD students who have transferred “upwards” into top-ten and top-twenty programs sometime in the last five years or so, as well as some “lateral” moves (from the perspective of Leiter rankings) to programs that are better fits for the students’ particular interests.

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2. Bill Vanderburgh

   August 25, 2023

   Some programs might want “their stamp” on students they graduate, so they might prefer to have a student complete all their required course work, for example. But I’d say overall that there will be few/no negatives for the student doing/attempting the transferring. The notion that top programs only rarely admit transfers is probably a perspective effect: Those programs hardly admit anyone at all from their applicant pools. Like Marcus and others in this thread, I’ve known plenty of people who transferred schools and (a) were much happier and (b) were perfectly successful.

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3. AristotleSparksthePeripatetic

   August 26, 2023

   There were several transfer students in my phd program, and they were treated (as far as I could tell) the same as any other student. I will say that they received no more credit for their prior coursework than did students with MAs. Consistent with Bill’s comment above, no one (as far as I could tell) receive more than a class or two of credit, and even two seemed relatively rare.

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4. former transfer student

   August 27, 2023

   I was not the only transfer student from another PhD program at a top five program when I was there (2011-2016), and I know of one person who is there now who transferred (there may be more, I don’t know many of their students). Just some evidence that this does happen in “top” programs.
   In my job now, when doing grad admissions, I don’t care whether the person is trying to transfer, coming out of an MA program, undergrad, or after years of work. The only way it affects things is that if someone has come straight from undergrad, especially from a smaller department, I am more forgiving about various issues in applications, especially in writing samples–if someone has a good idea and tries to defend it, I’m less worried about structure, writing, presentation, whether they are familiar with the relevant literature, etc. If someone has completed three years (say) of a PhD program, or has an MA, and their writing sample has a bunch of issues, that’s much more of a red flag.
   I also suspect that at least at many places, it’s more relevant what your research is about, who you want to work with, and what that specific person thinks of your file, than if you are coming straight out of undergrad, because presumably people probably think you are less likely to fully change your mind about at least general research areas. But I’m not totally sure how true that is, just a suspicion.

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