Greetings, readers. It has been a long time since I wrote an original post here (though I have commented on quite a few). I had always planned to take a break from this kind of writing once I got an initial Draft of 7 Years Later completed, but a tumultuous 6 months in my personal life and the unexpected TypePad closing extended my hiatus longer than I had planned. (I thank Marcus for managing the blog’s migration to this platform and preserving so much of its pre-Wordpress content.)
Anyway, I’m back, and I wanted to begin by offering an update on my expected revisions to 7 Years Later. If you missed the post from last year, 7 Years Later: Surviving Graduate School in Philosophy is my effort to offer a comprehensive, free, and useful guide to graduate school in philosophy that focuses primarily on graduate programs in North America. I gathered a significant amount of feedback, including some from readers here, and have been planning to make revisions accordingly. I had hoped to do them during the summer of 2025, but the overhaul will need to be a bit more thorough than I originally planned. Here are some of the planned updates for 2026:
- Updating and/or reformatting hyperlinked material. None of the old links to Cocoon blog posts (from Typepad) work anymore, so I will have to thoroughly comb through those and either fix all the broken links or cite the material differently.
- Clarify what advice applies across a broad spectrum of grad programs (e.g., including those in Europe, Australia, etc.) vs. what only applies to North American programs
- Reorganization of job market material into two separate sections (a preparation section and an “on the market” section) and some minor revisions to specific advice offered
- Expansion / rewrite of the section on personal finance for graduate students
- Slight expansion of material related to the transition to non-academic work
I hope to complete these updates during Summer 2026. When these are done, I’ll repost the manuscript and make a follow-up post here. In the longer term, I also plan to extract and edit some of the key sections as standalone PDFs. The first two of these standalones will be the materials about the philosophy job market.
If you want to provide any feedback on 7 Years Later at this stage, I recommend leaving a comment on the Google Doc version of it or sending me an email with your thoughts or comments.
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