Prospective Graduate Students

MA or PhD?

If you already have a Masters degree in Philosophy and you wish to continue your philosophical training, then you no doubt are applying to PhD programs. Our PhD program is a very small one and we only accept a few exceptional candidates, but we welcome your application.

If you want to pursue study of Philosophy but have only an undergraduate degree or an MA in another discipline, your options are more complicated. An MA in Philosophy is not necessary for entry into most good PhD programs. Many top programs even prefer to accept students directly from their undergraduate studies. Thus, you should apply to PhD programs directly if you have a very good Grade Point Average (especially in upper-level Philosophy courses), have taken a broad range of courses, have a polished paper to use as a writing sample, and two or three professors know you well enough write strong letters on your behalf. If you already have the philosophical education, the grades, the writing sample, and the letters of reference needed to apply to a PhD program there is little reason to do an MA.

In reality, however, many talented students are not quite ready to apply to a PhD program directly when they finish their BA. There can be many reasons why this would be so: a student might not be entirely certain that she really want a career in Philosophy and want to explore some more before making a commitment; another might have settled on Philosophy as his main interest too late in his undergraduate training to have enough courses in the full spectrum of philosophy; or perhaps interest and other contingencies conspired to make a student's course range narrow, or her GPA is too low, or he might lack a strong writing sample or a good set of letters. In all these cases and a host of others what is really needed is an MA program that will add some courses, round out the person's education, give her a chance to improve her GPA, allow him to shine in front of potential letter-writers and, in the end, provide her with a viable writing sample. The Philosophy Department at SFU has a long and successful history of preparing students for top PhD programs. Our students have been accepted at Arizona, Cambridge, Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, Duke, Edinburgh, Harvard, Indiana, Maryland, McGill, MIT, Oxford, Pittsburgh HPS, Princeton, St. Andrews, Stanford, UCLA, UCSD, UNC, University of Southern California, University of Toronto, Washington University PNP, Wisconsin, and many other fine departments and, equally importantly, many have completed their PhDs and gone on to good careers. See our Placement Record.

Which MA?

There are only a handful of MA programs that cater directly to those who wish to go on to a PhD but need further background in the discipline before they can apply successfully. Our Non-thesis MA option is designed precisely with this purpose in mind. Instead of working on a thesis, students take an extra course to further their education, bolster their GPA and get another chance at a strong letter of reference. Then they spend a term with the express purpose of polishing an already good paper into one that is of publishable quality, and so likely to impress admissions committees. This is by far our most popular program.

Many students express an interest in a one-year MA program in order to finish their studies as soon as possible, and some departments offer such programs. This is a sort of good program to pursue if your goal is simply to spend another year doing philosophy, or wish to add the ”MA” after your name. If, like most of our students, your intention is to go on to a PhD program or use your MA work for some other further purpose, a one year MA does not make much sense and certainly saves no time. This is because applications for most programs are in December or January so that, in order to go into a new program directly after your one-year MA, you would have to be applying before you have done any significant work at the graduate level. No one is in a position to write you a letter of reference; in some cases you don’t even have grades from you first term. Consequently, you are forced to take a year off after your one-year program; a year we think would be more profitably spent getting a better education.

There is another kind of student who should be going to an MA program. This kind of student already has a project that is coming along and plans to go into either a highly specialized program such as Logic, or an interdisciplinary one such as Cognitive Science or Public Policy. Such a person would do well to spend a year or two working on the project and taking courses directly relevant to it, not all of them necessarily in Philosophy. The Specialized MA option is designed with this kind of student in mind. In order to apply for the Specialized MA, the applicant must first develop a proposal and obtain a faculty member's agreement to supervise the project.

We have retained the Classic Thesis MA for those who wish to have both broad-based course work and a thesis at the MA level. Students may choose the non-thesis or the thesis stream at any time during their studies at SFU, and switch between them up to the point of Degree Completion.

Of course, not every student who comes to our MA program does so with the intention of applying to PhD programs. In fact, about 30% of our graduates choose other career goals at the end of their program. Most popular among these are Law School or a career in some, typically civil service, area requiring research skills and intellectual capacity.

A student may transfer from the PhD to the MA program at any time, given satisfactory progress. Transferring from MA to PhD is only permitted during the first year of study. After that time, the Department requires that the MA be completed first. In either case, the application process is the same as for entering students.

Details of degree requirements can be found in the Philosophy Grad Student Handbook. Please see also Admission Requirements and Awards and Financial Aid.

For further details on Graduate Study at SFU, see the Graduate Studies Website and the SFU Calendar. Please contact the Departmental Secretary (philsec at sfu.ca) with any procedural questions, and the Graduate Chair (hanson at sfu.ca) with any others.