In the face of a very difficult job market, we put in intensive efforts to place our graduate students and are continually looking for ways to improve.

The placement effort starts, of course, with providing one of the best philosophical educations possible. Our program is designed to provide both breadth and depth. Breadth is provided by the range of required courses our Ph.D. students are supposed to take during their first couple of years at Stanford. These include four core courses--(i) philosophy of language, (ii) philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology, (iii) ethics and political philosophy, and (iv) the philosophy of science--three courses in the history of philosophy; and least one logic course. Depth is provided by three years of intensive work on the dissertation starting with a dissertation development seminar in the summer after the second year that introduces students to the art of writing a dissertation.

Prior to going on the job market students have several occasions to practice presenting their ideas. Fourth-year students are required to present their research to the department as a whole in the Fourth-Year Colloquium. During the fourth and fifth years students present their research in our special, year-long, Advanced Ph.D. Proseminar. When students decide to go on the job market, we arrange at least one practice job talk to which the department as a whole is invited. Finally, we arrange practice interviews with small groups of our faculty for students going on the job market.

Each year, there is an official departmental Placement Committee composed of one relatively senior faculty member and one relatively junior faculty member. The senior faculty member is there to draw on his or her extensive network of connections in order both to be able to direct the attention of departments to our graduate students but also to be able to acquire useful feedback from departments who have considered our graduate students. The junior faculty member is there to provide graduate students with advice based on his or her own recent experience on the job market.

In addition to pushing for our students on the job market, this Committee reads each student's CV, cover letter, and so on in order to provide useful suggestions about how it would be best for the graduate student to present him or herself. The Committee in addition goes through the confidential recommendation letters of our faculty in order to ensure that the faculty member in question is not accidently conveying the wrong message by some inadvertent turn of phrase.

The first-round interviews for most jobs take place at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA). The department as a whole meets to discuss the students going on the job market in any particular year. We share relevant information about the students with the Placement Committee and with whatever other faculty members will be attending the APA meeting. These faculty members are then well placed to draw attention to our students at the APA. In addition, we collectively discuss at several points during the process who should ideally contact various departments on behalf of our graduate students.