Well, as I said above, I have no formal linguistics background whatsoever. I studied both Russian and French at undergrad and have lived for a total of three years in Russia, so my Russian knowledge is more practical. Nonetheless, if Chicago accepts me I'll take the linguistics track. I don't know if taking up linguistics at this stage is realistic, but I want to try. I'm interested in morphology, especially the morphological changes Russian has undergone as a result of social and political events - the October Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, for example. In a broader sense I'm interested in the interactions of state and language - official languages, language rights and language policies (especially for minority languages), for example, the Russian language in the Ukraine and Latvia (and the post-Soviet space in general). What drives me most of all is my ambition to become a teacher of Russian, but alongside that I want to learn something (well, more than just 'something'!) about linguistics as a science.