ColorlessGreen

I listed it. Can't hurt, right?

Applications: 4 Think I'm competitive at: 1 Have an irrational good feeling about: 1 Sincerely doubt I have a chance at even IF I wear my lucky underwear for the next three months: 2

Depends on the types of classes, too. I have one friend who is in the engineering department and considers 15 hours to be a heavy load (and I'm sure any other students or teachers in her department would agree), but I have taken somewhere between 19-21 hours of humanities courses for the past two years and wouldn't consider that heavy at all, even though 18 hours is the maximum an undergraduate is allowed to take at my school without special permission. Maybe that's because all those hours usually only work out to 5 classes, though, due to 4 or 5 hour language courses. In short, I'm sure 20+ looks heavy on any transcript, but it would be especially difficult to handle in certain disciplines.

I doubt there's anything wrong with using the passive voice in your SOP, unless it seems jarring to you and your editors. The passive voice has its uses in English, and can be extremely effective when used well, so the only important question is whether you DO use it well. In my opinion, a good passive construction is an invisible one; your readers should be too engrossed in your writing to notice whether it is in active or passive voice. In the interest of full transparency, I offer my own SOP's beginning sentence, the lone passive construction in the piece: "My original decision to study linguistics was based on a love of language, little real information, and a great deal of enthusiasm."

Submitted my first online application yesterday. Next deadline - December 8. I'm preparing for a busy Thanksgiving break.

What confuses me about the IU app is the part only for students under 21. Under 18 I get, but why would a 20 year old like myself have to provide my parents' contact information? Am I still a minor in Indiana? It's really strange. Most of my online apps have had layouts similar to IU's for work experience and publications. I don't think any of them actually ask for a CV, in fact.

Well, I thought that I had my SOP pretty much figured out, until I realized just how little time I have left. Now I'm panicking a bit, especially as I promised one of my LOR writers I'd finish it and submit it this week for one of my schools. All of a sudden my "experience" section is seeming very sparse, and I'm not sure how to pad it and remain honest. I'm graduating this spring, but before that I will be taking two graduate level electives in my field - would it be appropriate to mention this? Would it make me seem more serious and committed, or is it simply irrelevant? I know that I'll be competing with students who've already finished an MA, so I want to seem as earnest and well-prepared as possible. What do you guys think?

Sorry to send this thread so far off-topic, but... For anyone who is applying to a linguistics program, a word of advice: don't assume that singular "they" is incorrect. It's fine to object to it on a stylistic basis or on the grounds that it is clunky or weird in your own idiolect, but there are a million counterarguments to the suggestion that it is somehow wrong. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Anthony Trollope all used singular "they," to say nothing of millions of other English speakers who have been using it for at least 600 years. To say that it is wrong would be, from a linguistic standpoint, not only absurd but bad linguistics as well. The Cambridge English Grammar, along with most other reputable English grammars, puts the myth that it is wrong to rest, but there is still a great deal of confusion about singular "they" in the popular literature. Introductory linguistics classes, in my experience, almost always cover this topic when discussing prescriptivism versus descriptivism, so for anyone applying to linguistics from a different undergraduate discipline, it probably wouldn't hurt to read up on it a bit. You can check out the Language Log, run by Mark Liberman of UPenn among others, for more information. A few of their posts about singular "they" are here, here, here, and here.

I got an experimental math section; I knew it was experimental because they let me use a calculator on it. Then at the end of that section, the computer told me that the section had been experimental and that it would not count towards my score, but 200 of the top scorers would get a gift certificate. Never heard back on that, so I'm quite glad that section didn't count. Adding the use of a calculator seemed to make the questions a lot harder suddenly...

I have, but he may have forgotten. I'll try gently reminding him. Thank you for your advice!

I may have exaggerated my dire predicament slightly. I think I can in fact finish the second paper by most of my deadlines, and possibly even the first one, if I buckle down and actually do it. So far I've been agonizing over my SOP mostly, and then I realized today that even the best SOP will not help me if I submit a terrible writing sample to go with it, so I panicked. Anyway, thank you for your feedback! I'm glad to hear that you suggest the second paper; that is the one that I was thinking of using. I may be able to finish a suitably polished version in time. I was planning on waiting for my professor's feedback on what I've sent him so far, but he hasn't said anything about it, and I sent it two weeks ago. I think I'll just assume that the silence on his part means he thinks it's okay, and keep working. Usually he's very blunt when he thinks I'm on the wrong track, so I'm sure I would have heard by now if he disagreed with my conclusions.

I'm having some trouble deciding what to use for my writing sample, and I thought maybe someone on this forum could help. Right now I'm wavering between two choices - a paper I wrote last year about the status of derivational and inflectional morphemes in Sgaw Karen, and a paper that I have not yet finished writing about historical [y] and merging into a diphthong [iu] in Midwestern American English. The pros for paper 1: a)it's actually done, b)I got an A on it, c)it's written in the generative linguistics tradition (I use this term in the broadest possible sense), and I am applying to primarily theoretical schools. Cons: a)it's very shallow - most of it is discussing the difference between freestanding phonological words, clitics, and affixes in a way that really does not contribute anything new to the literature, b)it's short - only 5 pages, c)I made the mistake of choosing an obscure language without having a native speaker available, and consequently a lot of my data is drawn from writings from the 1800s and a few more recent linguistic analyses. Also, my conclusion is pathetically obvious, and I somehow doubt that the status of these morphemes was ever in question. Also, it's not as focused as it should be. The pros for paper 2: a)it promises to be more in-depth, and very slightly longer, than paper 1, b)I have plenty of data, c)I have some lovely screencaps from Praat to use. Cons: a)it's a historical linguistics paper, which is generally Not Done anymore, and which I don't want to study in grad school, b)I haven't finished it, and may not be able to finish it by my first deadline, c)my beautiful Praat screencaps are not actually very important to the topic. Any opinions? Thanks!

It's not just you - I'm from the US and I still don't know the conversion systems! Apparently there are 5280 feet to a mile, but if I were guessing, I'd be off by at least 100 feet, which is enough to get me the wrong answer. I don't remember ever being taught that, or pints, or any of our weird units of measurement in school (although I do know how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius, thanks to AP Chem). I was lucky enough to avoid getting many of these questions when I took the GRE, but it's pretty ridiculous that there were any at all.

I'd say ask your reference-writers. I provided one of mine with envelopes and he told me not to bother; he intended to use departmental envelopes. For the record, I think the department uses commercial-sized envelopes.

I believe what everyone is trying to tell you is that "ok" is not really good enough. Graduate programs are difficult to get into, and there will be a lot of competition, even for a lesser-known program. Many people will be applying, and many of those people will have the background that you lack. That is why it is in your best interest to make your SOP as good as it possibly can be. You may be setting your sights low on a conditional admission, but that doesn't mean you should put any less than your best effort into your SOP. If you really want to be accepted, you should be trying your hardest now to improve your application however possible. That said, I agree that your SOP comes off as unfocused. Even though your interests and goals may change later, this statement should offer concrete examples of each. The admission officers need some reason to believe that you have the will and drive to complete this degree and do some kind of serious work, and that is simply not shown by a list of jobs that you have abandoned and a collection of jobs you might want to do. You might consider writing an entirely new SOP, rewriting this one, and then writing one more based on the strongest parts of both. The first draft is never perfect, and sometimes it takes as many as ten or twenty to get your ideas and wording just right. Don't be afraid to rewrite, especially if many, many people are telling you to.

Let me preface this by saying that I doubt I know much more than you about the grad school application process, but... I wouldn't worry about your GRE - it's quite good, and increasing it would not, IMHO, make your chance of admission greater at any school with its priorities straight (I scored about the same, so I have an invested interest in thinking this). Is your research experience in your field? Are your LOR writers economists, or do they at least understand what studying Economics would entail? Do you have a strong idea of why you want to study Economics, and what you would want to research in the future? These seem like much more relevant questions to me.

I think that usually, the most important thing about reading comprehension is time management. I don't know how you've been doing it, but I would suggest that you NOT read the passage before reading the questions. It wastes quite a bit of time, since the passage they give you will usually be about something you have no experience with, so you won't retain the information well enough for it to be helpful. Read the question, then search for the answer in the passage. Just be sure that you double-check the context to be sure it's right. It's different for every person, but I find that this is the easiest way for me to deal with reading comprehension passages. Practice with reading for content is also extremely important, of course.

If you do decide to retake the GRE, I have at least one idea about how to increase your verbal score. There's a website called freerice.com that's quite good for drilling vocabulary - I've found that it often gives out Latinate words that correspond to the types of words that show up on standardized tests. Anything above level 50 will be entirely unhelpful - it's way too obscure to ever show up on the GRE - but if you get up that high, you won't need to drill vocabulary anyway. From what little I know, the GRE isn't the be-all and end-all of applications - admissions committees might use it for the first cut, but they ought to focus much, much more on the rest of the application. However, your score on an individual part of the GRE might factor heavily - quantitative for math or science, verbal for the humanities. I imagine your percentile is more important than your score, though.

Hi, guys! I'm really excited to be applying this year. Hopefully we'll all get into the schools we want!

Hello, this is my first year applying! I'm interested in phonetics and phonology, and I'm applying to Indiana, Iowa, UMass, and Stanford (I'm not hopeful about getting into either UMass or Stanford, but it seems worth a try regardless). I'm glad to meet you all, and good luck to everyone applying this year!