ExponentialDecay

True to the extreme. "Fluency" in America seems to mean that a person kind of knows the grammar and speaks with an abysmal Anglo-Saxon accent. Although, a lot of the programs are being liquidated or joined among neighboring universities. It's not a great time to study Russian.

Education in the EU is generally only free in the country's native language, or only free for EU citizens. So, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe are very affordable/very free, but you try learning Finnish at a humanities scholar level.

In my experience, English-language masters-level programmes in the EU are designed for students from third-world countries that can't afford/can't get into US/UK/Canadian universities, or for non-EU citizens of any kind who wish to live in the country in question on a permanent basis. The way it works is that you come to the country for a long time (1-2 years), you get to learn the local way of life, you get yourself a social network, and after you graduate, it is exponentially easier to find a job/get married/get some kind of residency. Although, if you study a humanity in a country with 25% unemployment rate, that's maybe not such an obvious strategy. The only reason this would make sense for you, if your goal is to go for a PhD in the States, is if you intend to focus on Spain/the EU/need a lot of Spanish for your research - and the latter point is easier/cheaper done by living in the country/going on a Spanish language course. Maybe, if the university in question houses an OMGWTFBBQ specialist in your area, it would make sense. Otherwise, it would be wiser to get an MA from a budget university in the states. The prestige impact would be the same, plus, you're not bothering the committee with converting your grades and trying to figure out what it is that you actually did in your PhD. Although, all things are possible. The newest assistant professor at my institution (dev. economics) got his PhD at a middling university in Italy. And I literally don't understand why he is even here.

How is the immigration officer gonna check that this gentleman is your boyfriend? It's not like there's a paper trail or a stamp in your passport.

The reason British PhDs are shorter is that the students coming into them are much better prepared. I wouldn't stick my foot into the British system this late in the game, tbh, because it's a lot more incestuous than the States, and its universities have less prestige in the States unless it's Oxbridge. Tuition is still cheaper in the UK than in the US, but the funding situation is abysmal for international students and the cost of living is much higher (also, don't forget - you're not legal to work outside the university), so I wouldn't consider it at all, unless you're ready to apply for a Rhodes or a Gates.

Holy shit. So you have to have a realist sample to get accepted? What is this, Stalinism?

Thank you very much for your thoughtful answer. As a small side question, if you have time: what is the gender break-up of your students? Thanks again

A high school classmate of mine bought his history coursework online, but it got sent to the exam board as part of a sample (my school is very careful about their image with the exam board, so they check all randomly selected samples for plagiarism, and though in this case they "forgot", I think they just got so sick of him that they wanted an excuse to get rid of him). Anyway, it got sent to the exam board, the exam board found it was plagiarized, and banned him from exams. The school then had to expel him, one month before final exams, because they couldn't give him a leaving certificate if he didn't pass his exams. His dad paid $7 million for Brown's swimming center, so he's now at Brown. All's we'll that ends well.

You can clarify something for me. What would you say is the career goal of the Korean students you tutor? Do most of them expect to work in the States after? Or is a lit degree from America valuable in the Korean academy? Thanks in advance; I'm deathly curious

The solution to a problem is never to throw more money at the problem. Money can only be part of the implementation of a solution; that is to say, you need to first spend significant effort analyzing and deciding what course of action to take, and then only worry about how to bring that course of action into being. I agree with you that if you are wary about law school, you should not go. However, now that you've liquidated what has been your plan for, I guess, many years, you feel confused and you are pacing. You need to stop, gather yourself, get a job doing what you can (many recent graduates work below their education level, and there are worse fates than hitting up that retail sector again) and spend significant time and effort researching: - what you are capable of doing. I don't say what you want to do, though for me the two intersect, but what you are able to do day in day out at full concentration. The fields you speak about are highly competitive and you are a person of limited, judging by your credentials, mathematical and scientific background. You simply will not survive if you cannot do math on par with your colleagues. Do you even know if you can? - what the job market in your area is like. You say you are geographically immobile for family reasons, therefore, general employment trends for your are unimportant. You need to look at local employment trends. Whilst my experience tells me that a degree that has a high chance of propelling you into a govt position is more valuable than a marketing degree, I do not know the situation in Houston and I am inclined to trust your intuition. But you shouldn't. If your only concern is getting an above min wage job in Houston, you need to pick up your local paper and see which section has the most job ads. One does not go into economics or engineering looking for a middle class sinecure, simply because the level of effort and talent (former more important) to succeed against your peers is so high. They are far from your only options and they shouldn't be your first options if you're not deathly passionate about either. The trades have become very lucrative in recent years; an electrician or the dude who catches snakes earns in the low six figures, if not more. There are the popular options like nursing and programming, or getting a teaching cert. Any or all of these options may be untenable to you for whatever reason. I'm just suggesting. tl;dr you need to figure out what you want and what you can achieve before signing up for another degree

There's a lot of ways you can study languages (what about languages interests you, by the way?). I don't think scholars of literature actually study literature. They either study its phenomenology, which effectively is cultural studies of some description, or its structure, which grew out of what Saussure did. A lady I know inaugurated the translation studies program at Princeton, and she does translation theory based on Jakobson, which is like linguistics except she doesn't use math or experimentation and talks about the way that speaking a different language transforms the way that you think, which is a concept that I think can be done rigorously as part of linguistics (I've seen tangents on it in published research) but perhaps not with the technical and conceptual tools available now. I have no relation to linguistics whatsoever, but I stalk the LSA and this board, and it seems to me that linguists are more similar to economists and computer scientists than they are to anybody whom we traditionally associate with the languages. Like, if there isn't mad calculus, there's mad formal logic. It just seems like such a different methodology and way of approaching the subject matter that I feel, as a person with something of a literary studies background, I would feel very behind and out of place in a linguistics program. By which I mean, you might need a Master's. As for translation degrees, you actually have to be careful with them as you are with teaching degrees, because different types of translation have different types of degree or certification. For instance, to be a simultaneous translator, you need a special certificate. Medical, legal, and business translators all have different degrees. But keep in mind that this isn't a research degree; this is a 9-5 work your ass off 2 weeks vacation and 401k degree.

> Marketing, Economics, or even an engineering field. With the exception of Marketing, those fields are very math heavy. The general calculus you will need for either of those fields is actually not very hard as long as you study hard and practice it a lot, but you do need to take up to Calc III, Linear Algebra, and a statistics course that uses regression analysis to get into most Economics MAs. Assuming you know your algebra well, that's six courses. Perhaps you should consider trying those courses at your local university or community college to get a feel for them. If you want to go into engineering, which I can't speak to but would assume needs some chem, phys, and egr courses on top of the same math courses, plus a co-op or a project of some sort, you'll probably have to do a post-bac, but there's no point in spending the money if you try say Calc I and discover that you hate math. As for job security, an Economics MA is a very general degree. People looking to become more sought-after post-bac usually get masters in Finance or Accounting, or work for a couple of years and get an MBA. An Economics MA certainly has some kind of pay off, especially if it's a name-brand institution, but typically you have to have an idea of what industry you're going into after the MA, which typically means having prior internships or some other kind of personal network. I think you can work in government with an Econ MA, but from what I've gathered, there are Master's programs specifically geared towards placing their graduates in govt administration, and it would be a more sound decision, to go into them. The biggest value of an Economics MA is as a stepping stone to the PhD, for instance if you graduated college in an unrelated field, like you did, or if you need to make up mediocre grades. I can't speak to engineering or marketing, but I've heard from some friends that engineering MAs aren't sought out by employers because most people go on to the PhD straight from college. Have you tried programming?

Dude, what job do you want to get? If you want to work in education administration, get an EdD. If you want to teach a language to adult learners, get a teaching masters or a degree in the language you intend to teach, and be sure to check out the certification requirements of the area/level/institution you will be teaching, because I hear they differ. If you want to try to get a research job at a university, get a PhD in the discipline you intend to be a professor of. If you want to use your language skills and think about politics, change, policy and social justice, make liberal use of the Starbucks free wifi and your local library.

If you liked We, you might like the works of the brothers Strugatsky. I'm not sure of the quality of the translations, but the plot and character development should be good enough to keep the ball rolling either way. Of the ones I've seen translated, I would recommend Hard to be a God.

Comparative Literature; Translation Studies?

The only way you can get a PhD related to teaching languages is if you write a dissertation on language teaching in some capacity. The PhD is a research degree. If you want to teach languages, it's much more financially wise to get a teaching master's.

It pisses me off because you won't believe how many times I've heard a mofo be like, I AM VERY SMART BECAUSE I UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY TALK ABOUT ON BIG BANG THEORY. I've seen like two episodes myself because, when I watch TV, I like to watch dumb slapstick dumb middle class sitcoms instead of dumb slapstick dumb middle class sitcoms that liberally utilize wikipedia to make the viewers feel smart or like they've not just wasted an hour of their lives. PS I do like Mayim Bialik, not that I know her at all, but I am fond of her grandfather's poetry.

work the bejeebus out of your okcupid account.

because international students are ineligible for any and all federal, state, or other non-private moneys which is also why international students can't get a Fulbright or an NSF.

That's all my professors have ever written on any of my papers. Probably because the step following from "awkward wording" is writing down how it should have been worded.

Have you ever taken a literature class? Postgraduate literature is almost exclusively cultural studies. Your average social sciences degree will have a fair quantitative and methodological component, which is not impossible to integrate with Marxism - but it is rather controversial. If you're set on it, though, you can try UMass-Amherst (I only know for economics, but if their economics is left-leaning, than I can only stare in horror at their soc department). Though, even there, the people who conduct rigorous studies of Zizek are doing work in history of science or some such.

please don't do that. in general, when applying outside of the laboratory sciences, you shouldn't worry so much about your adviser, as you will have to take classes first and acclimatize yourself in the department anyway. not to mention, professors, especially at highly competitive universities, get so many emails from prospective students that i'm sure your poi would be grateful if you didn't add to her workload:) but seriously - and I am likely to get slammed for this by people with good intentions - do consider applying for a masters first. the funding situation in masters programs for international students especially is pretty dire, and given your research experience, i don't think it's impossible for you to get admitted to a PhD, but if you want to get into a good program, and especially if you want to stay in the West after graduation, your english will have to improve. you're good for quotidian life and for quantitative degrees, but academic writing in the humanities and social sciences is a whole different beast, both in terms of fluency required and knowledge of forms and conventions.

Posting because this is a common, and unfortunate, misconception held by many people in the first world. Degrees from developing countries are often held as less rigorous or indeed shady by adcomms, employers, other academics, and in some situations, immigration in developed countries. There is an element of truth to this, due to lack of academic funding, lack of resources, brain drain, particularities of the local bureaucracy, and just a general geographic, linguistic, cultural, and economic distance of the country from the current research powerhouses. It somewhat depends on the discipline - for instance, the post-Soviet area's graduates of the theoretical sciences are held in esteem (though depends on the university too) - but especially in social sciences and cultural studies, the ideological and theoretical differences are so vast, the lack of knowledge of the main lingue franca acknowledged in the western academy is so wide-spread that these graduates are often ill-adapted to academic life in the west, at least. I mean, academics in the US won't speak to you if you got your degree from a good but not super famous university in another country - how do you think a person would do if their colleagues can't even place their country on a map? Additionally, whereas Armenia is geographically considered Europe, it is not in fact a European country in any other sense. I strongly, I would say within a 1% error bound, suspect that the Armenian educational system is modeled after the Soviet system - in which case, yeah, if you're a graduate of anything but math or physics, you're gonna have a hard time. Converting a degree from a developing country in the west costs a great deal of money and involves an amount of effort. More importantly, if one intends to work in academia, one may not have the personal network necessary to advance. That's why you hear about immigrants with PhDs driving taxis in New York. But yes, the OP will need to check individual websites of programs to see if they allow students to enroll for a) a second PhD in the same subject. I'm not even sure Armenian Studies is a thing, though.

I do all my writing in the tub. Nothing like marinating in your bodily fluids for a couple of hours to get the creative juices flowing.

yo bro, if the first condition is null, proceed to the second condition. or does your alma mater have no math programs either?