isilya

Yeah, so far I've had this experience as well! I only skyped with one person at Maryland, but at NYU I skyped with both of my POIs simultaneously, and at Berkeley I skyped the whole admissions committee at once.

Information sharing time! I found out in my Skype interview today that Maryland's Open House is going to be Feb 26-27, so keep those days open if you're really interested in Maryland! If you already have another interview weekend somewhere else though, it seems like they will be accommodating. I'll be at another interview that weekend, and my POI said it would probably be totally fine to visit another weekend (if I actually get invited to Open House, that is!!). Also, Skype interviews are so fun!! I'm really enjoying them so far. I'm always scared and nervous beforehand but they've all been really fun and it's great to just talk about research for like half an hour

I told you!!

Wow, 20?? I know engineering graduates who apply to 100+ before they are able to land something. That's insane!! Where was this?

Haha, luckily I am not like that

Yeah, at some schools my GPA was lower than all the people who also got interviews, but at other places mine was on the higher side. And GREs are all over the place! It's totally impossible to tell just from that (unless your stats are way way lower). I still put my stats though because why not.

Yeah Maryland is definitely all over the place since it's by POI! I got an email from mine yesterday. Good luck :D

NYU Cognition and Perception: 2/13 MIT BCS: 2/27

You raise good points...like I said, it's an irrational paranoid fear I probably still wouldn't be comfortable putting my POI's name(s) in results posts, but I could imagine putting a description of their research so that it somewhat narrows it down for people, e.g. "neurolinguistics/language processing". That way people doing unrelated stuff would know that it doesn't apply to them.

First of all, sorry that sucks. I would ask someone else RIGHT NOW -- even if your writer comes through, it can't hurt to have an extra letter; if your writer doesn't come through, you'll have the required amount. Good luck!!

When I've posted in the results search, I haven't listed my POIs. Before I got interviews anywhere I thought that I would do that, but I actually feel sort of paranoid that my POIs go on gradcafe or something and see me posting and then know who I am and then go through my posts...I highly highly doubt that actually happens, but it's just this crazy fear I have...

It's so weird that after all of the painful waiting, everything starts happening all at once! I've heard from 4 schools in the past 5 days about interviews...

People actually put this up in the results search! Last year was last day of March or first day of April.

Yeah, I'm hoping to look at this! With all the Google n-gram data free and easily accessible, it's probably pretty easy to do analyses of when a particular order reached some critical threshold and became the dominant order, and look at what was going on culturally at the time (particularly for those loaded phrases like "black and white"). I'm getting so many research ideas from this thread I've thought about this a bit, and it's really intriguing because the very, very frequent phrases like "alive and well" are sort of idiomatic, while the infrequent ones like "bishops and seamstresses" are very clearly not. So you might expect to see differences in prediction mechanism between those! And another interesting thing is that the abstract ordering constraints aren't all semantic -- some of them are phonological, or purely perceptual (like, more salient things come first), so I wonder if you would see an N400 or if you would see a difference prediction-y component like the P300. Now I want to do this study, lol!

Thanks for the suggestions! Maybe I won't email, then. Once I get official acceptance/rejection I can thank them for their time, etc.

Wow...this person is a train wreck. Sounds like he never learned how to manage his time and now it's affecting everyone around him. I agree with Symmetry, leave!! Not necessarily leave the department, but at least try to find another advisor. This is not good!

I agree! It's starting to become apparent that prediction plays a central role in cognition in all sorts of different contexts, language is just one. Specifically I'm looking at English binomial expressions (like "alive and well"). We hear "alive and well" all the time but almost never hear "well and alive", and in online processing studies you can show that people process "alive and well" faster than "well and alive". From all of these instances of different binomials, though, we end up forming abstract representations of what orders tend to be more accepted based on different cues (e.g., the more perceptually salient thing tends to be the first in the expression, the thing that comes first in time tends to be first, etc.) And we can show that in brand-new binomials that people haven't heard before, like "bishops and seamstresses", they preferentially process the order predicted by these abstract ordering constraints. But then, what happens if we keep exposing participants to a new binomial in the "wrong" order? Do they eventually start processing the more frequent order faster? Or do they stick with their abstract ordering constraints? Or some combination of both? This is my thesis work on a more general level though, I'm just super interested in how people use their experience with language to constantly predict upcoming language stimuli and then update these predictions when they get to a later stream in the input. Sorry for the rambling, it's just fun to talk about

Hi all! I recently had a skype interview with the admissions committee at a university and I wanted to send a little followup "thank you for your time"-type email. How should I go about doing this? Should I send it to all the members of the admissions committee at once or individually? What should I say?? I didn't anticipate this little email being so stressful...!

This is a great question! In a recent skype interview with an adcomm I asked each of them what the greatest strength of the department was and it really gave me an insight into the culture of the department, what they value, etc. Thanks for the tip!!

Thought I would start a thread on this since there is one for older students Assuming I get accepted this application cycle, I'll be 21 when I start a PhD program (I'll turn 22 a few months in). It seems like a lot of first-year PhD students seem to be at least a bit older and have some amount of real world experience that I just don't have. Super young PhD students, what was your experience? Is there anything I should be prepared for as a young/inexperienced person?

Agreed. Also, I would take your real name off this post. You don't know who is looking at these threads...

I'm interested in online language processing & production! I'm particularly interested in how we use our abstract representations of language and item-specific representations to make predictions in real time about upcoming language stimuli (and relatedly, what happens when these representations clash). Right now I'm looking at this in a sentence processing context where we use abstract constraints but also item-specific knowledge to shape predictions about word order in binomial expressions, but I'm also interested in a variety of other contexts this happens in -- how frequency affects phonetic production, how the use of a particular construction influences our predictions about semantic & pragmatic meaning, how expectations of information density shape expectations about upcoming words, how task relevance changes what representations we use during processing, etc. Fun stuff!!!

Congrats! You're killing it so far this application season

Oh hey, so anyone who has a Berkeley interview, I wouldn't worry too much about it. They only ask the questions mentioned in the initial email. They're also all really nice!! I don't know how much the interview helped my chances, but it was a great experience and I really liked the culture the program seems to have

Yeah but if you look at Maryland it's all over the place in past years! Don't give up! I know less about NYU but I imagine it's similar. Linguistics programs in general seem not to send interview invites out all at once (if they do interviews at all).