xolo
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Posts posted by xolo
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Wyatt, I upvoted you to cancel your down vote - you are too hard on yourself!
What I MEANT to say to 1Q84 was simply, don't stress. The app process is super stressful anyway and you don't need to get tied up in knots over little gray areas. I'm not sure people always help themselves by emailing POIs and I'm not sure they always hurt themselves by not emailing.
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Contacting POIs seems to be an emotional topic. I tend not to contact POIs unless I have a good reason to. I have, however, had some really good conversations with high ranking professors who could be my advisors - those were achieved through unique ways, almost by chance. So my point is that this is a subjective area and the general answer, like many answers in life, is "it depends". The university systems is from medieval times and I guess it shows, although I see a lot of benefit in this direct one-on-one as well.
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I was lucky enough to get a 169 V on my first shot (we shan't discuss my Q score :/) but I have a degree in Latin.
I honestly thought being able to puzzle out vocab words with Latinate roots really saved me a lot of time to concentrate on the other aspects of the V section. To that end, I personally would suggest getting to know Latin prefixes and suffixes and other common etymological relationships (one that always stuck out to me was silva meaning forest or woods in Latin, which gives us Sylvia, Transylvania (literally on the other side of the forest), silvan, etc.)
YMMV!
I do not consider myself a person with a particularly large vocabulary, but I have had this theory that knowing Latin roots, especially of low frequency words, as evident in a modern version of Latin, helped me. I got a 168V (and we shan't discuss my Q either)
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thank you kindly mollifiedmolloy!
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Bummer, so close to near perfection. I think the AWA is the least important section and for sciences even less so. "they say" that 3.5 to 4.0 is "safe". It did annoy me when I got a 4.0 and I ended up re-taking even though I said I would never take the GRE over. I studied a little and got a 5.0 the second time, so you can study for that test of formulaic writing. I was surprised by my verbal too, it went from 163 to 168, which was a pleasant surprise. Too bad my Q didn't change much
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Thanks for the report shadowclaw. That is about what my experience was also, except in languages there wasn't much lab work discussed, more of a cultural discussion. We did discuss fieldwork and data collection in the context of linguistics. The professor I spoke with was really nice and gave me tons of great ideas. I really think there is a tendency to overthink the interview, at least in my experience, anyway.
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How about "While creating the program I was able to explore programming from a hands-on perspective and what started as a chore quickly became a much bigger exploration of what goes into a good program. I then designed the framework for the data collection and this pushed me to learn about the architecture and organization of data"... There is just so much you could do with this!
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Is that Hemingway in your avatar? I went from BA math directly to MS Engineering. What field of engineering are you interested in? You really need to talk to professors at the different schools. I found a wide range of pre-requisites, from having to take all the undergrad engineering classes (yuck) to being accepted because I had a math degree. I ended up going to Santa Clara University because at the time they accepted math degrees equally to engineering degrees for grad engineering. It really worked out good but I had to talk to a number of schools.
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I agree with your strategies. If you are taking the test computer based, one thing I did was after about a minute if I didn't have the answer I gave what I thought was the answer (you can usually reduce the number of possible correct answers after a minute) AND I MARKED THE QUESTION. This allowed me to answer all the easy questions and start to answer the harder ones and still have 10-15 minutes to circle back and try to crack the remaining questions. For me, especially in math, time is my enemy.
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I had the same thing happen to me - I overbooked while obsessing on the GRE and then got a pretty good score, good enough for me to stop obsessing anyway. It does still say "unavailable or absent" on my ETS account for the test session I cancelled, but I sent my scores after the testing and only sent my single best test. I don't think you have anything to worry about, ETS probably has some kind of legal responsibility to maintain records I suppose, but it should say "cancelled"
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I studied off and on for 3 weeks and raised my verbal 5 points and my math 1 point. That was with Magoosh which I like. That dang math was sooo boring. I really believe this, and in your case even more so, a big variable is taking the test with the right attitude. You need to stay calm - remember you can take the test as many times as you like (until ETS has the contents of your bank account anyway). So just make sure you have the time set aside for the exam, get there a half hour early, and just do your best. I'm betting you get that high score.
- youngcharlie101 and Gvh
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I'm in a humanities field so I'll post my somewhat related musings. Spanish departments are just starting to recognize that not all PhDs are going to get jobs, or at least not going to get good tenure track jobs that end at Professor with no qualifying adjective around the title. I felt I had to put on my SOP that I intend to teach but I really don't know what the prospects are for that. It seems good statistics are not easy to come by. My real interest is research. In the case of Spanish, I was thinking about starting with Latin American studies but found that Spanish departments don't necessarily welcome someone who demonstrates a lack of focus by moving between programs (something to think about if you want to go the MFA --> PhD route).
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My bad. I over-reacted to the very thought of writing multiple SOPs from the ground up! Now that you mention it, I do have a question. My "native" SOP is 900 words and it can be reduced to about 700 without too much negative affect. I do have a couple of schools that state 500 words. Do you think a 700 word SOP for a 500 word limit will be a problem?
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Oh, I definitely did this, that's just common sense. At first, all schools sort of looked the same. As time went by, they all started to look different. I just didn't write each SOP from the ground up.
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I just want you all to know how jealous I am, I think the Languages forum has gone belly up. Hopefully it will pick up. There is no way my SOP is going to be unique to each school. That is too much creative writing, it took me a year to write the sucker, maybe you creative types can handle writing multiple SOPs. What I did was write my SOP and then tried to find schools that matched it. I feel I have a unique story and I feel it is strong. Of course, how I feel doesn't really matter at admission time.
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For all you erudite linguists. I have been studying Spanish linguistics and am basically ignorant about English. Is there a good foundational textbook that has, for example, a complete list of English phonemes and their associated allophones? I am starting to think comparatively and this Spanish one-sidedness is starting to annoy.
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Can you not talk to the PI and ask him to supply the rational in his letter? I wouldn't want that discussion wasting space in my SOP. I guess this depends on your relationship with the PI but it can be spun into a positive, "so and so left because he received multiple offers due to his hard work and one offer came in late that really fit him perfectly" There's no need for sour grapes!
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I'm applying to UT Austin also, otherwise my schools are more out west than yours. Maybe someone else will share a different point of view, but in my opinion when you say "PhD program" in "Spanish", there is no such thing as a safety school. Are you a traditional student with a bachelor's or master's in Spanish?
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Others may know more, but it is very common for grad students to teach foreign languages as TAs. I know that sometimes TAs in Spanish are actually students in a different department but they work something out with the Spanish department. If Arabic is her language, I wouldn't know about that specifically, it is generally a much smaller department.
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This is all too common so don't think you are the only one who has this burden. Just try to stay focused on what you are about (easier said than done, I know). I also wouldn't assume your work was below par - give it some time for calm and then assess.
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Thank you all for the comments!
I am a heritage speaker of Greek (Istanbul dialect) and Syriac (Aramaic), although I am fluent in Spanish and conversant in Turkish, Portuguese and learning other languages. Spanish linguistics is essentially an applied/sociolinguistic approach to Spanish (dialectology, bilingualism, ideologies, etc.). For the letters of recommendation, I have my thesis advisor (who also taught two of my MA courses) and one of the program coordinators of my MA, both of whom wrote me letters last year. My third was an undergraduate professor with whom I took three Spanish ling courses, however maybe I should have the coordinator of my research fellowship write me one? The problem is that he is a historian, but can attest to my fieldwork, etc.?
I'm still confused. Are you applying to a linguistics department or a Spanish department? All of your LOR writers are good. I can only offer that you should use the people who can provide the most persuasive case for you, in light of your overall application.
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Scarecrow, you sound like you have all the bases covered. I think you just need to pull it all together with your SOP, writing sample, letters of recommendation. Are you a Spanish or Greek speaker? Sorry, I don't know what Spanish Linguistics is, maybe that is something in the linguistics department that doesn't involve knowing the language?
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Why do you want a PhD? What does the department say?
Anyway, you do not have a problem whatsoever, in my opinion.
Don't give up! You are talking about mere Bs and measly grades and GPA. That is not the crux of what a PhD is all about, right?
Now, I detect in your writing a certain exhaustion and frustration which is normal, it sounds like you have your plate really full. I don't know if this is practical for you, and maybe this is the situation anyway, but can you study in a country of your chosen language for a year? That will really help!
How do you know when it's done?
in Writing Samples
Posted
Easy to answer: It's never done, you just run out of time or collapse from exhaustion.