Hi Puffer Fish,
I'm definitely not an expert, but reading your post only one big question comes to my mind: why computational linguistics? Did you take a course, do you have programming experience? From what I know the UW's program is not easy to get into and they expect you to have taken (at least) some courses in programming, statistics, etc.
Maybe you could look at some MOOC's and see if you can find a computational linguistics course (for example, this general introduction to NLP: https://www.coursera.org/learn/natural-language-processing)? That way you cant test whether you like it *and* whether you think you'll be able to do it. Also - if you decide to apply next year - it might help to show that you are motivated
Good luck!