leahmd325

Hi all, I'm a senior who's been accepted to a few MA programs and am looking for some guidance on final decisions for where to attend my masters program. For some background on me, I'm a linguistics student with a background in sociolinguistics, phonetics, and digital humanities. I want to focus on minority language usage (broad, I know) in my MA. By that I mean I want to do research on understudied groups in linguistics, so diversity of research is really important to me. Additionally, I plan on applying to linguistics PhD programs after finishing my MA, so I want to go to a school that will give me a fighting chance at getting into a top PhD program. I'm having trouble deciding between these two universities because they both offer really different opportunities (UNC is more theoretical whereas NC State is more applied) but also both have research interests I really enjoy. Financially, I have more funding from UNC, but only by $2k/year. In terms of surface-level attraction to each school, I really enjoy them both but I can't get over the name recognition UNC has over NC State. My advisor says NC State has more renowned faculty but I'm just a bit adrift in my decision making process. Any comments or advice, especially if you have experience with either school, is greatly appreciated!

Hey y'all, I'm a senior undergrad looking into a linguistics MA (and eventually PhD). I have a ton of interests in linguistics but I would say my main focuses are sociolinguistics (especially in minority communities), phonetics, and psycholinguistics. I've done a lot of research on grad schools that specialize in this but would love to get recommendations from those who have already been through the application process. I'm still not quite sure if my stats are ivy-league level but I would like to apply to 1 or 2. Some background on myself: I've been doing undergrad research at my university since sophomore year, primarily on sociolinguistics and with a fairly well known dialectologist. Within this field I've done work on American's accommodation towards British English while living in the UK, field work on refugee English acquisition and the social implications of learning English, and am going to be doing my senior thesis on the phonetics of vowels in the South. I have a 3.8 GPA, am getting a certificate in digital humanities (essentialy data processing for humanities data), have studied abroad and done research at Oxford, and am working in a sociology lab next semester. I haven't taken the GRE so unfortunately I don't have any scores yet. Unrelated to my major I have a lot of extracirricular experience working with refugees (I was president of a refugee outreach club last year, began a high school outreach group to help some locals become college-ready, and am currently working at a refugee nonprofit). I'm hoping to somehow incorporate my passion for this topic into my applications since it's been such a major part of my life in college. My top schools rn are Stanford (reach), U of Hawaii, NYU, Oxford, UC Davis, Santa Cruz, and Arizona. If anyone knows of good programs elsewhere please reply, I'd love to hear about it! Best, Leah.