Liquirizia

I'm not a total expert, but I would say: Keeping your answers as brief as possible always allows more time and is reasonable considering how brief the interview is. Don't ramble the time away. In your answers, you can leave things open ended to provoke a question on their end for you to talk about what you left open ended. Lead them into the topics you want to discuss or highlight. They have an agenda of questions to get through, which you can't control. They usually leave 5 minutes at the end for questions which isn't much. So when you answer their questions, you might bring up something in your answer that could spark them to think of something to tell you that you would have wanted to ask as a question otherwise. Being prepared as much as possible beforehand - polishing answers to prevent yourself from rambling. Also, preparing all the questions you want to know from them so they're clear in your mind and written down for you to reference. I hope this all makes sense. Again, these are my ideas based on my experiences with these 20 to 30 minute interviews. *edit - I also, have written down every question asked from all my interviews - which helped me prepare for the subsequent interviews.

To whoever wrote this, I thank you sincerely. It needed to be said.

Also, I realize your question was, "is there a best language to learn for students of comparative literature or students of linguistics?" The best language is always one that interests you. Any language is learnable. How fast and easily you learn it depends on your native language to an extent and to a larger extent your motivation to learn the target language. If you have no interest in the target language, it will be hell to learn. So picking a language means finding a culture you find endlessly fascinating - that way learning the language will be much less work for you. And it will be enjoyable.

Disclaimer: I am not a student of comp lit, but I was planning to pursue it (applied last year) so I took some time to really learn about the field. Learning Turkish will definitely help you in Comp Lit - in fact it will hurt you if don't have multiple languages. However, you already have Persian and French under your belt so while learning Turkish is nice, you've already won the battle. In general, language combinations are totally up to you in Comp Lit, but you have to be ale to connect them somehow -- whether that is a shared literary movement, did a famous French author live in Turkey and that informed their writings, do the languages share politics, borders, etc. You need to be able to connect them somehow. This is crucial for you to be apple to explain in your applications. Funny enough a friend of mine is getting her PhD in Comp Lit and her languages are Turkish and French - but it is uncommon. She said it is both extremely challenging, but extremely impressive because it's not common. She mentioned that it adds to her stress a little bit because it's only impressive if she does it well. I think her foci are memory, trauma and genocide connecting the languages). TLDR: Any language combination is good as long as you can connect them. For linguistics, you don't need to speak another language to study it. Some of the most famous linguists like Noam Chomsky don't speak any languages other than English. So knowing other languages will certainly help you as a linguist (and make you stand out in your apps), but it isn't required in the way Comp Lit requires languages.

Ciao a tutti! I have been seeing a lot of questions in the grad admission results, especially regarding interviews. I decided to start this thread to create a space to ask those questions and share admissions results/experiences with each other. To get things started, I saw a lot of questions asking about NYU interviews. I can only speak for myself. I was interviewed on Jan 22, and I have not heard anything since. Judging by the results, it seems no one else has heard back either, but they must be doing a second round of interviews. Can't wait to hear from everyone! Hope you're all staying positive.