fuzzylogician

I've started declining offers from schools I am sure I won't attend, and even though I know I won't go there, it was still gut-wrenching having to write to potential advisers who were so nice and supportive up until now and tell them I won't accept their offer. I feel bad about having to say no to great offers, but on the other hand knowing that someone off the waitlist will get a yes helps make up that. Everyone I've written to so far knew I had other offers I was considering, and was very understanding of my choosing a different place. But yes, it was a hard thing to have to do..

I'm choosing between schools that are a better match but offer less money and schools that are not as good a match (and are ranked lower) but offer a lot more money. I'll choose one of the better matches because they still offer enough funding for me to live reasonably well, and fit is more important to me than more money.

I mean languages other than English. I've been at this for a while now, the field is very small where I'm at, and I personally know the people working on corpus linguistics here. I think I'd know if there was a corpus that suited my needs--I really wish there were, I spent a lot of time last summer doing google searches for data someone needed for their research which I couldn't find evidence of in our corpora (but abounded in chats). I probably could have done a month's work in a week if I had a tagged corpus *sighs*.

There was a thread that discussed this topic around here on one of the forums recently. I'm planning to send each of my letter writers a hand written thank-you card as soon as I make my decision. I might also add a small present for each of them. If you're uncomfortable with doing that, you should at least send an e-mail. Most recommenders are interested in knowing how the process turned out for the students they recommended.

Considering that it's still March, that's a hard question to answer . I don't understand why there should be any connection between being an international and getting acceptances in April. Why wouldn't it be possible? There would still plenty of time to deal with the bureaucracy even if the admissions offer came in May.. I don't know, you could be on a waitlist and get an offer after someone else declined their offer at the last minute.

I don't think you should read too much into this. Your file has been forwarded to one of the committee members, who is reviewing it; another told you that he's on the committee as well, and will therefore also review your file. It sounds like all the committee members (or maybe of the ones who are relevant to each specialization) are reviewing all of the candidate files. If that's correct, then your chances are probably the same as all of the other finalists. Re: international students, none of the universities which offered me admissions included any documents relating to visas and other bureaucratic stuff to do with the intl status. I think they only start dealing with that after you accept their offer. Good luck!

Congratulations!

You really need to ask the program that question. They will be able to tell you if they issue J1 visas and if you can be a candidate for one. I think sometimes schools can choose either (though J1 is more of a hassle, I hear) and you can try to haggle, it all depends on the specific school, the sources of your funding there, etc. Sometimes schools can only issue F1 visas. The safest bet is to call the department and get the most accurate information there. Visas are too important for you to risk relying on information someone gave you in a forum anyway .

I don't think anyone here claimed that we shouldn't use corpora as a tool in our research. But: for the languages I work on, few, if any, corpora exist. The few that do (for some of the languages) don't contain enough data in the registers I am looking at (=they're usually of newspapers and suchlike, but I'm looking at informal speech). Often they're too small for me to infer anything about the frequency of use of an utterance, or the probability that it's unacceptable (just because it doesn't occur in my small sample). Given that, I sometimes have to revert back to making up examples and asking informants if they're acceptable. I try to base them on google searches of chats and fora which use informal speech, or on things people I eavesdropped on in the street or on buses said . Unfortunately, more so than not, corpora just don't give me conclusive information about what I'm looking for.

I think it all depends on what the difference between a "good" and a "fabulous" research match means for you. If you feel that you can find a good adviser at the school ranked #1, who you get along with and who will guide you and help you produce good work (=possibly work less related to their research, since the match is only "good"), then it's a hands down winner in my book. Otherwise it's a harder choice, and I'd need more info - what's the placement record of students of your potential adviser at top #100 university? How much financial strain will going to Ivy League School put on you (I am a firm believer in not going into debt for your Phd, especially when you have funded offers). How important is a friendly adviser to you--do you see yourself getting along with the aloof faculty of Ivy League?

Seconded. It's not you, it's her. When I met with faculty, I found that all I needed in order to find out if I got along with them was to engage them in some kind of conversation, the topic was not important. I usually let them have the first word - if they started out by asking me what I wanted to know, I would ask, "what do you want to tell me." I learned the most from what they chose to tell me about themselves and the program, and would later follow up with questions as needed. I asked the most routine questions you can find on the website, it was useful because you sometimes get more details/different information than is posted online. I talked about my research, asked about the prof's. I asked about the prof's mentoring style, the kind of student they like to work with, etc. I asked more generally, what type of student does well in the program, if they think the students are happy, if the atmosphere is friendly and there's collaboration between faculty and students (or faculty/faculty). And I asked about money. It all depended on where the conversation drifted. Since I talked to several faculty and students at each place I visited, I ended up with a full picture of each place. I (almost) never had adverse reactions to any of my questions--it happened once, and while I thought I must have done something horribly wrong at the time, I now think that person did me a favor. Imagine I'd have gone to their school only to find out I couldn't get along with them!

Oh man, I'm sorry to hear about your rejection, that sucks! I totally agree that you shouldn't get into debt counting on the UC system to recover and pay your way in future years, it's a much too large a risk to take. I'm glad you're starting to see again the advantages in Waterloo that made you apply there in the first place; with a great research fit+generous funding+good location+housing, it sounds like it has a lot going for it. Definitely go there and see how you like it--one person's safety is another's first choice and you might find yourself becoming enthusiastic about it. Have you been in contact with the interested faculty there? Probably a lot will depend on how well you two connect.

The issue of location is very important for me, considering that I'll be spending at least 5 years wherever I choose to go. I have several funded offers of comparable strength so I can afford to take factor this a consideration. However, if only one of my offers were funded, then the money factor would outweigh any other factor, unless I felt I would be utterly miserable living in a certain place (I didn't even bother applying to places I knew I couldn't live in). In your place, I think school A would be my hands-down winner.

Since I don't want to get dragged into a long debate with you addressing half sentences and phrases I wrote out of context and referring me to reading materials, I'll try to keep this as brief as possible and will refrain from answering again (you will have to forgive me for not quoting entire passages. The post got too long and confused to read that way. Rest assured I am addressing entire passages and not only the sentence I quote, which is only meant to signal what paragraph I'm referring to) . I don't know if it's justified or not. The criticism you cite doesn't represent the field as I know it, and it's outdated. Therefore, even if we were to conclude our discussion with you winning every point, how will that forward our discussion of what's happening in the field right now? As lingapplicant and psycholinguist have said, the field seems to be moving in what I think you would call a "functional" direction, so why make rigid distinctions between 'formal' and 'functional' linguistics? Well, then, we can debate what is meaningful or meaningless in the study of language and for what ends. I don't believe research has to have a purpose, other than to better our understanding of whichever phenomenon we're studying. You may think studying an utterance out of context serves no function. I think it furthers our understanding of the way this utterance behaves. It shows us additional meanings that it can express, and, while you may not like this, it betters our understanding of what a certain utterance *cannot* express, regardless of manipulation of context, etc. It gives us insight into the breadth of expression of a certain utterance, but also into it's limitations. You work on corpora. Assume you have mined bountiful data from various corpora but have no evidence a certain construction ever occurs. You and dozens of informants judge sentences containing it malformed. I'd consider it then a fact that this construction is ungrammatical, would like to make the prediction that you won't find it occurring in any later search, and would like to give an explanation of why this is so (ideally by making one simple generalization). You may easily disprove my thesis by showing me new evidence that this construction does occur somewhere, and that will surely prompt me to re-think my analysis. In the absence of such proof, I think the stronger analysis is the one that predicts more facts -- both about occurring and non-occurring constructions in the language. Your world is random, you never know when you might encounter something you've never seen before. Mine is orderly, at the expense of making certain generalizations you have refrained from making, but I am now much more confident about the way my world is structured. Well, we don't just make up these generalizations in our feverish dreams--of course we base them on observable facts (e.g., such-and-such is a non-occurring utterance). Sometimes it's more economical to draw a conclusion from absent occurrences in the data to what you do see. It might allow you to make one generalization of what is disallowed, and derive from this different cases of forms that are allowed, that you would otherwise fail to generalize over with one rule. It allows us to order our universe in a deeper way than just observing things that are on the surface. To use your example, you can't see gravity, but you certainly can feel its effects. The same goes for our generalizations into things you can't see. We make them in order to better explain the things we do see. This said, I will now cease and desist, stop procrastinating and go work on my thesis .

Unless told I'm not allowed to rely on outside sources while solving a particular problem set, I don't see why it's so wrong to look for background info, try to find out how similar problems have been solved, what other authors had to say about the problem, etc. Research wouldn't make any advances if everyone had to reinvent the wheel every time they encountered a new problem. However, I do see a difference between that, and downright copying the answer to the question from the teacher's manual. Plus, academic integrity forces us to cite sources we used in solving a problem, and I see failure to do so as a much more serious problem than the actual use of outside sources. I don't see a difference between using materials found online and in textbooks. What difference could it possibly make if I look an article up online or go to the library and look at the hard copy? Again, I usually consider myself allowed to use whatever tools I would normally use in my research to solve a given problem, unless otherwise instructed by the teacher.

I think it would be helpful if you referred to the current state of research in the field, not to criticism (justified or not, I don't even see the point in debating that) from 20 years ago. I have several reservations regarding corpus work, though I see its advantages and use it to collect examples for my papers, instead of making up my own, perhaps unnatural, examples. For one, in everyday speech, speakers tend to disambiguate their sentences in different ways in order to convey a more precise meaning to the hearer. Now, one of my main interests is scope ambiguities, and the fact that I see an ambiguous sentence used mainly (only?) on its prominent reading in corpora does not mean that I can rule out the possibility that the sentence also has a non-prominent reading. The everyday cooperative speaker, who seeks to assign one clear meaning to an utterance, has in this case the opposite agenda than I have (namely to detail every possible meaning the utterance may have). This leads me to the bigger problem: corpus work only describes what IS there. It cannot explain what isn't there. But that's a large part of what I, as a formal linguist, aspire to do: I am concerned with explaining both constructions that occur in natural language and those that do not, and cannot, occur. I want to be able to differentiate between non-occuring cases of grammatical sentences (say, on their less-prominent reading) and non-occuring cases of non-grammatical sentences. I want to be able to explain and predict those facts. Drawing conclusions from data you find in corpora alone won't give you that - you have to assume some kind of theory to explain facts you can't "see". I don't think that this is such a bad concequence as you make it out to be. As in every other science, your theories must be well motivated and subject the review and critique of your peers. If your theory is disproved by counter evidence, obviously you would have to work on improving it. But it's not inately wrong just because you don't see it.

Thank you for posting this. It's been ten days\two weeks since I visited my last two schools, but I hadn't gotten around to writing thank-you notes. I'll do them right now...let's hope they'll be accepted well.

I've more or less decided, but I don't feel ready yet to let go of (some of) my other offers.

As Aceflyer said before, taking a course is not a prerequisite for succeeding on the exam. Many people have received high scores without taking a prep-course (myself included), all you need is enough time and self discipline to study on your own. I got a 10$-worth used book+disc and used that, free websites and the ETS materials to study. I thought that the ETS software gave the most accurate prediction of my score. The fact that you had to pay for 7 additional score reports was *your choice*. Most of us couldn't afford to send out as many applications as you did (we had to pay for the test and whatnot), so I don't really see how that's a fair argument. That's overstating it just a bit. I'm the last one to defend the ETS and have a lot to say against how things are currently going, but you have to admit it's not as bad as you make it sound. Most applicants will not have any published work by the time they apply, and having someone read a multitude of writing samples is time-consuming and unrealistic. On the other hand, studying for an exam and solving some analogies is not that difficult, though admittedly a less accurate predictor of your success. It is, however, a more feasible criterion for schools to contemplate, and all you have to do is pass a certain lower bound score that's not at all impossible to achieve in order to have your application considered. I think it's a common consensus that no one factor will get you into, or keep you out of, grad school. If you have a great writing sample, recs, research experience and publications, then you will get in someplace.

That's good news: it seems that you've been placed on a waitlist and the school is now waiting to hear back from its admitted applicants, whether they accept or decline the admissions offer. Now you wait and hope others decline, so they'll have a spot to offer you. You might also want to contact the school, reaffirm your interest in it and ask if the list is ranked and what your rank is. You could also ask how many applicants were admitted off the waitlist in previous years. That'll give you a good estimation of your odds. Good luck!

In that case, make sure that they'll allow you to do the kind of interdiscplinary work that you're interested in (I'm sure you've already done so..), otherwise you might get very disappointed, which certainly won't do your work any good. Assuming it's encouraged, or at least not discouraged, then choosing the funded program seems like the right move to me. I remember reading about it on the linguist list, no idea if it's the same person you were told about.

I'm finding it difficult to decide because I think that my main contenders have strengths in almost complementary ditributions. Where one is more appealing to me, the others are lacking.. but yes, I can see myself going to each of them. That's what's making this all so painful. True. Thinking about it, they're two sides of the same coin. But right now I'm having more second thoughts than anything else. I kinda think that one is more than enough for me, haha.

No reason to be ashamed..if that's the place that is best suited to allow you to do the kind of work you're interested in, then you should go there! I browsed the U of T's department of linguistics website and they have two psycholinguists cross-appointed with other departments, so it looks like it could be a great place to do that kind of research. Did you see that U of T was looking to hire a new psycholinguist starting July 2009? Looks like you guys are multiplying

haha, I took the chance that you might find out that I like Beethoven and whatnot. I can live with that .

One professor sent me an acceptance email at 2am on sunday morning. It's uncommon, but it can happen. Actually, it was a little anticlimactic, I ended up doing a little happy dance alone in my room and had to wait until the next morning to call everyone and tell them the good news . I wasn't able to stop refreshing my inbox even on holidays or in the middle of the night when I knew I wouldn't hear anything, haha. But, if you can keep yourself from checking your email, it's definitely healthier to do that..