Typologaster

Good luck!



Congrats mang, and good luck! Also, feel free to tell us about yourself/what you're into/where you applied.



I called in one to two weeks ago because there was this issue with my transcript (which is now resolved); they said at the time decisions would be made in a few (e.g., 2-4 (?)) weeks.

Congrats, pearls! My friend goes there for phonology.

I applied, and yes, their application system is slightly weird. It says they received everything from me, except the section Miscellaneous Materials (or whatever it is) doesn't state that they have my thesis (but I know they do). Prof. Johnson seems awesome—I think there's this youtube video of him teaching syntax to undergrads in which he uses grad students dressed up as bees to convey the notion of constituency. o.o (I could be misrepresenting this somewhat; I saw the video quite a while ago.)

Excellent stats man, you have some beast research experience! I'm also quite interested in theoretical syntax (specifically case, agreement, argument structure, etc.). Good luck, perhaps (if luck goes both our ways) we'll be able to work together on something in the future.

This only applies to MIT applicants: According to previous comments (see Tips for MIT Application 2010 (or something like that)), "usually it's a paper (=the writing sample) that develops and defends an argument about a (possibly very small and focused) problem in one of the core areas of research - syntax, semantics or phonology" that gets applicants into MIT. Note the fact that that's usually the case—I bet there have been a number of admitted applicants in the past who wrote a serious work on a topic of a related discipline. The MIT website says "these papers need not necessarily be about linguistics, but they should demonstrate an applicant's ability to pursue serious scholarly inquiry," so as long as the paper demonstrates that the applicant has strong analytic skills (which perhaps is too general a statement to be at all informative )-, (s)he has a good chance of admission. (This is all guesswork, unfortunately. I would imagine that they consider theses, inside and outside theoretical linguistics proper, that argue and/or defend theories based on empirical observations.) I'm preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. =\



Your undergraduate work could be good! Psychology is certainly related to linguistics, and practically *is* half of psycholinguistics (I think?), which is one of MIT's 5-year specialization programs (and which, to some degree, I am considering doing, if the heavens part and they admit me). As long as the work demonstrates that you've engaged in "serious scholarly inquiry."



This is all hearsay from other topics in this forum, but I don't think they consider typos in the SOP to be a really big deal. That your paper concerns an issue in syntax will probably greatly help your chances. And yes, I submitted my thesis as the writing sample. Unfortunately, the honors-thesis sequence runs throughout my entire senior year, so I wasn't able to send them a completed work. Stanford received a 20-pager (which, by the Stanford deadline, hadn't been looked over by my advisor, so I'm not incredibly positive about that one), the UCs received a 25-page improved form, and MIT/UMass received the 35-page form (which might be bad, even though some of the pages are filled with either graphs or derivations—they could potentially not want to read all of it).



Welcome to the Linguistics Waiting Period Subforum! Feel free to tell us about yourself.