Phonologist
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Posts posted by Phonologist
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I just realized that if I go to Hopkins I'll never have to deal with this question again, assuming no one asks a cognitive scientist how many languages they speak.
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Well, the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. I consider myself a generative phonologist, but my approach is very functional. My personal view is that a very minimal or "soft" UG guides the emergence and self-organization of sound patterns, but on the other hand, I tend to focus on the UG aspect exclusively. I don't know what I am.
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I'm in the middle of my year off and I don't have any health insurance. It's an option, I guess.
Also, would you really get insurance just by taking classes at a state school? Everywhere I know of doesn't provide health benefits unless you're a degree-seeking student.
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How weird - it's like the advertising terms have been spliced into a legitimate text, although not very coherently.
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Congratulations Phonologist! I'm thrilled for you. And I totally think you should take JHU :wink:
Haha, thanks Dinali. If I do take myself off the wait list, it'll be with you in mind. I'm really hoping something works out for you!
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I'm the one who posted the last JHU acceptance, for whoever was asking on the results page. I got a call from my would-be-advisor yesterday.
It feels really good to have a legitimate acceptance (finally), and I'd be thrilled to go, but I'm holding out to see what happens with my various wait lists before I think about a decision.
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The two programs I'm wait listed at don't admit anyone unless they can guarantee five years of funding. I think it'll hurt a little less if things don't work out, knowing that I was never actually admitted. To be accepted somewhere and not be able to go must sting pretty bad.
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There's been little activity on this board lately - any news, anyone?
Yes - just found out I've been put on the "alternate list" at Stanford. UGH. I've got nothing solid at this point.
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Did anyone else get an email this morning from Paul Smolensky (from the JHU department) requesting a phone interview?
He actually called me before the visit, as did Legendre. I think they both want to talk to everyone.
It was nice meeting you BTW. How was the "party?"
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Ugh, I'm really bummed about MIT. Just this week I had a professor emailing me who wanted to see more of my work, etc. I thought that kind of interest would at least get me a spot on the wait list, but I've heard nothing.
At least I'm done now, aside from my interviews. This whole grad school thing has turned out to be kind of a bust - I didn't get in at either of my top choices, and I don't even have anything definitive from my second-tier choices. These two interviews are going to be very stressful.
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I heard mid-March, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't finish until 2012.
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I lived in Mt. Vernon for a while and loved it. The only time I noticed that it was the "gayborhood" was one weekend in July when the Pride festival took place.
I love Baltimore more than any other place on earth, though I don't live there now, unfortunately. I was a bike messenger in the city and know it like the back of my hand!
As for the area around Hopkins...it's kinda mixed. Northwest of campus is Hampden (pronounced Ham-din), which is the old, proudly white trashy part of the city. Some of the homes in Hampden have been redone though, and those are super cute. Hampden has lots of cute shops and is home to Hon-Fest each year. To the north of campus you have Guilford, which are the old, expensive society homes. To the south is Charles Village (25th St. through 40th St.), which is cute but a little iffy at night. Further south from Charles Village is North Avenue and "Penn North" (Mount Royal Ave. through 25th St. or so). North Avenue is sketchy even during the day, I have to say. Of course, the next neighborhood south of North Ave. is Mt. Vernon (Saratoga St. through Mt. Royal Ave.), which is my favorite part of the city. If I were going to be a student at Hopkins, I, being small and a woman, would probably choose to live within 5 blocks of campus. However, if you want to be near fun nightlife, I would suggest Mt. Vernon. Mt. Vernon has tons of cool bars/pubs/restaurants (Brewer's Art is my fave bar, The Helmand is my fave restaurant, and Nino's Pizza is way more delicious than the price would suggest) and is very close to "downtown."
I'd be happy to answer any more questions! I love Baltimore and miss it dearly.
I'm always glad to hear good impressions of Baltimore. I'm interviewing at Hopkins on Tuesday.
Come hang out in the linguistics forum! We have fun and games.
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Pony Express
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As I see it, this is the only real way to test claims towards the ``poverty of the stimulus:'' claims that the speech kids hear doesn't contain very much information about linguistic structure. Real speech might contain a lot of cues that are not useful in isolation but can be useful when integrated by powerful (and psychologically-evident) statistical algorithms. And the only way to see how these things hash out is to actually expose these algorithms to the stuff kids hear and see how well they do.
Is this really what you'd call computational linguistics? I'm very interested in learnability/statistical learning, but I wouldn't consider myself anywhere close to a computational linguist.
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Thanks for discounting my experience, but I live outside Baltimore, go into the city for work and visits nearly every week, and find it hideous. Just because I don't live there doesn't mean my experience with the city isn't significant.
I wouldn't have said that had you included that information in your first post. Chill out.
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Baltimore is like any other city: it has nice parts and bad parts. The bad parts are bad and the nice parts are nice. Hampden, North Charles, Fell's Point, Canton, and Federal Hill are all very nice areas in the city of Baltimore - quaint, tree-lines streets, nice living options, shopping, bars/pubs, yuppies, etc. It's a lovely city.
It's unbelievable how ignorant people can be of these things. When I tell people in San Francisco that I live in Oakland, which is directly across the bay, I still get weird looks and people ask me why on earth I would want to live there. They live right next to the city and don't know what an objectively nice place it really is. So I guess my advice is to take what people say with a grain of salt, unless they're personally familiar with the area or have lived there. Case in point: the one person in this thread with significant first-hand experience with Baltimore had good things to say.
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I'd say all of your GRE scores are fine. Mine are considerably lower than anything that's been posted here; I just barely broke 1200. Granted, only two of the schools I applied to wanted them, but I have interviews at both of them. They are top programs.
So I guess the good thing is that it's not as much of a numbers game as you might think. My GPA isn't very good either.
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I'm planning a trip to the US to check out the schools that have admitted me. I contacted MIT to ask when they might be making their decisions so I'll know if I should include them in my plans. Got this response: "MIT linguistics admission decisions will be made at the end of February (end of next week)."
Wow, that's considerably later than usual. I thought I was done for since I hadn't heard by now, but now I have kind of a renewed anxiousness.
Congrats on all the acceptances by the way - you're doing very well.
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Who keeps posting about "theoretical linguistics" on the results page? Sounds like someone's got a case of physics envy.
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Feisty, are you planning on having a car if you were to live in Oakland? Your friend's email was very thorough, though it left out a couple of my favorite neighborhoods here in the Town. The problem is, they're pretty much off-limits unless you have a car. If you're interested I can tell you more.
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Not to talk down my apparent future program, but the Summer Institute was held in Illinois in 1999, and UIUC doesn't rank very high on any list that I've seen. Not that that means Berkeley can't hold its own among the best programs in the country -- it's certainly great for cognitive linguistics, phonetics (according to some of the phonetics people here, anyway
), language documentation and revitalization, historical, etc.Yeah, and it's going to be at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Berkeley does have a great program though; it's just pretty eclectic and laid back. Most Berkeley professors would never be too involved in any of the "hot debates," so it's hard for the department to get much recognition. Lakoff might be a different story, but Lakoff is Lakoff (ew).
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I think it would be interesting if the people in this forum posted which programs they thought were the top 5/10 in their subfield. I imagine the list would vary quite a lot across subfields. My preferences going into this process were: 1. MIT , 2. UMass, 3. UCLA, 4. Rutgers, 5. NYU, but I am so confused right now I don't know anymore.
Wow, I sat here and tried to come up with a ranking of the top 5 programs for phonology, but it's hard because they're all doing such different things. Instead I'll rank programs according to my interests, which center on phonetic explanation in phonology from a synchronic, UG-based perspective:
1. MIT
2. UCLA
3. Stanford
4. Johns Hopkins (cog sci)
5. UNC Chapel Hill
Even that was hard. Only a few years ago UCLA would have been a clear #1, but the critical mass has since dispersed making the other programs much more competitive. The ex-UCLA crowd at MIT as been particularly successful in the field recently, enough that for me they're #1.
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Here's the National Research Council's 1995 ranking. The new report is supposed to be out any day now, but they've pushed it back so many times that no one really knows when we'll actually see it.
http://consusrankings.com/1995/08/13/na ... rams-1995/
But I actually think that all of the top 10 isn't really the "top" since linguistics is such a small field. I'd say the NRC's top 5 are the best programs, and 6-10 are second tier (and the second tier might include schools beyond number 10).
Any decisions yet?
in Linguistics Forum
Posted
I'm going to Hopkins. I turned down Stanford after being accepted off of their wait list. It was an extremely difficult decision.
Job placement won out in the end - Hopkins phonologists have been taking up fantastic positions. Let's hope it works for me too!