Phonologist

I can see why UCSC responded the way they did. Linguistics isn't at all user-friendly; you'd be surprised how much background knowledge and understanding you need just to get through most Language papers. Even still, there's a big gap between understanding what's going on in a paper and understanding it well enough to be insightful about it. If you can clear that gap, then you may be capable of doing good research. Any grad program will want to see that you're somewhere towards the end of that sequence, or at least that you're clearly getting there.

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.