sbowman

While doing computationally-inflected sociolinguistics would likely be hard, and not extremely marketable outside of academia, but potentially great if you wanted to stay within academic sociolinguistics. If you want something almost as fun and likely far more career-safe, consider going into natural language processing (applied computational ling) but focusing on dialect and speaker variation, and drawing on sociolinguistics for insight. A PhD in NLP is gold in the tech industry job market. I don't know the lay of the land for variation-leaning NLP that clearly, but here at least (Stanford), that kind of work would be heartily encouraged, and both the CS and Linguistics departments would give you space to take classes from the other.

I don't have firsthand experience (I'm attending Stanford for Linguistics as of this fall), but from everyone I've met there, you'll be fine. It seemed like a good, socially-functional group of people. And yes, It sounds like a solid portion of the students moved up to the city after a year or two, and it seems quite doable if you don't need to be on campus every day.

Small landlords tend to be your best bet for Hyde Park's ubiquitous 3-, 4- and 6- flat buildings. I'm renting from Harold Newton (Nordica LLC), and I've heard good things about a Mr. Lin, both of who own a handful of buildings. Look for ads on craigslist and Marketplace.uchi in the next few weeks that don't point to a corporate website.

$500 in Hyde Park is certainly possible, and becomes downright easy if you look near the somewhat dicier south end of campus (near 61st/62nd and Woodlawn).

The Parkmerced/Parkside area is probably the least interesting bit of the city. Late 40s streetcar suburbs with no real retail to speak of. However, it's 10-15 minutes by very frequent rail from Castro station, which itself is at least a gay nightlife mecca, and is also a good transfer point for the Mission, NOPA, SOMA and Potrero Hill nearby, which are probably cheaper, and are all perfectly young/progressive/LGBTQ friendly. Your real issue will be finding an apartment at all... it takes time, money, and dedication anywhere in the inner Bay Area.

I'm a current BA/MA student. I'm not eligible for the University owned apartments, but from what I've seen of it, it tends to be on par in both price and quality with most of Hyde Park, if not a bit better. For housemate hunting, marketplace.uchicago.edu is a great resource if you want to live in Hyde Park, though it's worth pointing out that that's likely to be most active in the next six weeks or so—a lot of apartments around here turn over leases in June, and are showing now. The housing stock around here is pretty great if you can put up with peeling paint and rusty fixtures here and there. The buildings haven't all been maintained, but most of what's available was built as luxury housing in the teens and twenties, so expect big rooms, high ceilings and nice details. MAC owns at least a third of the apartment buildings in Hyde Park, and their maintenance and billing record is pretty abysmal. It's not terrible in the high rises where they have on-site staff, but I'd recommend avoiding them if possible and sticking to smaller scale landlords. If you want to live outside of Hyde Park and South Kenwood (47th to 61st, Cottage Grove to the lake), I'd recommend living north of Roosevelt unless you are absolutely sure of what you are getting into. The South Side is not all bad, and there can be nice places to live, but if you're not familiar with the geography going in, a lot of the neighborhoods you'd be commuting through or even living in can be legitimately dangerous. Englewood and Woodlawn especially see murders and arsons all the time. Also for what it's worth, racial politics on the South Side are also surprisingly bad for a northern city—Hyde Park is one of the only neighborhoods nearby that isn't either over 95% black or under 5%, and there is still some tension about what the University is doing to the area.

I think that that's a common outcome for one or two courses, and probably a good thing. Taking familiar material with a new professor that you'll likely have to work under or alongside gives you a very clear sense of their take on the subfield.

The short answer is definitely yes, even for the Bay Area, which is saying a lot. There are two-bedroom houses going for upwards of $6000/mo here and there. I'm getting the sense that sub $1k apartments show up here and there, and that it's not impossible to get a room in a larger house for under $1k as well.

Hey folks! Does anyone (current students stalking the thread?) think I'm crazy not to apply for housing? I have family in the area, own furniture, and am not a fan of TwinXL beds, given the choice. I'm hoping that if I show up in SF a month or so ahead and start bothering people on craigslist, I'd have a shot at finding an apartment in Palo Alto or a nearby town.

For what it's worth, I have been admitted to one program and invited to visit another before finding out that I was missing letters for those programs; the fault was likely the recommenders, and both programs said that it was fine as long as they *eventually* got something.

I booked a flight so that I'll be there for all of it. Thanks, all. Hopefully if we all get along for two and a half straight days, we can get along intermittently for a few years.

My top choice PhD program has invited me out for an extensive open house. They asked me to be prepared to be on campus by Wednesday morning for two days of interviews and presentations, but mentioned that there would be an optional social hosted by current students on Tuesday night. Initially, I had no plans to attend the social. I have met a couple of current students already, and my class schedule at my current University conflicted—I would have to have missed two consecutive meetings of a grad-level class to make it. I'm reconsidering, and I'm curious what experiences people have had with these. It sounds fun, but it also sounds like a good chance to get familiar with the terminology, attitude and daily workings of the department before the interviews, which could be a pretty valuable help in being able to ask the right questions and avoid showing off any possible incompatibility to the faculty. Also, as an aside, I've heard only vague mumblings about this: They know that I am interviewing at a couple of other programs that look like perfect fits for me on paper, there any danger in saying explicitly (and honestly) that their program is my unequivocal first choice?

I don't think that there really is a national norm. I am at a reasonably progressive school, and in most departments its generally expected that unless you hear otherwise, you'll use first names with *anyone* you are at all familiar with—i.e., after you've spoken to them extensively more than once or twice, taken a smaller seminar with them, or the like. There are plenty of (mostly younger) faculty who quite clearly prefer this, and only a handful of faculty who would be put off by it. That said, I've heard very different things from other schools. It's never inappropriate to start off with Prof. X, but if the tone of the conversation is relatively friendly and the department doesn't seem too formal, switch.

Hello, all. It sounds like JHU CogSci is starting to send out invites for the March open house, and it looks like I'm not the only one on here who's gotten one. Congrats to the others of you — from last year's numbers, it looks like the odds are very good from here. I'm also curious what the rest of you are applying to work on. My provisional interest lies mostly in the architecture of OT (Wilson and Smolensky?), but I may wind up steering more towards less highly structured modeling (Eisner? Others?). Exciting times.

Edinburgh informatics (in pending funding), though I think the term has somewhat different connotations there.