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Yep! I am looking forward to it. And having a hard time concentrating on my current schoolwork.

Ooh, ArcImpulse42, you got into UCLA's IE Studies program? Neat! May I ask what your interests are? IE historical linguistics are an interest of mine, but I'd make a terrible Indo-Europeanist because I don't know Latin or Greek or Sanskrit, and really only like the obscure branches of the family. Alas.

Something about competition this year? But anyway, I think the problem is content and not form.

Hi, I think most of us will need more information to be able to give you any advice, but if there's a forum area for chemical engineering, they might be able to offer some insights about those programs in particular. Are you better funded at one school than the other? What do you think of living for five years in Madison or Ithaca? Have you had a chance to visit? Are your interests well represented at both schools? How are the programs ranked? What kind of research opportunities exist at each schools? Without knowing these kinds of things, we can't really offer much advice. (Although, I am at Wisconsin now (in a completely unrelated field) and I could just try to push my own school on you. )

Ahaha, yes, I'm so glad I won't have to take the GRE (or any other standardized test) again! Good luck with your application!

Oh, no! Someone's not using perfect grammar on the internets! D:

I second Fuzzylogician totally, but I'll also add that it's a good idea to see if the schools you're interested in mention anything on their websites. I think it was UPenn that had something like "if you don't have above 700 in both V and (especially) Q, you'll have a hard time getting in, and a much harder time getting in if neither score is above 700". So, if that was your dream school, it might be worth getting both scores over 700, but otherwise, I agree your score is good enough to get your application looked at anywhere (even UPenn!) and it would be better to work on the rest of your application. The only other school whose website I looked at that mentioned specific GRE scores was Berkeley, but they said their average incoming score was 1400, and your scores put you safely in that neighborhood, so I wouldn't worry.

Totally! Though I wonder what kind of targets a person would have in mind when employing a successful-linguistics-applicant ninja-squad. Prescriptivists? I just mailed in my decision to attend MIT today. I visited both schools, and it was interesting to see their similarities and differences (and also compare to my current school) but I feel pretty good about my choice.

YAY! GOOOOOO Psycholinguist! I'm glad we both did well in our second attempts!

I'm going to have to second willemvanoranje here. If you're already worried about going stir-crazy in Madison, it's not a good sign. I grew up in Madison, but went to Los Angeles for undergrad, and now I'm back in Madison while I wait to move on to a PhD. It's really hard to find good restaurants and things to do in Madison. If you put in the effort, there are places to go, but everything seems toned down for midwestern tastes, and if a restaurant closes (as happens often) it can have a pretty big effect on your options -- for example, we just recently lost the city's only decent Korean restaurant. State Street isn't the only place in town for restaurants and shops. The Willy (Williamson) Street/Atwood Avenue area has the highest concentration of good restaurants, and there are a couple more on Monroe Street and the near west side. There are a few nice Mexican restaurants on Park Street and a handful of other good options, but you have to know where you're going and have a car, generally. You can't just stroll around and expect to find something interesting to eat here. Entertainment options are somewhat limited as well. The local music scene is pretty good, as I understand it (though I have no direct experience or interest myself). There's a decently active theater community here, between the university, the APT in the summer, traveling shows, and various smaller groups that perform downtown. It's certainly not anywhere near as exciting as a bigger city, and here too, I think it's toned down for midwestern tastes. There are only two art museums and two history museums in town, all of which are smallish. I can think of a number of ways to survive Madison: -Have friends in Chicago you can stay with over the weekend. Getting out, even just to Milwaukee, helps, but being able to go to Chicago without paying for a hotel room would probably help satisfy a need for good restaurants and things to do. (It's about an hour and a half to drive to Milwaukee, and two and a half hours to Chicago.) -Make a big effort to find new places to go in Madison. Weekly newspapers publish everything that's going on in the weekend. Plan to try one new restaurant or activity a week at least, instead of just going to the same places all the time. If you make a game of finding new places to try, it might stave off the boredom. -Change your habits. Madison is a good city for quiet people. If you like reading in coffee shops, or might like to join a knitting group or something, Madison has tons of small groups of people who share an interest. Take up gardening or something instead of going out. Except for drinking, I don't think Madison has a huge 'going out' culture, but a lot of people seem to have hobbies they work on. But if those options seem unpleasant, Ann Arbor might be the better choice (though I've never been there and can't say anything about it).

For another perspective on the academic incest thing, try reading the top (after tip 4) of this page: http://members.terracom.net/~dorothea/gradsch/success.html NB: I don't necessarily agree with everything on the website, but it's a different point of view than one normally gets, and it's well worth reading through.

Glad I sent the long version of my CV/work history then.

Wait, is *that* why I got into MIT?

Hurrah!

I like "even more wronger" best. ("wronger" alone sounds weird to me) I think fear of someone else getting there first would be my biggest concern in publishing the incomplete paper. But the other concerns are valid too. Still though, if your advisor isn't too worried about it, maybe it's fine? I also doubt having the line on your CV is a huge concern -- you're giving another conference paper soon (or just recently?) too, right? If you get a proceedings out of that, then you're almost as well off as if you had this one. And you seem admirably productive in general, so I doubt that it will matter either way in a few years' time. So I guess it comes down to (in my view) time/effort, and how much it means to you to get the data out and retracting (somewhat) what you said the handout. Or perhaps you can just let the decision be made by inaction, if you don't get the extension.

Cool. If I were you, I'd start looking through journals for articles that interest you and then looking up the websites of the departments where their authors teach. I think it would be a good idea to find a mix of PhD and terminal MA programs that appeal to you so that you'd have the best shot at getting in somewhere. Doing an MA first can help you narrow down your interests, get you more research experience and a better writing sample, and get you good letters of recommendation. Plus, if you do an MA, your professors there would probably have a lot of advice about where to apply for your PhD. But going straight to PhD is also nice, and easier to get funding for. The other problem is that there aren't that many MA programs in linguistics, it seems. Your interests reminded me of a friend who does sociolinguistics at South Carolina (http://www.cas.sc.edu/ling/grad/ma.html). She was doing an MA when I met her, but has since applied to continue on to the PhD program there, so that is another option besides doing an MA and then reapplying for PhDs in other schools. Someone on the results search recently mentioned getting into Georgia for historical linguistics (http://www.linguistics.uga.edu/) and their program sounds like it might have the kinds of things you're interested in. Not that you necessarily have to go to the deep south but those are the two programs I know of that you might look into. Dig around their websites to find faculty who do the kind of work you like, then look to see where they did their PhDs and look at the websites of those departments, and so on. Hopefully someone else on the board will be able to come up with some more programs that might suit you. And, as I understand it, fit is mostly determined through the SOP and writing sample, but you can also email professors you'd like to work with before you apply so they might keep an eye out for you application, and your letter writers might be able to mention something about your interests or suitability for a particular program. Your history of classes you took in undergrad might provide some insights as to your interests as well. But mostly SOP, they say.

Hi, It would be more useful to know your interests -- do you want to do theoretical linguistics? sociolinguistics? work on a specific language? something else? Once you know what you want to do and find some programs with people doing work that interests you, that'd be a better time to think about your stats and your chances at getting in. Even so, the fit with the program probably plays a bigger role in admissions (moreso in linguistics than in some other fields, perhaps) than does having a specific background and GRE/GPA.

It's just a proceedings, right, so it's not as serious a publication as a journal, eh? I'd go with what your advisor suggests for the proceedings and keep working on the problem. Then, once you have a working analysis, you could submit that to a journal (or another conference, or whatever) for publication. Though I think, if it were me, I wouldn't want to publish an incomplete analysis. Still, I do like it when I find mentions in articles of problems for a theory or directions for future research.

In addition to Craigslist, the Isthmus (a local weekly newspaper) has a good classifieds section full of apartments. When I was looking for an apartment in October one year, I found a bunch of nice options here. It shouldn't be impossible to find an apartment outside the student lease dates, but it might take a bit more effort. Still, somewhere that isn't full of undergrads might be a better choice for a grad student anyway. The Isthmus's website: http://www.thedailypage.com/

Congratulations, pointaken! That's great!

Ooh, awesome. I did an MA in Wales and got to study Welsh while I was there. It's a really fun language. I'm hoping to do more with it in the future.

Hi dant.gwyrdd, are you interested in Welsh, by chance?

I think there was a poll about the time and day of the week of acceptance emails last year, either here or on LiveJournal. (But I think for me to search for it now would be pushing procrastination too far.) So far, I've had 2 emails on Thursdays, and one on a Friday, and all three were sent in the 6pm hour, local time.