psycholinguist

Having backed out of grad-school in psychology, I'm now working as a software-consultant for a small business. It's nice to clear my head a bit before restarting grad-school in the field I really want to be in.

I'm so glad you're feeling good about that! I really respect how hard it must have been to leave someone behind.

Most of the grad-students I know are at least in a long-term relationship. Some are engaged, and a lot are married. I am happily single, which is nice since I've been so nomadic in recent years. (Nine addresses in three countries over the last five years. w00t.)

Oh, I know, eh? * laughs * I think a lot of that was just the novelty of talking to random strangers in real-time, and wanting to know who and where they were. Now that interacting with people from around the world is so commonplace online, people's basic statistics aren't inherently interesting.

Heh! I've heard good things about the d'Aulaires' books, but I haven't found them myself recently. I'm reading a mix of fiction, fantasy, linguistics/etymology, and YA novels these days.

24. The right age to start a Ph.D. is when you're sure you want it.

* laughs * Yeah, Phonologist was a confirmed guy. Heh. I have no idea where my impression came from, though. (It may well have been the picture!) Yeah, me too. But it's really fascinating getting to interact with people in a meaningful way without necessarily having any idea as to their genders. I'm not very girly (part geek, part tomboy, part anti-materialist) so I like it when unconventionality and gender mix.

I took the general test once. It was really out-of-the-way for me (I actually had to stay in a hotel), and it cost a lot, so I didn't bother writing it again. I did fine (1360), so who cares. I didn't take the subject-test at all, because I wasn't coming from a psychology background.

Off-topic, but wow, I totally thought you were a guy. (Then again, there are probably people here who think I am as well.) Don't you love the Internet? * laughs *

Hehe!

Thanks; same to you! (Heh! I'm actually more interested in the University of Toronto than McGill anyway, but we'll see how it goes!)

My GPA has increased, I've finished an undergrad thesis (which will serve nicely as a writing-sample), my LORs will be stronger, and my SOP actually makes sense now. I want to do language-change and dialectology, so at McGill I'm the most interested in the work of Charles Boberg and the Dialectology and Sociolinguistics Lab. When you hear from the programs depends on a lot of things. Linguistics-departments tend to meet all together to talk about prospective grad-students (this is in contrast to, say, psychology, in which individual faculty-members pick their own grad-students), so it could be anytime. Some programs I heard from at the end of January; others not until March. Rumour has it that in general when it comes to admissions-decisions, verdicts that were easily reached by the committee (whether acceptances or rejections) are sent out first, with the middle-range ones left for later.

I've always loved words, and in high school I got really interested in etymology. Somewhere along the way I noticed that one of the authors of one of my favourite books on wordplay and word-origins had multiple degrees in linguistics. Because I had no better ideas (I no longer wanted to study literature or engineering, which were earlier aims), I put it as my intended major on all of my university applications, figuring that I would actually end up changing my mind at least a half-dozen times about what to study. When I got to university, I found I wasn't thrilled by Linguistics 101, but it was only because of the professor, who really came across as if she had no idea what she was doing and didn't enjoy it much either. So (against what would have been the advice of my professors if they had realised it at the time), I dropped the course and switched into a class on minority languages instead. Which was awesome. As a result, I didn't once question my decision to major in linguistics. Okay, so I didn't realise I wanted to go to grad-school until I started my honours-thesis and became aware of how much I love language-research, but never mind. I figured it out.

I'm thrilled with linguistics; it's such a great match for me. The only part I'd've done differently was get enough lab-experience in psychology to realise a little earlier that I didn't want to be sidetracked by that field. As it stands, I did a semester as a psychology graduate-student only to discover that I didn't really like it much and linguistics was perfect for me. Music could have been an alternate career for me, but I never wanted to be forced to do it (either for assignments or for money), so maybe not.

w00t! Best of luck!

Yep and yep. I was feeling profoundly torn between psychology and linguistics, so I applied to a bunch of programs in each field - including McGill's in both. Got almost all rejections, and I could only afford one of the two schools I was accepted to, so I went off to the other, the University of Waterloo, to do an MA in psychology. Almost immediately my old ambivalence was resolved; I started missing linguistics terribly, and discovered that I would much prefer to be working with language-data than with reaction-times. Furthermore, it started looking as if reconciling my revised academic goals (i.e. Ph.D. in linguistics) with the MA in psychology was going to be really difficult; one of my LOR-writers said that if I couldn't do anything close to linguistics for the psychology MA - and I couldn't, since no one at Waterloo really does anything non-developmental that really qualifies as psycholinguistics - he wouldn't be able to account for why I went off to get that degree there. So I actually ended up leaving the program and now have a Real Job™ to go to until I can get back into linguistics. Totally can't wait to, though!

Heh! A lot of linguists I know - myself included - are former aspiring engineers. I think it's just a testament to how analytical we tend to be. (For a couple of years in high-school, all I wanted to do was engineering. Then I took honours physics in eleventh grade and didn't get along with it. Which forced me to rethink my plans. Thank goodness I did, though, because I'm so happy in linguistics. w00t!)

I have an honours BA in linguistics with minors in cognitive science and music. GPA: 3.72 (A-). Undergrad honours thesis Two presentations - one at a conference, one at a casual departmental event Study-abroad semester A little bit of data-organisation at a language-acquisition lab One semester of graduate work in cognitive psychology (...which taught me that I don't want any degrees in cognitive psychology) 3 letters of recommendation Applying to: University of Toronto McGill University of Western Ontario Montréal is very bilingual, but McGill is overwhelmingly English-speaking, so I don't think it would make a big difference to your application in general. However, considering that we're linguists, additional languages are always a good thing, and knowing French is a big help when it comes to navigating the city, etc.

w00t. Congrats!

No worries! We appreciate commiseration from any source!

I can totally understand the aversion to computational work! I didn't realise in advance that my current MA supervisor does as much connectionist modelling as he does, and now it's boring the absolute heck out of me. Oh well. At least I get to do some empirical studies for my MA project. Anyway, no pressure; just wanted to make sure you were aware of him! Heh.

No problem! I agree with tarski that you'd be just fine in Montreal without French; most people speak English as well. You might pick up a few words of French, but it probably wouldn't hurt you. * grins *

I wouldn't worry so much. Just apply and see how it goes. How good a match you appear to be for the department plays such a major role, after all. Had you considered Cornell, by the way? I only met him once while I was there, but Morten Christiansen does a lot of evolution-of-language work from a generally cognitive perspective.

This is an interesting question (then again, I'm a linguist!). In my experiences, the answer has been a defiant no. The U.S. doesn't have an endonym based on the term 'United States', so 'American' on its own fills that gap. And to no one does it more strongly indicate the U.S. than to Canadians. Canadians don't mind being labelled 'North Americans', but if you call one of them simply an 'American', he or she would be puzzled and quite possibly insulted as well. Calling the whole lot of us 'Americans' would likely be even worse.

Hello! I grew up not far from Vancouver, and I now live not far from London, so let's see if I have anything helpful to say. UBC: Vancouver is a great city: stunningly pretty, exciting, cosmopolitan, and fairly environmentally-friendly. I've only been to UBC a few times, but it's set apart from the nearby residential neighbourhoods, and it's a bit of a bus-trip from there to downtown, so it strikes me as pretty self-contained. One thing to consider is that from Florida, Vancouver would probably take at least eight hours to get to, and would be the most expensive to travel to and from. Growing up in B.C., I only went to Florida once, and it took seven hours and a half to get from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale, via Nashville, TN. Just something to keep in mind. McGill: Right in the middle of downtown Montréal. Which is another great city. Far more history than in Vancouver just by virtue of the cities' relative ages. Bilingual, with a very European flavour. It's said to be much cheaper to live in than American cities of comparable size, and might even be more affordable than Vancouver (although I'm not certain about that). UWO: I haven't been to the campus, and I've only been to London twice, but it's a nice enough medium-sized city. Much more of a university-town than the larger cities. Southern Ontario is a pleasant place to live; the locals are friendly, the scenery is nice, and Toronto isn't too far away if you need some big-city excitement. The one catch here is that travelling in and out of it would be tricky for you. You'd have to travel either to, yeah, Toronto (two and a half hours by car, more on the bus) or to Detroit (probably ditto, plus border wait-times) to fly back home. The other thing is that the climate's going to be pretty different depending on where you go. (Of course, you're a Floridian, so anything in Canada would probably strike you as cold. Heh.) Vancouver's climate is far milder than that of any of the other places; the average July temperature is around 65º F, and in January it's around 40º F. But if rain bugs you, think twice about moving there; sometime in November, it clouds over, and it stays that way for virtually the entire winter, usually with rain. I can tell you that I got really sick of that. Meanwhile, London and Hamilton have a pretty standard continental climate (four well-defined seasons; cold winters and hot, humid summers). Montréal is colder in the winter, and notorious for it. Halifax's climate is probably less extreme than those of the other Eastern places on your list since it has the Atlantic Ocean to moderate temperatures a bit, but it'll still be cooler than Vancouver.