psycholinguist

If the note is very formal, I'll use Mr or Ms. However, if it's more genial and personal and/or if I've noticed another faculty-member call the staff-member by his or her first name, I'll go with that.

NOTE: My reasons for coming across as so cryptic in this post have much less to do with anonymity as with striving to be generic. Back at the beginning of the month, I nearly called off my trip to visit Third Choice when I was accepted by Second Choice, but I knew it was wiser to go through with my original plans. Am I ever glad I did. Now, I'm quite aware that the purpose of a visiting-weekend is, essentially, to sell the campus to admitted students, but what happened was that I went in not expecting the interests of the program and its faculty to correspond all that well to my own, and...well, virtually all of my reservations (acquired gradually through the website and communication with several professors) turned out to be almost completely baseless. Furthermore, the program more generally and the campus overall both turned out to have a lot of features that appealed to me but that I hadn't really known about in advance. (I'm going to start from the beginning, though, even getting into the having-Third-Choice-sold-to-me parts. More suspenseful that way.) I know the city that Third Choice is in quite well, but I had never felt so welcomed to it before. Third Choice paid for a very pleasant hotel-room; within an hour of my (very early) arrival, Potential Advisor #1 was on the phone with me making plans for dinner with him, one of his grad-students, one other visiting student, and one other professor. He called back to confirm just before dinner, and actually came to pick me up at the hotel. The five of us met up at a lovely restaurant and had a really enjoyable chat. And that was just the beginning. My hotel-roommate arrived later in the evening; we hit it off so well that we were awake until 1 AM talking! I went to bed hardly able to believe that we had only just met. In the morning, there was a breakfast for invited students, at which I talked with a lot of people, all of them really enthusiastic and interesting. A great question-and-answer session with current grad-students at Third Choice really started to get me excited about all of the research-opportunities there (and the promise of guaranteed funding was nice to learn about as well). There turned out to be a much stronger general graduate community at Third Choice than I had anticipated. What I would probably label the highlight of my visit, however, was something semi-accidental that wasn't even on the schedule. Several of us were divided between a couple of professors' cars in order to go out to see their labs; I was arbitrarily assigned to Potential Advisor #1, and over the course of the drive out to the labs, he and I got to talking about his research. It turned out that I hadn't been able to get the whole picture about his interests from his web-site; he described study after study in detail and each one pretty much blew me away. Utterly fascinating...so much so, in fact, that I kind of ran out of synonyms for 'awesome' when I needed to respond to them. (Not only that, but PA #1 turned out to be friends with Former Cognitive-Science Professor, the guy who was pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting me interested in cognition and perception.) When we got to the lab-compound, we were both so caught up in discussing the subtleties of his research that he didn't think to point out which buildings were which and I didn't think to ask! * laughs * Tours of the labs in question, as well as meetings with grad-students and Potential Advisor #2 followed. The roles that PA #1 and PA #2 would play in my (hypothetical) grad-school career at Third Choice just fell into place; when I apologised to the latter and said that although I was very interested in his work, I thought I would be better off doing a side project under him than working in his lab full-time, he laughed and said he agreed with me and had been waiting to suggest exactly the same thing! I also really liked the layout and structure of the labs. What I hadn't realised going in is that the lab-compound isn't that old, and features plenty of space and more than a lot of windows. Much more pleasant than the psych-department at Undergraduate University. There also turned out to be housing-options I hadn't expected but that I seriously like the sound of. Then there was a casual dinner-thing that two grad-students hosted just because they wanted to chat with a few of us some more. Anyway, I left Third Choice this morning not wanting to leave, having made a new friend in my hotel-roommate and lots of new contacts around the department. This is after spending a lot of last week wandering around Undergraduate University wondering how on earth I would ever want to move on to a new place! (So either Third Choice was immensely enticing, or I'm just fickle. Or both. * grins *) I haven't heard anything yet from First Choice, but now, to my surprise, I'm finding that I really don't care. I almost hope that something about Second Choice turns me off so that I can just commit to Third already! Anyway, I guess the pseudo-moral of this overlong anecdote is: if you can visit, DO IT. Even if you think it's not a priority. Obviously I know this isn't going to happen to everyone - in fact, since there's only so much you can learn from the Internet, it's quite possible that the diametric opposite of this situation could occur (i.e. finding out that one's First Choice is not really all that exciting). But the point is that it's so hard to know without actually getting to experience being on the campus(es) in question. What until Wednesday morning was undoubtedly my distant Third Choice has turned out to be a FAR better fit for me than I ever would have guessed.

Heard back today: rejected. I'm actually not at all disappointed, though, because I was starting to feel that I wasn't a very good fit for their interests anyway. Plus, I already have enough choices to contend with. So yeah.

Meme-time! (Some good further examples are listed here.) ...you get excited about unattested words. ...you think everyone should have to learn to use IPA. ...after a semester of syntax, you no longer have any reliable internal grammaticality-judgments. ...you randomly change the language-settings on your Facebook/LiveJournal account just to see what the sites look like in other languages. ...you misspell the last name of the chair of the psychology department at the University of Toronto as 'Praat'. ...you realise in the middle of a lecture that for the last twenty minutes, you've been mentally analysing your professor's dialect and haven't paid attention to a single word that he or she has said. Continue!

Congrats!

I know, eh? * grins * And yeah, congratulations!

I agree; it sounds as if you're giving yourself a red-flag. The best reason to go to grad-school is an unquenchable desire to keep doing original work in your field. I'd take a step back, do something different, and give it some thought from a distance.

I agree; go through with it. You never know what you could learn, and it could come in handy even if you end up turning down Program X as you expect.

I have class to keep me busy, but in my (minimal) spare time, I read a lot, write, listen to music, walk around, and occasionally do something reportedly called 'hanging out'. (Pop-quiz: spot the introvert!) Yoga is great, too.

Heh. I can't read the name 'Richard Stallman' without thinking of xkcd.

If Second Choice gives me enough money, I'll probably just go there. If Third Choice gives me more than Second (which is what I'm anticipating), I'll probably still try to make Second work, unless the difference is considerable. If I get accepted to First Choice and they give me more than Second, I don't know what I'll do since Second is starting to feel like the best fit, academically speaking. I'll visit and see how it goes.

I finished two or three applications in November and submitted them in order to get them out of the way. The rest were finished one by one; I got one due on 1 December in on the day, a couple due 15 December in a few days early, and the ones due on 15 January in on the day of, having more or less ignored them over my entire winter break.

I wanted to do that when I was wandering around Toronto at the beginning of last August...but I didn't know my way around the U of T and I hadn't thought to look up where the linguistics and psychology departments were anyway! Heh.

I feel good about my applications; I put as much time into them as I could amidst a really crazy semester (too many classes + too many extracurricular activities + starting a thesis). My GRE scores could have been a little better, but I did just fine considering how little time I had to study for the test and how far I had to go to actually write it (an hour and a half away, with an overnight). I know, eh? I thought exactly the same, and then when one of my professors recommended doing this, it was too late and I thought my applications would go right into the recycling-bin. And yet, if it's any consolation, it seems that the mere references to potential advisors that some applications ask for are enough to make the faculty-members in question think, 'Oh, okay, this student wants to work with me!'

I haven't received anything related to grad-school in the mail at all, except for acknowledgments of my applications.

Not yet, but I'm going to visit UCSD in the middle of March, and will probably chat with a linguist or two at the University of Toronto when I go there this weekend for the psychology-department open-house.

And you can always get a savings account for bananas, right?

How about emailing the department to find out whether they would encourage that sort of visit or not?

Agreed!

Yikes.

It's hard not to. The University of Waterloo's online application-system made my application so difficult that I nearly withdrew it before I finished it; the only thing getting me through it was the knowledge that I needed a safety-school. That said, every time I see aspiring grad-students rejected from my undergraduate university, I want to go apologise to them personally.

Very good to know, especially since I also have the Canadian-American exchange-rate to worry about. Now, I don't have a car (in fact, I don't even have a license), but that's just one more concern about SD. Input much appreciated! I think the decision probably will come down to funding, and I'll be finding out about that probably by the first week in March. I did see your post over in City Guide, but I'll keep you in mind if I really start leaning towards UCSD. Thanks!

One potential advisor who notified me of an acceptance spelled my name wrong...and I didn't even notice until the third time I read his email!

As someone who's spent a fair bit of time in San Diego but only as a tourist, and who is now thinking about moving there, I really appreciate these points. The climate is probably my biggest worry; I find that here in the Northeast I really like the constant changing of the seasons, even if the winters are longish and pretty cold.