Jump to content

psycholinguist

Members
  • Posts

    613
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Everything posted by psycholinguist

  1. I'm already a grad-student here, but I just wanted to say hello and congrats! I've only been here for six months now, but I absolutely love the U of T.
  2. If anyone asks you where else you applied, just say, "Way too many places! Something like fourteen. Glad that's over. How about you?"
  3. I moved here from B.C. as well (albeit with a four-year detour through upstate New York for a BA). And I'll always be a West Coast girl at heart, but I love Toronto. I find it much easier to get around than Vancouver (having a car out here is almost a disadvantage if you live in or near downtown), and feel a lot safer here than I do there (particularly after dark). Most of the time the city doesn't seem nearly as large as it is. And the arts-and-entertainment-and-culture-and-such scene is fantastic. It's also nice to be so well-connected to everything out East.
  4. * laughs * I might well have overreacted. It's just that I've spent so much time quietly getting so concerned about this over the years that once I started typing a post on the subject I couldn't stop myself.
  5. Hear hear! (I also really appreciate qbtacoma and Nurse Wretched's comments.) I think it's absolutely repulsive what Western society has come to implicitly teach people about what is acceptable and what isn't when it comes to how they look. Especially women (though not only). I think I read somewhere that in the U.S., an estimated 95% of the female population are dissatisfied with their appearances. I've long thought this a major tragedy: it doesn't have to be this way. Perception is subjective, attractiveness is subjective, standards are subjective...possibly even approaching arbitrary. (It works both ways, too: dismissing anyone as shallow and stupid simply because they wear a lot of makeup or whatever is about as narrow-minded as dismissing someone as clueless and socially inept simply because they don't. In an ideal world there would be no correlation whatsoever, negative or positive.) Not that I want to distort anyone's words here, but statements about people having to be careful to "present themselves as how they want to be perceived" tend to strike me as perilously close to 'your clothes say everything about you', which in turn makes me want to respond, 'Okay, in that case, you should leave your brain at home tomorrow?' Sure, we're a sexual species, and of course we like the idea of looking pretty for prospective mates; but that doesn't mean we should disregard some of the more-recent consequences of this getting way out-of-hand: rampant materialism, artificiality, objectification, anti-intellectualism, a heck of a lot of eating-disorders and unhealthy dieting, arbitrary ostracism/cruelty, etc. It worries me. It really worries me. We're an intellectual species as well, so if you ask me this is something we desperately need to learn to put behind us.
  6. Agree with everyone else. Not only are professors really busy (sometimes ludicrously so), but they get an absolute ton of email. I'd say it's nothing to worry about at all. Wait a few more days, and if there's no reply, yeah, send a little reminder-note. Odds are he clicked on your email, read it, prepared to reply, either got interrupted or overwhelmed with urgent things, and then didn't have the email marked as unread anymore.
  7. * bursts out laughing * What a great line! Yeah, I agree that this is common. I've certainly worried about the possibility of developing crushes on several people in my subfield, of both genders (even though so far I've only ever fallen for guys, and very infrequently at that!). As basically everyone else says, I think it's just a combination of major intellectual stimulation and a sense of being star-struck. Probably nothing to worry about.
  8. Congrats to everyone! I absolutely love Toronto. I'm paying about $850 for a tiny studio-apartment in The Annex. Great neighbourhood: pleasant, fairly quiet, within walking-distance of the U of T, several grocery-stores, several subway- and bus-stops, and lots of nifty shops on Bloor Street West. There are lots of apartment-building overview things at viewit.ca.
  9. I agree that the sense of not being defined by the Ph.D. is actually great. So many things can change so quickly within a graduate program. I'd simply go for it and see how it goes!
  10. Congrats! It's a very good school in an extremely pretty city.
  11. Don't despair! Maybe the department sensed that it wasn't the best match for your interests, or that it wouldn't end up being high on your list of priorities? At any rate, it still sucks, and I'm sorry.
  12. This. My boots are from Naturalizer. They're very warm, very comfortable, supportive enough that I can walk in them for hours, and cute!
  13. Nifty. Montréal is a great city! I don't know much about SLA either, but I've heard good things about the University of Pittsburgh for that.
  14. Congrats! I don't know much about Michigan and Connecticut, but I agree that Maryland would be a great choice given your interests. (I sort of know Annie Gagliardi, who works with Jeffrey Lidz; they're both into theoretical syntax and language-acquisition.)
  15. Uh, UNBC is in Prince George, isn't it? Or did I misinterpret this? Best of luck to everyone still waiting! Hang in there!
  16. Sure. If you love it, odds are you understand well the intersection of languages and cultures. Any decent committee will understand a minor learning-disability. And if possible, learn a sign-language! * grins *
  17. I love this thread! It's made me giggle about fifteen times now. Name: Two years ago I was kind of interested in psycholinguistics, and there was the alternate possibility of 'psycho linguist'. One of those two things is now out-of-date (hmm...I should figure out which one), but I can't be bothered to change it given how long I've been hanging around this forum. Avatar: Self-explanatory. (I just tried looking for it on Google in an attempt to identify the source, but a) I had no luck, and I found it available as a T-shirt and might have no choice but to buy one. Darn.)
  18. Not in the slightest. My first round two years back was a disaster involving vague SOPs, web-forms incomprehensible to two of my letter-writers, nasty department politics, a total lack of funding for international students at the one Ph.D. program that accepted me, and more. For most of the year off I ended up working as a medical office-assistant. It wasn't at all awful; and a bit of extra money didn't hurt either. Then I got accepted off the waitlist to my top-choice of program the second time around. I'm just so happy here; who cares that it took a tiny bit longer than expected to get this whole grad-school thing underway? A single year off from school is nothing; in fact, it's often a good idea considering how many years you'll've been in the classroom by the time you reach the ABD stage.
  19. What a cool thread! I've always been very intrigued by people's choices about their particular field(s) of study. The summer before twelfth grade, I was reading a book on languages and word-origins when it occurred to me that I'd always liked words and suffixes and etymology. Not that I didn't have a ton of interests, but I liked the thought of putting 'linguistics' as my intended major on my college-applications. By the end of the summer I was becoming aware that this was starting to feel like a very significant discovery. At one point I went by the university in my hometown and had a little look at an actual linguistics textbook. Didn't understand much of it from just a peek at it, but even just the diagrams had me getting excited. Why not try that out as a major? Come August, once at college I signed up for Linguistics 101, and excitedly went off to the first class of it. Aaaaaaaannnnd it was horrible. The professor was apathetic and disorganised, and after an hour and a half I wandered out feeling really discouraged. Then it occurred to me: I knew myself better than that. If I'd just been frustrated by the first class of what was supposed to be the introductory course to an intended major I was excited about, then the problem probably wasn't me. On a determined impulse, I went and dropped the class, replacing it with a course called Minority Languages and Linguistics. Okay, I turned out to be the only first-year student in it - and most of the other seven people in the class were upper-years or grad-students. I didn't care. The professor was a superb teacher, and the sweetest guy ever at that; the class was small enough that there was plenty of discussion. It was absolutely fascinating all the way through. Intended major became actual major, and eventually Minority Languages and Linguistics professor became senior honours-thesis advisor. It was the minors that surprised me. In the middle of my second year I went from having no interest in the cognitive-science minor at all to eagerly wanting to do it. So I picked that up. Then they set up a music minor at the beginning of my fourth year, and I've always been so into music that I couldn't help but squeeze that in as well. Et voilà.
  20. Aww, glad to hear it! (Everyone says dumb things during campus-visits. Jet-lag, travelling, new places, excitement, confusion, questions: everything can contribute. I doubt anyone'll remember. * grins *)
  21. Honestly? I can understand the arguments on both sides, but I have to agree with cocorosie here. Two years ago I applied to a bunch of programs; I got a few interviews and acceptances, but funding problems and department politics and all sorts of things intervened in every single case except for one...my last choice. I was not especially encouraged by this, but I figured some grad-school was better than none, right? Not necessarily right, actually. I went, and while I wasn't miserable, right away I wasn't at all happy either. They gave me nearly nothing to do, and what I did have to do was not of interest to me; there were several personality-clashes with department-members; I didn't like the town much; and the only place to live I'd been able to find had been an expensive apartment in the middle of nowhere, forcing me to rely on a terrible transit-system. I got restless and bored and - for the first time in my adult life - homesick. It was not worth it. Come December, I cut it short and quit the program, returned to my hometown and moved back in with my parents, and took up a menial office-job. I actually liked the menial office-job a heck of a lot more than the graduate-department that simply was not a good place for me personally. Reapplied to grad-schools (including my dream program) with a much better SOP and some more up-to-date statistics. Third choice accepted me, second choice rejected me, and at the first choice, I was... ...waitlisted... ...accepted! Now, of course I was hugely thrilled by this second chance at my favourite program; and it turned out that I'd had exactly the right idea. I absolutely love it here. Research is immensely exciting, classes are neat, classmates are awesome, supervisor is truly special, and the city is great. Anyway, if it's tough to get in one year, it may well be just as tough - or more so - to get in the next year. However, if a) you have an extremely good sense of Schools 1 and 2 being very, very good matches; and there's a chance that you'll be able to strengthen your application and/or refine your research-interests, I'd say (barring good results from the potential waitlisting at School 1) decline everyone else and give it another shot, especially given that you have not just one but two dream-programs in mind.
  22. It's great that you're interested in grad-school! I remember being at this stage: wanting to go study something, somewhere, and not being sure of how to go about it. First of all, yeah, ask yourself the questions. Which field would I absolutely love to dedicate a career to? What am I most passionate about? Which classes have I just loved? Which sorts of jobs can I see myself doing? Am I aiming for academia (universities, think-tanks, etc.), or for a job involving international relations (diplomacy itself, NGOs, development, journalism, etc.). What do I like to read about and/or write about and/or do research in? How do I want the languages to come into play: do I want to be able to use them all frequently (e.g. international relations, political science, economics, comparative literature, European studies, history, translation), or do I want to study them directly (linguistics, any of those particular languages as a field)? Exploring is great, and do please take as long as you need in order to narrow things down: keep in mind that statements-of-purpose need to be well-motivated and specific, so saying 'I might want to do this, or maybe that, but possibly also another thing' isn't going to reflect well on you (I learned this one the hard way). The Princeton Review's guide to college majors is actually a great overview of what different fields look like and which careers they might be conducive to. The next thing to do is make a list of schools in the field(s) you intend to pursue further degrees in; I'd recommend finding a copy of Peterson's grad-school guide. (They have a website, too, although I find the book more useful.) Go look up the fields you think would work best for you, and take note of all of the graduate programs that look promising in places you'd be interested in living. Look them up one at a time: each department is very different, and the school's name is far less important than who is working there; you're searching for people whose research is a great match for your research-interests. Look through a bunch of papers by promising-looking people; this is a fantastic way of establishing whether you'd be interested in working with them. If application season is looming and you're still uncertain, that's a good sign that you should go off and do something different for a while to get experience in the relevant field(s) through other means. Volunteer for CIDA or another NGO, travel abroad, do an internship for the foreign bureau of a large newspaper, etc. This will serve two very important purposes: first, it will give you a much, much better idea of what it is you want to do; and second, it'll look great on the résumé once you apply! Anyway, best of luck. (And hello from across campus!)
  23. What a great attitude! Keep at it; they can never stop you from applying again!
  24. w00t! (I guess it is like biting nails in that if you overdo it your fingers hurt...but otherwise the similarities are negligible. * grins *)
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use