psycholinguist

Nifty! I'm at the U of T, doing regular unapplied linguistics. * laughs * (And not psycholinguistics, either; my name is out-of-date.) Not sure if there're applied programs here, though there might be something offered by OISE that comes close. (As for some of the rest of the city: I know absolutely nothing about linguistics at Ryerson, but I've heard good things about York. There's a fair bit of contact between their linguists and ours, actually; people from here go on to there and vice versa, and there's at least one mailing-list about guest-lectures that goes out to people at both places.)

I did my undergrad degree at an Ivy League school, and I absolutely loved it! There were a few morons here and there - that's true of every school - but it was a big enough place that ignoring them was easy. The vast majority of the people I met there were (and still are) so hard-working and academically-minded that they were very down-to-earth and didn't have the time or need to worry about superficiality and money and those sorts of things. Furthermore, with so much alumni-support, the school was able to offer financial aid to so many people that there really wasn't much of an elitist feel to it. Students came from all over the U.S and the world - I was one of hundreds of international students - to study everything. Full of special people, both in terms of the students and the faculty. If you feel the research and people are amazing, then go visit! My guess is that you'll discover there that yes, the research and people are amazing. Which is exactly the sort of way you need to feel about a grad-school if you're going to do well there. Worried that the environment might be a bit of a drag? Go and find out! If it is, you can stop worrying and go elsewhere. If it's not, you can stop worrying and accept the (hypothetical) offer of admission! I know a guy from a working-class background who attended the same school as I did, also with the help of financial aid. He applied to some grad-schools and ended up being unexpectedly offered a place at Harvard. I got the feeling that he felt pretty darn weirded-out by it, but he decided to go for it and, as far as I know, is enjoying it just fine!

Congrats! I was invited for a visit there two years ago and it was just lovely. The department is full of neat people, the campus is pretty nice, and the weather was great. San Diego is an awesome city, though it's hard to get around without a car. (Couldn't make it work financially - they were so strapped for cash that they couldn't afford to fund international students - but I actually didn't end up resenting it. I love where I've ended up, and hey, I got a fantastic spring-break trip to California out of that. [After nearly a week in SD, I took off for LA and hung out with some friends before returning to parts of the U.S. where it wasn't quite so pleasant outside. * grins *]) The grad-students there were all really friendly - they insisted on taking me out for lunch and nifty conversations ensued - and although I only had time to meet three of the faculty members (Amalia Arvaniti, Rachel Mayberry, and Robert Kluender), my impressions of everyone were positive. I'm thrilled for you! Provided you can make it, enjoy! I don't think you have much to worry about. Aside from the writing, your GRE scores are strong, and everything else looks pretty solid, too. See how it goes!

For more than five years now I've been using Environotes notebooks. They're well-bound, with a front cover that can be folded under the notebook if necessary; and they're only about $4 each. And they're recycled! (Personally, I find I'm much happier with notebooks than loose-leaf paper; it's easier to keep everything in one place that way, and single notebooks take up a lot less room on the shelf than multiple half-filled binders.)

I agree with the others. Plan your time, do arts-and-crafts when possible, set up an Etsy shop, and see how it goes!

I absolutely love the department I'm in. The other MA students are bright, interesting, funny, supportive, and full of nifty observations; the Ph.D. students I've met are just the same. The faculty is wonderful: even the professors who are sometimes a little on the boring side are very eager to help you out. Everyone is just so interested in promoting an environment in which students are encouraged to come up with research-questions and/or -topics. The administrative staff members are so great: of the main department secretaries, one is funny and amazing with every type of technology you can think of, and the other one is such a sweet person and an expert in everything to do with finances and registration. Physically, the department was just renovated so it's such a lovely space now; you can always go into the lounge and find a nice corner to sit in and a good group of people to chat with if you want. There's also a great department mini-library; every time I go by it I see five or six books I want to read just recreationally! Every day I'm reminded of how much I love my field and subfield. I feel so lucky to be getting to work on the sorts of projects I'm doing. I'm seeing ideas for potential new studies absolutely everywhere, and starting to get a sense of what could probably be presented/published where. I love conferences and meeting other people in the field. By this point I have no doubt that I'm aiming for a Ph.D. in linguistics (preferably right here...heh), and I'm just thrilled about it. My supervisor is really special. Even only having met me twice, when my MA application ran into problems at the last minute she fought for me and got me put on the waitlist. Working with her has been so, so great: I'm interested enough in her work in the first place that I was a little star-struck at first, and it has turned out that it's been a great match in terms of both research-interests and personality (INTJ-ish, for people who like the MBTI). Not to mention that her classes are awesome. I feel so fortunate to be working with her! I had the best TA assignment last semester! It was for a class I was really, really interested in, being taught by another great professor. I actually enjoyed almost everything I had to do for the job, and started looking forward to teaching classes like that myself (a first). Toronto is fantastic. Love the city, love how easy it is to get around, love being able to walk to so many things, love the culture (classical music, opera, museums, art-galleries, etc.), love the nearby grocery-store, love my adorable little apartment. I even like the climate: not actually that cold by Canadian standards, plenty of sunlight throughout the year, pretty autumns. Best thread ever.

Yes. Just keep at it. Enthusiasm and motivation are what professors tend to notice, so even if you appear to be struggling with the material itself, hang in there.

I've heard good things about Christopher Voigt's lab at UCSF, and the person I know there has interests fairly similar to yours. (I hear they're about to move to MIT, though.)

I agree: that's an impressive amount of work-experience, and you have a very clearly-defined idea of what it is you want to do. I'd say just go for it and see what happens!

This. I only applied to three MA programs last year: one I absolutely loved the sound of in every single way (great department, perfect fit for my research interests, potential supervisor whose work I was so interested in that I was nearly feeling star-struck, city I knew I loved already, etc.), a second that sounded okay, and a third that I knew I didn't want to go to the second after I sent off the application. First I got into #3, but couldn't work up much enthusiasm for it, and decided that if I didn't get in anywhere else I'd just keep working for another year and try again. Then #2 rejected me. A few weeks of hanging around the Waiting it Out forum later, #1 put me on the waitlist. Suspense! A week later they had a place for me. How's it been? Absolutely fantastic! Even better than I expected, and that's really saying something. Love the department, love the subfield, love supervisor, love classes, love the city. If you have a program that is far and away your first choice for multiple strong reasons, I'd say it's worth gambling on!

That's so cool! Me, nothing really...I'm so darn busy that I don't have enough time for the inordinate number of favourite pastimes I have already. I recommend yarn-crafts, though (knitting, crochet, weaving, etc.). They help the time go by and they're calming and at the end of the day you might have something new and interesting to use/wear/show off. The only tricky part is learning the basic skills; after that, you can go looking for patterns you like and pretty much make anything.

What a nifty thread. Points (literally and otherwise) to bhikhaari and Ludwig von Dracula for an exchange both intriguing and very civil! The converse is the case as well. My undergrad GPA was great and my references were good and all that, but I only barely got into my MA program off the waitlist. Why? Mainly because I'd done very poorly in a single class that the department (rightly) considers crucial background. So yeah, you never know what could make a difference one way or the other!

I'm like that as well. I think the key is that 'imaginative' doesn't mean 'chaotic'; it's perfectly possible to enjoy creative things while structuing your life in general around order and rationality. (Those who are into MBTI personality-typing note that this is a rare combination, but it exists, particularly in INTJs.) Yep. Different things. Double-dissociation, too, as far as I can tell. I'm introverted but not shy (I don't mind interacting with people, and I actually kind of like giving talks about my research; but at the end of the day I'm thrilled to get back to my own little apartment), and my sister is the reverse (she says she wants to hide when in the presence of strangers; but she loves hanging out with her friends as much as possible, and sometimes gets lonely when she's in a room by herself). Heh! Annie Hall, anyone?

If you're sneaky about it, you can use basic HTML skills to make a page look very clean and interesting (albeit not flashy). Use invisible tables (<table border="0">) to position things, draw strategic bitmap images, etc. Learning a bit of basic CSS can help with layout-related tasks, too (backgrounds, what links in text look like, style-templates, etc.). I'd start by drawing out (on an old-fashioned piece of paper if you want) an ideal look for the page; then think about how you might be able to reproduce it on the screen with your skills. It might be easier than it looks! (Also, a lot of academic libraries and IT departments offer workshops in HTML and general web-design; I'd look into whether such a thing is available where you are.) Good luck!

No, nothing nearly so fundamental. Canadians aren't any more laid-back about their ambitions. It's more that in the United States the whole game of college-admissions and -attendance has gotten totally carried away.

I grew up in Canada, did my undergrad degree in the U.S., and am now in grad-school back up here; I'd agree! I get the feeling that there's a lot of implicit pressure to graduate within the expected time in the States (especially when following similar expectations of high SAT marks and getting into good colleges). In fact, at my undergraduate college I think you need to request special permission to take more than eight semesters to graduate. At any rate, one of my American friends realised he'd need more than four years for his BSc and freaked out about it; meanwhile, I have a lot of Canadian friends who keep going, "Yeah, maybe I'll finish my BA this term, maybe next term; we'll see".

I love that book. Enjoy! As usual, these days it's mainly fiction, linguistics, cognitive-science, memoirs, and more YA books. I just finished 'An Anthropologist on Mars' by Oliver Sacks (fascinating!), and am currently working on the very amusing 'My Year of Meats' by Ruth L. Ozeki.

Heh! I'm not sure I'm quite sensitive enough to be able to tune pianos, but totally understood. Nifty!

I have both absolute pitch and mild pitch-colour synaesthesia, and I have to say that it all really doesn't amount to much more than a nifty party-trick, and there are plenty of downsides to it. It's not a radically different type of musicality; I can't stand it when AP-ers get all elitist about it. Advantages: • Transcription is darn easy. • You never need a pitch to prompt you before singing. • Telling what key anything is in is automatic. • Every key has a qualitatively different feel, meaning that using them in composing is very interesting. Disadvantages: • My sense of relative pitch is very underdeveloped; for instance, I'm not very good with intervals. What I mean by that is that if someone plays an A and an F, I hear...an A and an F...so I calculate that it must be a minor sixth. In other words, I don't have any good idea of what a minor sixth in general sounds like. An A and an F is something immensely different from a D and a B-flat. • Similarly, any song (or cover) played in the key I'm not used to really gets to me. • And listening to period-recordings while trying to look at the score drives me crazy. Hearing an F-sharp and looking at a G produces major cognitive dissonance. • Also, the key that something is in can really make or break a piece. I, personally, happen to love F minor - can't get enough of it. But E minor I find irreparably boring. Consequence? When I'm listening to my collection of mp3s and a song in E minor comes up, I tend to alt-tab over to my audio-settings and notch the pitch-level up a semitone. Why? Because then I'm going to enjoy it one heck of a lot more. I can't love anything in E minor. • Yeah, things that are a bit out-of-step with standard tuning can be very annoying. For instance, The Charlatans' song "Just Lookin'" is in...well, it's about halfway between B major and C major. This bothered me so much that I deleted the song from my hard-drive and avoided it for nearly four years. In fact, the only reason I re-downloaded it (just this month, actually) is that in the meantime I'd discovered that you can adjust the pitch of a track in Audacity by fractions of a semitone. * laughs *

Ah, well even the Northeastern U.S. isn't going to be as sunny as Egypt, especially in the winter: first of all, the entire region is cloudier and far more prone to precipitation; and second, it's farther enough north that the summer days will be considerably longer and the winter ones likewise shorter. So SAD might be a legitimate concern. Some people are more susceptible to it than others, though, and the good news is that there are a lot of things you can do starting in the autumn to ward it off. Exercise, light therapy, and taking Vitamin D can all be major sources of help. (Anti-SAD lights aren't cheap [typically at least $100], but your student medical insurance might cover the expense.) If you go to the U.S., I'd say monitor yourself and see how you're feeling in October and November; if the relative lack of light is getting to you, make an anti-SAD plan and stick to it. The UK is even farther north. England is lovely, and its climate is much more temperate than that of the Northeast; but it's very rainy (often year-round) and the winter days are short enough there that if you do end up there, I'd suggest being proactive and investing in a light-box early on, then start using it daily in mid-October or so. Then keep it up - that should preclude the possibility of an incapacitating case of SAD. At any rate, SAD is very seldom as serious as major depression, and by March or April it goes away!

When I was in high school, my eleventh-grade guidance counselor told me that he thought the first thing I needed to keep in mind when deciding on a college was whether I liked the climate. When I (a native of the Pacific Northwest) mentioned being a little bit afraid of snow and cold winters, he told me not to even bother applying to anywhere outside California, Florida, etc. I'm VERY glad I didn't listen to him. A number of friends and acquaintances - even people in LiveJournal communities - balked at my choice of college, even though its reputation is stellar. They said that it was in the middle of nowhere (true) and that it had a really darn cold climate (true), so I shouldn't even want to go there. I'm VERY glad I didn't listen to them. I absolutely loved my college. The purportedly dreadful winters? Yeah, they were winters. But you know what? They were fine. It didn't take long to learn that: putting on three layers of warm clothing keeps you pretty comfortable outside, even when it's way below zero (in either Fahrenheit or Celsius). Gloves and hats and scarves are good things; buildings in cold regions can be counted on to have really good heating, so you can always go inside to warm up; the Northeast may be cold, but it gets one heck of a lot more sunlight in the winter than the incessantly rainy, dreary Northwest does, and seasonal affective disorder just didn't enter the picture at all, which was a welcome change; Northeastern autumns are STUNNINGLY pretty, and the springs are nicer than those in the Northwest as well; and snow is pretty, and working in the library by a fireplace while it's snowing outside is really cosy! If people tell you to avoid your first choice because they think the climate is horrible, I'd go and find out how you respond to it. I've discovered that winter doesn't bother me much at all, and I love having four distinct seasons every year (as opposed to the Northwest's two: the rainy season and the dry one).

How long is your master's program? If it's just a year, I think the best course of action would be to stick it out, put it behind, and then get the heck out of the classroom for a while. You know you love the subject, but you're feeling a little burned-out at the moment and dread the thought of doing it all the time; I think that a year or two doing something completely different (menial, even, if necessary) would be all you'd need for that love of the subject to recover enough that you just can't wait to go back to school. (Or, if that doesn't happen, whatever: just stay away and keep going with the jobs!) Given that you're unsure about committing to a Ph.D., this would be especially good as it would allow you to step back and gauge whether in the long-run academia would be for you. A Ph.D. is a big deal, after all, and you need to really really want to go for it in order to get through it in a healthy way. Best of luck!

Bring your research-interests and plenty of enthusiasm. * grins * A notebook is helpful; you may get a lot of useful information all at once and need to write it down. If you have an extra undergrad transcript lying around, take it; you might be asked about certain classes you've taken and/or about your GPA. And it never hurts to have a little look through a few papers of particular interest by each potential advisor, but you needn't go overboard with that. Anyway, best of luck!

I'm so sorry to hear about this! What a drag. Well, I'd say the first thing to do would be cross off #4. * grins * Yeah, most universities, especially research-universities, will have something along those lines (though it might also be called 'Accessibility Services' as it is at my grad-school). I volunteered for the Student Disability Services office at my undergrad-school for a while, and the people there were just so great: friendly, calm, resourceful, and empathetic. They helped out all kinds of students with all kinds of health-issues: learning-difficulties, physical disabilities, chronic physical/mental illnesses, colourblindness, test-anxiety problems...all sorts of things. In order words, there's never any need to be shy about asking them for assistance, and they've probably seen it all before. Being in school is bound to be stressful on some level or another, but if you love your field, plan your time well, work with the disability-office when necessary, and give yourself plenty of time to look after yourself, then it shouldn't be overwhelming. Meanwhile, a good health-department and/or psychiatric centre might well help get your symptoms more under-control: I realise you're probably aware of this, but there are a whole range of medications, cognitive-behavioural therapy programs, meditation-techniques, etc. that might be of help! So I'd say go for it, totally.