LinguisticMystic

Call me judgmental, but maintaining 100% responsibility and being unwilling to live with some "risk taking" (like ONLY using ONE form of birth control, for example) are no way to live and enjoy life. Seriously. And call me Pinkster for fantasizing about getting married and becoming pregnant (not necessarily in that order because I'm only 90% responsible), but I have for a while envisioned the later PhD years as being a reasonable time for these things to happen. With the recognition that pregnancy and child-rearing always bring stress and major adjustment even under the so-called "ideal" circumstances, of course it makes sense to seek the advise and experiences of others.

That was fantastic! I can only hope to someday be slandered so ridiculously on the internet. Then again, I'd be laughing a lot less if I ended up in a program with Loric. Sorry to those who do.

Comparing hypothetical scenarios based on how happy I think they should/would make me is exactly the last thing I would do to be happy. Wait no, using my hypothetical ideal life as a basis for judging other people's lives is the very last thing.

Close, but the actual worst are sneaky essays with character limits, not word limits... ... I'll limit your character, application form!

longforit, you've chosen mostly east-coast schools ("schools" as in "schools of thought"), yet the way you describe your interests in the phonetics/phonology interface all rehash the same big concerns of laboratory phonology (phonetics + phonology), essentially. I agree with Fuzzy in that you are probably capable of narrowing your focus. Then again, there's a lot to do in lab phon being that it's a newish field, so going into a PhD program with those interests will necessarily be specific in a way. As far as your statement, the things you mention don't have to be unrelated--I don't think they are. All this to say ... yes, your interests as you describe them may be broad. But it sounds like you would be capable of easily pitching a line of inquiry that would link one or more of your interests together.

I meant NCSU's MA program is a very good one is all. The sociolinguistics PhD is only a concentration within the sociology department and it's only been around for less than a year, so I don't really know how that will turn out. Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill don't have PhD programs anymore; only UNC-Chapel Hill still has an MA program and it's not really comparable to NCSU.

NCSU is far from a mid-tier sociolx program for only having an MA!

Not lying is a good approach. "More" truthful should be reason enough. My impression has been that the proposed institution is an important piece of information anyway.

Thanks you guys. Fuzzy, that's great advice. I've already been told I'll need to explain the subfield thing in at least one of my statements. I don't think it's that huge of a deal, but I definitely want to prove myself in an effective way.

So I attended the linguistic institute and met a ton of great people while there ... including potential PhD advisors! That's opened up some wonderful lines of communication and I can see it helping a lot when it comes time to submit applications (which is good because they're programs I'm very interested in). My question is, is it possible to do this now with professors I haven't met or is it sort of pointless in this field? It was nice at the institute to just simply walk up to someone or email them and ask if they wanted to get coffee before class.But do I get in touch with all of those professors I haven't had the chance to meet? What do I say? I'm in an MA program now, so I've applied before but never tried to "network" prior to application time. I'm getting mixed advice about whether or not to contact potential advisors and what to say, etc. Part of my problem is I'm switching from one field to another, I think. Any insight/experience? I hope this sort of question can help others too!

I thought about it, too, but have already decided against applying to a school in the UK. For a lot of reasons that have pretty much been covered above. Too short (3 years), not enough (or any) classwork prior to dissertating (I'm interested in interdisciplinary work, so it doesn't make sense for me to stop taking classes right now...), not enough time to develop relationships with colleauges (looking for a close-knit department/lab), not enough teaching experience, a lot of the major conferences are in the U.S., etc. etc. etc. One other thing: I noticed that none of the professors I'm interested in potentially working with in the U.S. have degrees from Europe. So that stands out to me since that's where I'd like to end up.

Thanks for sharing! It's like no pressure advising even if not specific to my field. It was also interesting to hear about some things that can happen to "failed linguists" since that's not talked about often. Also, if watching bothers you just listen to the audio ...

The assumption that the admissions process is even supposed to be "fair" is a big one.

It sounds like you might be newly exploring the field. I could suggest looking at some papers from the Language and Linguistics Compass. That might give you an idea of what sorts of things you might consider doing. Here's a list of all the sociolinguistics titles: http://linguistics-compass.com/sociolinguistics/ If you want to compare English and Arabic, you'll need to think about what's special or interesting about differences or similarities between the languages or how they are used (e.g., if you want to do discourse analysis) in some aspect which has social relevance. That's great you have access to speakers of the languages, though.

I'm doing my MA in sociolinguistics, too. I could probably give you some advice if you provided more information along the lines of what Fuzzy suggested. Especially considering the resources available to you is important -- a lot of sociolx research depends on collecting speech data or relying on corpora. But the field is really broad in what it considers, so it's definitely necessary to narrow your scope. Labov argues that all linguistic inquiry is (or should be) sociolinguistic in nature, after all.

Just saying. Sociolinguistics and optimality theory. 0_0

Yes. In the case that you do get googled (which does happen ... some sites track unique visitors/search terms/etc. for you) by interested parties, at least if you have a personal website (and some other professional-ish sites) those will turn up higher in a search than, say, your race times from 6 years ago... So even if they don't navigate through all of the hits, they'll still see some relevant returns in a search of your name.

But, what if it's Bill Labov?

I have the pleasure of looking forward to applying to PhD programs again in the fall as I begin the second year of my MA. I think I'll be much better prepared this time around. Hopefully attending the linguistic institute this summer will help even more, especially in the way of networking.

A sublet would definitely be ideal, but the dates are kind of funky, so I'm not sure that'd be likely to work out. I would just camp the whole time, but then I wouldn't have wifi. Maybe live in my car? Stay in touch/message me if you'd be interested in going in on something together (this applies to anyone planning on attending!).

Good question. I got awarded a fellowship as well but no news about the Bloch fellowship either. We'll see I suppose. Either way, I'm definitely set on going now.

I think I asked about past students in the department attending the institute... the topic sort of arose naturally. Thankfully.

I can imagine this depends a lot on your department. I'm applying and my department can't cover my additional costs, but I'm told there are other strings to be pulled when the time comes. We'll see. I recently put in my fellowship application, too... fingers crossed. Good luck!

I'm not exactly sure either what you mean by the similarity between mathematics and linguistics... If you're talking about drawing analogies between the two, I would first ask... why? There's no inherent reason to look for analogies without a purpose for doing so. It's simply too easy to find analogies when you're comparing two rule-ordered systems. It sort of goes without saying that you'll find similarities. I would suggest narrowing down what you want to examine and then being able to substantiate why it's something worth doing in the first place...

I'm doing a Master's in linguistics... and I'd give it a 4.5/5. I really truly love the program, the work I'm doing, the classes I'm taking, my colleagues, etc. My only major complaint is that the professor I TA for is ... not good and is sort of an outsider even within the department. And as a perfectionist, it's been driving me insane all semester! I also wish this were a PhD program because it would make for a blissful 5-ish years. I'm disappointed it will be over in only a year and a half and I'll have to apply to other schools.