paigemont

Sounds sorta like me: 1 acceptance, no word yet on funding (but I don't expect anything, from the tone of our correspondences); 4 rejections; still waiting on one master's If I don't get funding, I couldn't justify dragging my significant other halfway across the country for the best program in the world, let alone UIUC. I'm still going to visit, but more and more, I'm planning around the master's...*fingers crossed*

Holy cow. I'm glad I didn't bother applying there. It'd be interesting to see the statistics for more of these schools. I know that my Stanford rejection letter said they had 5 slots, but I took that to be about average or just below average. 3 is just plain ridiculous.

The same thing happened to me. I had the same qualms about whether this meant that there might be a lack of funding and whether I should be applying at all, since I might decline their offer anyway, but the head graduate advisor from the department seemed reassuring enough. He said that the department would "aggressively" seek alternative forms of funding if I didn't get the fellowship, but that I should definitely apply. In short, I don't think there's anything to worry about. My alma mater just approved next year's overall budget last week, so I doubt each individual department can possibly know how much funding they'll have. The fellowship application is probably just standard procedure.

Haha thanks! To be honest, I was kind of trying to, in a very sensitive, polite kind of way. Plus, I don't really know what I'm talking about. Interesting. Underpaid, yes, but I'd like to hope that the kind of comp ling that I'm into (as a sort of supplement to a regular theoretical subfield) would give me an edge in the academic job market. Additionally, it might be less common, but I think a comp linguist might be able to find a job in a CS department somewhere, if they're good enough. Regardless of whether I'm right about the job thing, I think comp ling is really cool and will pursue it .

You may know this already, but Eve Sweetser at Berkeley does some work on (old) Celtic languages. I think she even teaches Breton and some other things in the Celtic Studies department.

I certainly can't tell you that your opinion is wrong. I would like to point out that computer science is doing pretty well as an academic field, so certainly some people can resist that 160k. I'd like to think that I could be one of those people. Maybe I should have said something like "computer science as applied to linguistics/linguistics as applied to computer science" -- anything from corpus work to actually building a working model of some aspects of whatever theory you're into. At this point, I would consider my research aim to be semantics, first and foremost. Computers would just help me understand things about it (for example, via automatic semantic role labelers and parsers and whatnot). I dunno. I think it's pretty awesome. Plus, in my perfect world (in my daydreams), layoffs don't exist and everything I do makes the world better.

I think it's bizarre that nobody here has voted for computational linguistics yet. Is it just unfamiliar territory that you might explore, or do you know something about it and want to do something else?

The longer I wait for my last decision to come in, the more I agree that taking a year off for a masters degree/research might be in my best interest. I want my PhD school to be -perfect- and at this point, I'm just not sure. As for my background, I'm certainly not the best applicant, but I don't think I'm terrible. I've got a ling BA from a major public university, four letters of rec total (two of which are from very influential people in the field), ~3.8 GPA, 2 years of work/research at a fairly well-known comp. ling. research group, and some graduate course experience. I think my weaknesses are just too many at this point -- mid-range GRE (somewhere around a 1350, though I forget the exact number), a statement of purpose that probably did not play off my strengths, an underwhelming writing sample, and perhaps too many, somewhat convoluted interests. I'm pretty sure that I only got accepted at UIUC because one prof there just happens to be an alumnus of my alma mater, took language courses under the same instructor as me, and now wants to do fieldwork in that country. Essentially, I was accepted because I fit one obscure profile by pure chance, not because they were impressed with my linguistics abilities. In short, you're not alone here, nocturne. This business is rough.

Distributed morphology is the main syntactic approach that comes to my mind. If you go to Penn or Arizona or NYU, there'll be some people who can tell you lots about it. It's a bit too extreme for my tastes, but it does account for lots of data well. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/ Are there any others? The next closest thing I can think of is A-morphous morphology cf Stephen Anderson. Random tangent: anyone else regretting not applying to a certain school? I suddenly wish that I had applied to Yale...

Question to whoever voted for morphology (or anyone for that matter): do you think of morphology as a more syntactic or more phonological process? Or something else?

Yeah sorry about that. There's a limit of 10 items for each poll. I had to leave out things that I normally wouldn't have, but hopefully the "Other" option or an informative post can take care of any deficiencies.

I'm curious about what you guys plan to focus yourselves on (if you know yet). Also, I included the option to choose between formal and functional, just because I'm curious. I doubt anyone is very extremist wrt that issue, but if you lean either way, I'd like to hear why. Feel free to include more info in a post, too.

Not to talk down my apparent future program, but the Summer Institute was held in Illinois in 1999, and UIUC doesn't rank very high on any list that I've seen. Not that that means Berkeley can't hold its own among the best programs in the country -- it's certainly great for cognitive linguistics, phonetics (according to some of the phonetics people here, anyway ), language documentation and revitalization, historical, etc.

If you run a search for a few of the criteria, it lists the sources at the bottom of the page. They are the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, National Research Council, Survey of Earned Doctorates, and Survey of Graduate Students and Postgraduates in Science and Engineering. I have absolutely no clue how trustworthy/dated/thorough these things are, but there are links to more information if you're curious. I'm curious -- why did/do you like NYU so much? My preferences were something like 1. Illinois (TIE), 1. Stanford (TIE), 3. Brown, 4. UCSD, 5. UCLA. My main reason for ranking Illinois so high is that it will allow me to do field work in the Caucasus and has lots of good-looking NLPish research going on. Pardon me for hijacking the topic slightly, but does anyone have any sources that rank schools within the subfields of computational linguistics/computational semantics? If not, do you have any personal opinions about such things?

I use this. It's at least partly based on that same National Research Council thing, but I think it's still useful: http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/linguistics

I heard on Feb 5. I'm not one of those international students. I'm from CA. Are you waiting to hear back from UIUC? Where are you from?

UCLA finally sent out their rejections. I'm sort of relieved -- the wait was torturous. Has anyone heard back from Brown at all yet?

Oh yeah I forgot to mention the courses I would take. Semantics (Barker), syntax of argument structure (Van Valin Jr.), lexical semantics of verbs (Levin), deixis and indexicality (Hanks), usage effects in phonology and morphology (Hay), and the experimental semantics course (Matlock) all jump out at me. Not to mention about 75% of the rest of them. Shame we can only take four. I wish someone would teach a course with a focus on Caucasian languages, though. Maybe that'll be me someday... Also, it just occurred to me -- if I'm graduating, I will probably have to pay the non-UC student fees. Looks like I should start preparing application materials for a fellowship again. Argh. And, congrats on UCSD psycholing. I'm jealous. I thought UCSD was my safety school, but it was the first and fiercest to reject me.

Anybody here planning to attend the summer institute this year in Berkeley? If so, what courses will you take? I'm just finishing up my undergraduate degree at Berkeley, so I'll just stay here an extra month or two for some classes before moving far away. Hopefully I'll meet some of you guys here . http://lsa2009.berkeley.edu/

And my real ignorance of phonology reveals itself. Or my biases. I'm not sure which.

IMO, UMass is easily the best choice over MIT. It certainly has stronger phonology, psycholing, etc., which might matter in case you want to be well-rounded/change your mind about syntax/semantics/pragmatics. If you don't mind me asking, what's your educational background like? Also, as my sig says, I was accepted to UIUC last week. No word yet on funding, though, so I don't know how to feel about it. Also, rejections from Stanford (no real surprise) and UCSD.