ConceptualMetaphor

The Manning and Sch

I would definitely agree that for "everyday" use - word processing, web surfing, that sort of thing - the laptop plus external monitor/keyboard/mouse combination is great. You get portability and the comfort of the larger-sized monitor and keyboard. However, if you're more of a power user who does anything video or audio editing related, plays games, or does a lot of coding work, the processing power of a netbook simply isn't enough. Even with my regular laptop, I had to use the computer science lab often because code just took too long to compile on my own computer. (My thesis work was especially ridiculous - it took hours for the data processing, even on their desktops! I took a lot of nap breaks in the student lounge while waiting for it to finish...) So, that's why I'm planning on the desktop + netbook combo. I want the extreme portability of a netbook but the processing power of a desktop - and that's pretty impossible to find in a single computer.

This is my plan! My Apple Powerbook is on its last legs so I'm definitely going to get a new computer this summer. I realized that the reason why I like my laptop so much is just that I like being able to bring it with me to campus to take notes, check email between classes, etc. I also like being able to work on papers sitting downstairs on my couch instead of at my desk. But, I also found it frustrating having it as my primary computer - there are some things laptops just aren't as good as desktops for. I do a fair amount of coding and it's much easier programming when you have a bigger monitor (or two!). So I've decided to get two computers - one tiny cheap netbook (probably a Dell Mini) for commuting purposes and one desktop for serious working at home purposes (also watching tv online >_>). It'll actually cost about the same as getting a high-end laptop. Plus, being a huge dork I may set it up so that I can access my desktop at home remotely via my laptop, in case I need to access files I don't have on the laptop. I may also Hackintosh my laptop because I'm really fond of OS X. (Hence why I'm thinking of getting the Dell Mini - they Hackintosh well.) Don't forget to look into special academic discounts offered through your school!

The ling board's been quiet the past few days...anyway, thought I would mention I'm going to Berkeley! After 4 years of being in freezing cold, middle-of-nowhere NY it will be a welcome change.

Oh hey, yet another thread I should have posted in a while ago that I didn't even realize existed. Thanks for resurrecting it, anyli_t - I'll be in the linguistics dep't at Berkeley too! I'm pretty sure we met during prospie visit week, actually. (I'm the other cog sci-type.) I'm really curious to find out who else is in our cohort, but I guess we'll find out in August...

LOL! Ok, LingGrad, I think you win.

A lot of Berkeley-area Craigslist postings specifically mention they're queer-friendly and/or state their sexual identities, so if your friend is concerned about this he should have some good luck there. And hey, it *is* Berkeley...

...So you're an accountant, huh? Think you can help me do my taxes?

And yet you'll still have to endlessly explain, over and over, what "cognitive science" is...of course it would help if the discipline itself had a good answer for that first! I had fun explaining today to some parents of a potential anthropology major what "linguistic anthropology" is. I hope I didn't get too carried away. And I like the UArizona shirt idea, although I'd prefer "You're a psychologist? How many neuroses do you have?"

I agree, going to the LSA Institute this summer might be a great idea, especially since you don't have a ling dept at your university - it'll expose you to interesting subfields that you would otherwise miss out on. I can't say anything about McGill in particular, but linguistics depts really vary on what sort of background they expect you to have. Some do want you to come in with substantial ling training from your undergraduate degree, as you would get from a full linguistics major. Others have a list of "related majors" like anthropology, computer science, cognitive science, and foreign languages who they also encourage to apply, with the understanding that a lot of undergraduate institutions (like yours) don't offer a linguistics degree. So if McGill says that course prep is an issue for them, I would encourage you to make sure you also apply to other departments which suggest they welcome non-ling majors (sometimes more interdisciplinary programs are more "open-minded" in that regard). Personally, my undergrad doesn't offer a ling degree either, so I did much what you're doing - I made sure to take whatever linguistics-related courses I could find throughout the school and established proof of my academic viability in the (related) fields I did major in. In my SOP I made sure to illustrate that what I lacked in formal preparation I made up for in other ways, especially my persistence in creating a linguistics-related curriculum for myself and seeking out other non-class-based opportunities (e.g., research assistant jobs with professors in ling-related fields). Another really important thing is outside research experience - this can definitely improve the strength of your applications, so if you can continue to work in a lab with the professor (I assume) you wrote your hopefully-published paper with, I would highly suggest doing that. Of course, having a published paper is also a great achievement for an undergrad too. If you can establish your ability to do good independent research, even if it's in a barely-related field, a ling dept is more likely to accept you without an actual ling degree. (My research background is primarily in robotics. Go figure!) Quite honestly, unless you're *absolutely* dead-set on McGill, if I were you I wouldn't do the un-funded prep year. You can get into a fully funded ling PhD program without an undergrad ling degree!

I'm going to go ahead and bump this thread again with the same question...when's the best time to start looking for housing? I'm moving to Berkeley the first week in July and subletting a place for 7 weeks, and planning to move somewhere more permanent right before school starts. Are there school-year based leases to be found for grad students? The listings I've seen so far on Craigslist for late August move-ins seem geared toward undergrads, but I'm guessing more listings will be popping up later in the spring/summer...I hope.

I don't know anything about UW, but since you've already decided to go elsewhere you could withdraw your application from consideration, both to help out other people on the waitlist and to get a bit of a snub in there (you're too good for them! ha!) since you feel they've been rude. That said, they probably can't get back to the waitlist applicants until after April 15th anyways, since they're waiting on responses from the first round. It's strange that they haven't said anything at all to some applicants, though. That's rather unfair. Btw, your forum screen name is quite amusing.

Ok, I've been diligently avoiding posting in this thread - I have a thesis to write, after all! - but I'm afraid you guys have managed to suck me in. I know that I posted earlier saying that I considered myself a functional linguist, but I'm honestly of the opinion that at this point in the field, labels like these are unnecessarily divisive and too hard to define to even be really all that useful. Considering that a lot of research is moving in an interdisciplinary direction, and given that linguistics is already so fractious and open-ended, maybe we should stop trying divide everyone into one of two massive groups? And meanwhile, I'm going into cognitive linguistics, so proverbial gun to my head I'd put it on the functional side as well. But that has a lot to do with the fact that I'm approaching it from a cog sci perspective, which trends toward the function camp, and because I'm grounded in discourse analysis (I'm actually a linguistic anthropology major for my undergrad). And here's what dragged me into this - sorry, Dinali - I suspect you're being somewhat facetious here, because I'm not sure anyone (well, just about anyone...) honestly thinks that "exact phrase not in corpus" = "can't exist in the language, period!" A better characterization, using the same toy example you suggested, might be: 1. I[NP] [see[V] [a[DET] ship[N][NP]][VP]. 2. I saw a ship. 3. I see a dog 4. I saw a dog. 5. I see a cat. (With similar POS tags for all the other sentences in the corpus. And sorry if my brackets are off, I hate doing this by hand...) So is "I saw a cat" an allowed sentence? Well, we can see from the corpus that I is a NP, saw is a past participle, a is a determiner, and cat is a noun. And we see the attested forms "I saw a dog" and "I saw a ship", which both have the parsing: S -> NP VP VP -> PP NP NP-> DET N Therefore we can ascertain that "I saw a cat" would be a felicitous sentence in this language as well, because it can be accepted by that attested grammar. I think the great thing about corpus linguistics is that we can do this for far, far more utterances than can be intuited, or individually analyzed, or elicited from subjects. Automatic POS taggers are a wonderful thing! I don't see why corpora should be an issue for formalists, given that they can be such a useful tool: you can think of a structure you want to investigate, intuit that you find it felicitous, ask some subjects "hey, can you say this?" and then look in a corpus to see if it occurs in everyday speech and what tends to elicit it. And then it's easy to look through the corpus for similar occurrences. And it works well in reverse, too - you might think "oh, nobody ever says that" and your subjects might, in a formal research environment, say "oh, I wouldn't say that!" but corpora sometimes show that constructs are far more common than one might first suspect. Anyways, that's my two cents. In general I'm going to stay out of this, if only because I don't consider myself nearly informed enough to really even justify having an opinion on the matter. And I have other things to occupy myself with...like that thesis...

Well, to be fair, I'd say a number of those criticisms used to be more true of formal linguistics than they are now. For example, a lot of arguments for the poverty of the stimulus were based on intuited claims (i.e., that such-and-such construction is far too rare for children to acquire it and therefore it must be inherent, to grossly oversimplify). Then corpus linguistics came along and demonstrated that some of these constructs are far more common than previously claimed, and other empirical work showed that claims which held for English and Romance languages (i.e., the privileged languages Nel cites) failed when considering a more typologically diverse field. So that created a challenge for formal approaches: they need to be theoretically sound, but also rigorously tested. Of course, now we can all squabble over methodologies and the validity of experimental elicitation and corpus biases and so forth.

I'd consider myself a functionalist linguist. I'm primarily interested in the cognition/language interface and cognitive linguistics (particularly spatial and embodied work). That's what you get for taking mostly cog sci classes in undergrad, I guess! I also have a heavily computational background, so I'm a big proponent of empirical research, especially corpus linguistics. I think I'm not so much anti-UG (although I am admittedly skeptical of it) as falling on the interactionist side of the modularity debate.

Well, after that massive angst-ridden post of mine, it turns out that first choice school found funding for me after all. No substantial details just yet, but I'm still enormously relieved. I think that if your school hasn't straight up said "there is no funding at all" if you are politely persistent and make it clear you would *love* to go there, they will try to funnel whatever money they can come up with your way. Due to the economy, a lot of state schools' budgets are in serious flux right now, so some more money might pop up in the next week or two. (This is what happened in my case.) Demonstrating interest can't hurt, at least. Good luck, guys.

It looks like I'm in the same boat too. This is difficult for me, because my second choice is actually offering me a great funding package. But then I visited my first choice and it's definitely the better place for me - except that they're still trying to find funding for me. (According to the latest email, the situation is "fluid.") So unless they pull some money out of a hat it looks like they can't commit to funding, which leaves me three options: 1. Accept the second choice and probably play the "what if" game for the rest of my life 2. Accept the first choice anyway and go into extremely heavy debt (and yes, it's one of the most, if not *the* most expensive areas to live in the country) 3. See if I can defer a year from first choice if they can get funding for me next year Option 3 wouldn't seem so bad if it weren't for the fact that I have no real job right now (since I'm still in my undergrad I just have work-study positions) and few marketable skills, so I'd end up having to stay at home with my parents, in a very economically depressed part of the country (one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation! woo!) with no jobs available and no friends. And I'm already pretty depressed and anxious...this would not be ideal for my psyche. Also, I would have to start repaying my currently deferred undergrad loans since they're only deferred as long as I'm a student. Additionally, I'm only covered under my parents' insurance if I'm a student, and I have significant medical bills that would be impossible to pay for out of pocket. Option 2 would be more feasible if I didn't already have a significant chunk of debt from my undergrad loans, and if that area didn't have such a ridiculously high cost of living. Given that the post-PhD job market is so bad I'm already going into this knowing that years of poverty are ahead of me, but I also went into this told that I shouldn't have to pay for grad school, and I'm pretty set on that idea. Option 1 at this point feels like a horrible settle-for, especially after all my profs and friends and family were so excited for me when I got into first choice school. (Not to mention how happy it made me!) I'm a bit depressed just thinking about it. To have money be the deciding factor - rather than how well I fit at the school and whether or not I like the area and so forth - would be really lame. *sigh* There are no easy choices here...there's no 4th option I'm missing, is there?

Native Tucsonan checking in - I went to the other side of the country for my undergrad, so I'm speaking as a townie rather than as a college student. Some answers and highlights: - Someone asked about the political climate: Tucson in my experience is pretty middle-of-the-road, definitely more liberal than most of AZ. Our county trends blue in national elections and our Republican mayor published a letter during the last election arguing against banning gay marriage. That says a lot, I think. - The influence from Mexico: We have some of the best Mexican food in the country, for one. I can't eat "Mexican food" in the northeast because I'm so spoiled. Personally I really like that we have more cultural diversity than a lot of places, but I'd say it's still quite American. Just southwest-y. As someone previously mentioned, we have Rodeo weekend, which is very distinctly Tucsonan (the public schools get vacation days for it and everything). - More about the weather: Has anyone mentioned the monsoon yet? My favorite season, with big thunderstorms rolling in at night to break the summer heat. Happens late July-August. In general, yes it is hot, but for most of the year it's just plain nice and sunny. Carry a water bottle and you'll be fine. - Transportation: I agree it'd be difficult to really get around without a car. Traffic's also gotten a lot more worse than it was when I was little. That said we do have one of the best bus systems around, especially for a sprawling western city. Main shopping areas (malls, Targets, supermarkets, etc) are all located on high-frequency bus routes, so you could do it if you had to. There's a Walgreens pharmacy on practically every corner. Tucson is also great for biking, especially given the weather. Bike lanes are plentiful and generally people seem a bit more respectful of bike riders than in other cities I've seen, particularly in the UA area where there are hordes of them. The UA campus itself is dominated by bike riders and pedestrians. - The people and culture: It's so laid back here; it's not that we're lazy, we're just easygoing. After spending 4 years living in the northeast and visiting the various big cities out there, I much prefer the friendlier, calmer west coast style. People are just less pushy, it seems. Generally there's more to do here than people sometimes think; we have a lot of museums, including some unusual ones like the Desert Museum, the DeGrazia Gallery, and the Pima Air and Space Museum. Lots of good restaurants, far more to the music scene than just country/western. There are a few big street fairs a year in the downtown area, where you find the kooky alternative shops and boutiques. If you're outdoorsy there's great hiking and camping year-round, and you can always drive up the mountains (an hour's drive, maybe) and suddenly you're in a deciduous pine forest that gets snow and everything. Big change from all the cacti. If you come here be sure to drive to the top of Mt. Lemmon, there's a hamlet up there called Summerhaven that has the best little pie shop ever. Wow, I sound like I was hired by the city gov't to do PR. I've just really come to appreciate how nice a place it is, I guess. One more thing: gorgeous sunsets. Ok, I'm done.

Yeah, I'm not sure if any of the schools I'm deciding on would even let me use those 5 credits. I'll have to think about it. As for housing, I'm probably going to get a summer sublet in one of the shared houses near Berkeley; one of my friends is also going so we're hoping to get something together. I think it'll be a bit nicer than staying in the dorms and a bit cheaper too. Only problem is people don't list their sublets on craigslist until a month or two in advance...

Hey guys, maybe you can help me out here. I'm trying to figure out if I should register as a student or an affiliate; I graduate from my undergrad in May and don't know yet where I'll be going for grad school in the fall, so technically I'm not a student this summer. There's a good chance I'll be going to a UC come August and the UC student prices actually cost more than for non-UC students. Weird. :? And the affiliate cost is much cheaper than student tuition! So does it really matter which I register as? I've never been to the LSA Institute before so I'm not sure how this all works...thanks!

Wow, the last time I looked at the gradcafe forum this subforum didn't exist! It's always nice to talk to other linguists, given that we're somewhat of a rare breed. Does anyone else find visiting departments utterly exhausting? I just got back from an open house and literally collapsed. The busy schedules combined with the stress of having to meet so many people at once is nigh-overwhelming. Well, it's not quite as stressful as the application process itself, though...