PhDreaming

Speaking of wardrobe... I've never been a "business casual" person. The only button up shirts I own are flannels and my only pair of solid colored pants that are not jeans are from "21 Men" and are totally form-fitting/stretch. I sound like a total fool but I rock a very specific style. I've never found myself in a situation where my clothes were a problem but how is this going to play out when I visit campuses for interviews?

That's cuz diachronics is totally in the past. ;-)

I heard that one of my programs will be making final decisions on Monday. I hope this is true but I feel slightly uneasy expecting it to be so. Fingers crossed that I will know something in a few days.

Shortlist seems to have a couple possible meanings when it comes to this whole process. 1) Some schools shortlist candidates and invite them to campus to interview and base offers on the interview weekend/day. 2) Other schools seem to "shortlist" students and invite them all to campus knowing that they plan to make an offer to all of them. Still other schools send out acceptances without a shortlist/interview cycle and thus also send out rejections without an interview. Needless to say, if a school does send out shortlistinterview invites, the rest of the applicants get rejections though these are not always sent out at the same time as the shortlist/interview invites. HTH

Because CU is a state school, the funding situation is not perfect but it is still good. All PhD students are guaranteed 10 semesters of teaching. Depending on your percentage appointment you will get paid more or less and be able to take more or fewer credits without having to pay out of pocket. There are also possibilities to T.A. outside of the department which can sometimes be better than the percentage appointment in linguistics. But that is seemingly rare. Like I said... the funding is not perfect, but it works.

Where did you apply? Where have you been shortlisted?

I'm currently a student at Boulder and just thought I would update this. Though the message board indicated that decisions are made late in March, that's not exactly the case. From what I have gathered, the committee will meet in February and invite shortlisted students to visit campus in the first week of March. I don't know if that visit is interview or recruiting but that's what the schedule looks like as far as I can gather. I applied to Georgetown two years ago and was told that they only have enough money to fund 2 people per subdiscipline. This means, two sociolinguists, two theoretical linguists and two whatever else they have (blanking right now). They admit more than they can fund, it would seem. Anyone have the school on any other schools process (specifically Stanford or OSU?)

funology - you just made me spit out my ice cream! thanks!!

wow! that's a crazy small margin! But I did do a bit of research just now and found this: http://magoosh.com/gre/2012/new-gre-score-conversion/ Could be helpful and is TOTALLY interesting.

Nothing new to add except further evidence for my agreement. The school I am currently at for my MA hosts a weekend of interviews for a shortlist. The shortlist is essentially for those who have made the cut and will get an offer (at least that's how it happened last year). However, one of the schools I am applying to definitely uses the interview weekend as the finals decision maker.

You could always call them on Monday ... :-/

Interesting fact: I heard the head of my department today ask the administrator for the "conversion sheet for the GRE." It's definitely starting... Also, what is the deal with the new GRE? What's the max score? I don't understand how to interpret the news scores (not that it matters ALL that much in the grander scheme).

Ha! So did I! Hey also... did you know that if your hand is bigger than your face it means you have cancer?

@LING 304... I checked past updates on the Results Survey to deduce that Stanford sends out interview invites around the 10th of Feb and that OSU sends out acceptances (without interviews) around the same time. If you search for your schools there you could figure some stuff out most likely. BTWs what are your research interests? I'm trying to figure out what all your schools have in common and I'm not having any luck

NICE! so meta.

lots of THIS: http://www.talentigelato.com/Products/SeaSaltCaramel.aspx

If you managed to get waitlisted without a tailored statement and you have since done so AND otherwise improved you application, sounds like you should be a shoe-in. IMHO.

Also... not to wallow in rejection, but I have a friend who is currently unable to access internet who applied to the program and has not received an interview invite yet. If anyone checks and sees a rejection on the UMICH portal could you PM me so I can at least tell my friend that some of those decisions have been made? Thanks.

I had the same result with Michigan when I applied 2 years ago. My LOR writer kept telling me that "no news is (probably) good news" on the assumption that if I had been rejected I would have been notified. Finally in APRIL I got so fed up with waiting that I e-mailed them and I got a really terse response that said something like "To verify your application status, check the UMICH portal." I did. Not surprisingly, I had also been rejected. No e-mail, no snail mail, no phone call... NOTHING. I think they need to figure out a way to change their policy for notification. It seems like most other schools (smaller/more prestigious even) take the time to send out polite rejections early on so as to not string people along. Michigan is such a great program with such great faculty but this definitely rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't reapply this time around... but that's mainly because my interests have shifted quite dramatically. Good luck to any and all who get an interview! And if you are still waiting, definitely keep an eye on the online status. Also... looks like an NYU invite has been posted to the Results Survey - it has begun

As long as we are going this direction - Frankfurt, Kentucky?

It's funny how the focus of this forum is totally getting into grad school and to a lesser extend what it's like to be there. I'm wondering if there are any other Sociolinguists or Linguistic Anthropologists out there reading anything super interesting that they would want to share with all of us. I'd suggest anyone can post about any cool article they read but I will have more (if anything) to say about the socio side of things. At the "behest" of my advisor I just read Ben Rampton's brand new article in Language & Communication From 'Multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia' to 'Contemporary urban vernaculars' and had a few thoughts. Though I didn't really follow his rational for the terminological shift he argues for (mainly because his argumentation style is unfamiliar to me), he did make some very interesting points about "reflexive" language (i.e. crossing and stylization). This is my area of focus, namely stylization, and, though I operate under a slightly different definition of stylization than does Rampton, we seem to have enough overlap to argue similar points in recent works (don't you just love/hate when something you wrote but haven't published yet comes out in an article by a highly respected academic in your (sub)field?). Anyway... if anyone else has read this and wants to chat about it, feel free. Otherwise, let this thread be a place where we can chat about interesting articles we read more generally. Cheers!

Awwww... looks like Santa Barbara sent out a little wave of rejection. Man, those UC schools are really on top of their game. Early bird catches the worm? Sorry to those that got rejected (secretly a little glad I didn't apply... one of my friends got rejected - no bueno).

I actually did the same thing this season. I didn't have any papers that I was particularly confident about so I just wrote a paper that was more in line with my research interests and not the class materials specifically. When I mentioned this to my advisor (2 days before my first application was due) she kinda flipped out. Apparently, she had told another student to avoid such a situation at all costs because 1) the paper has not bee reviewed by anyone and 2) you wouldn't have had time to work out any obvious kinks. If I had known that she was so against it I would have probably worked on making another paper better. Fortunately, my advisor is awesome and read my paper and said it was great... so I guess I lucked out! I guess the moral of the story is: do what you need to do but there are some serious potential problems when you DONT have someone to talk to about what you've written.

I can't say what your chances are for the programs you applied to but you do seem to have a lot going for you. 5 years of research is way more than most would have when applying to a PhD program (I would wager). The real question would be how well you fit in with each of those departments. As others have said in other threads, the strength of your SoP, LoRs and writing sample are very important for AdComs. If you have demonstrated that you are a good fit for the departments, your qualifications seem like good, strong support. I know this probably isn't the answer you were hoping to get for your question but I think it's a fair starting point. Good luck on your applications and don't forget to keep an eye on that pesky little results survey (I keep refreshing it a couple times a day too... just to see whats going on).

I'm a linguist. I love linguistics but if I were better at math in undergrad I probably never would have dropped my first major (Geology) and I would probably be in grad school studying earthquakes and volcanos. But alas, my major changed and now I am going down a totally different path. Additionally, I have a quasi-ridiculous obsession with commercial airplanes and I've always dreamed about being a pilot or even a flight attendant. Very different jobs but cool in their own way. My goal at this point is to devise a linguistics experiment involving flight attendants while they are working... just for an excuse to fly.