goldheartmountaintop

After 4 rejections and a countless number of sleepless nights with my name on a waitlist, now at the dawn of the week of April 15th,
 
I must have been on the edge because I was still accessible to admissions operations – and I'm accepted to and will be attending UCLA.

I am derailing this thread somewhat, but there is a tendency for people to throw around terms like pro-UG and anti-UG without specifying i) what exactly about UG-type hypotheses they take issue with, and ii) how much the answers to that question has direct ramifications to the work they do. I think considering both is important to your decision, and I am also interested in hearing more about it.
 
My two cents. Re: (i) it simply cannot be that you disagree with everything UG!  E.g., everybody--nativists and empiricists alike--agree that there is something innate, a hypothesis space, i.e. there are "priors" if we are talking in Bayesian terms. Re: (ii), I am of the belief that your personal beliefs about e.g. UG does not and should not constrain who you work with. It's often informative and sometimes more constructive to be around people who don't share these beliefs, as long as they are interested in arguing with you. Good advisors are able to work with and support even those students who are making claims that go directly against them. This happens all the time in my department. 
 
I have, however, had experiences where people have been actively disinterested in the kind of questions I find interesting and important, and some that don't even want to give me the time of day because of their preconceived assumptions about my theoretical beliefs. Now that, I would find to be a toxic environment to be in as a graduate student. From my experience, people at UCLA don't strike me as falling into this category. Take Carson Schutze for example-- I am sure he disagrees with some or most "anti-UG" claims, yet, from my reading of his work, he takes seriously the authors making these claims. 
 
Anyway, while the "ideological divide" you describe is a perfectly reasonable thing to be worried about, I am not sure it deserves as much weight as you seem to be giving it. Take all this with a grain of salt, of course-- just thought I'd share my opinion as a psycholinguist/acquisitionist who people might characterize pro-UG

U of T!! I literally almost started crying at work when I saw the email.

The notifications are coming out slightly later than usual this year. I believe the adcom is meeting sometime mid-next week!

The notifications are coming out slightly later than usual this year. I believe the adcom is meeting sometime mid-next week!

I've heard this said too. I'm on the job market now so have never served on a hiring committee but judging based on who is getting on shortlists and getting jobs these days, that seems fairly accurate. I can't think of anyone who's gotten a job without at least one accepted (in press, if not published) publication. More often than not, people also have some postdoc/assistant prof experience, and the publishing record that goes with that. Beyond publications, it makes a huge difference when you apply before you have your dissertation. Things look much better once you actually have your degree in hand.
 
To get one publication out by the beginning of your fifth year (assuming a 5-year program, and going on the job market in your 5th year, with mostly October/November deadlines), you probably need to submit a first draft at least by the beginning of your fourth year. The reviewing process can be lengthy, but varies wildly between journals. This would be something to consult with your advisors about, so you choose a venue that is both appropriate and relatively fast. Assuming a 3-month wait for each round of reviews, and a quick 2-week turnover between revisions, and at least one round of revise and resubmit (which happens almost without exception these days), at the very minimum you are looking at ~7 months from submission to acceptance. If that happens, you are very lucky. Likelier you need to double that, so about a year, or a little over that, from submission to acceptance, assuming that all goes well. The first papers take the longest to write, so this would be a project that you will have been working on for a while, possibly one of your qualifying papers from 2nd or 3rd year, which you work into a journal submission. It's doable, but not every advisor is good about encouraging their students to do this, so it's good that you are aware of this. 
 
Rule of thumb for me (which took a while to arrive at): every half decent project I have should end up in a journal. Maybe not all of them at top journals, but don't leave proceedings papers hanging. It's not that much work to take those and turn them into a full-length submission.* 
 
Before getting to this stage, it helped me to present my work at large conferences. It's good for networking and for getting proceedings papers out. The nice thing about proceedings papers is that you can write whatever you want, and they can serve as a good basis to work off of. They also give you a timeline for completion and a nice frame. Some proceedings are quite prestigious, so it's not bad to have. At some point, though, you want to stop traveling and just submit to a journal.**
 
If you're a first year, I don't think you need to worry about conferences just yet. I know some people who start that early, but I think it's fine to start in your second year. My first batch of conferences happened in the spring of second year, so ones with submission deadlines around December-January, with projects from the summer after first year and the fall of second year. If you only start in the summer of second year or in your third year, that's fine too, in my opinion. You really want to be out there by your fourth year and beginning of fifth year, because that's when you go on the job market and need to be visible. 
 
... I got a little rambly. Does that help? Any other questions? 
 
 
* The first time one of my advisors told me this, I thought he was crazy ("well you're a genius but we can't all be like that!") but no.. now I think it makes a lot of sense.
** Same advisor, same reaction. It's so annoying how they are always right

I just got into UCLA too... I can't believe it!!!
 
Which open house are people planning on attending? I'll be doing the one in March.

Just got into UCLA. (!!!!!!!)

Just got off the plane and had a voicemail. Assumed it was from my boyfriend who's picking me up. Nope, it was from UCLA! I got accepted! This is crazy!! I can't believe it!

I had an interview with UPenn in 2009. I'm still waiting to hear back. Never give up hope! 

Thank you! My research interests fit perfectly with the department there. I spent a year studying/working with a guy in Northern Ireland who collaborates with my POI at UPenn 70% of the time. I had an interview with two professors that went so well. I'm very content/relieved/excited to know that I may be going there.
 
It really is all about research fit, though. I was interviewed at Maryland as well and really felt the difference between the two schools in terms of how I would fit in. I was not invited to Maryland's open house, so I'm assuming I was rejected. But that is completely OK, since I probably would not have gone there anyway. The interview at Maryland was very rigid and unfriendly. It seemed like the interviewer was going down a list of questions and not really listening to what I was saying. This was not my experience with the other interviews I had and left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
 
I'm waiting to hear back from Harvard before I make a decision, obviously. But even if I don't get into that department, I'm elated to have to possibility to go to UPenn. I grew up in Philly, I used to play on the statues on campus when I was younger. It's sort of like a childhood dream come true.

Thank you for the encouragement! I actually just did get the email saying I'm in, so I'm gonna shut up and just be over here freaking out until further notice.

46 years ago we put a man on the moon, yet we're still feeding forum trolls...

Please take your negativity and sexism elsewhere. We're here to support each other. Thanks.

I am rather confused by your last few posts. What do you mean exactly by funding? If you are talking about funding as a graduate student: the top programs in Linguistics all fund their PhD students, that means covering full tuition, insurance, etc. and giving them a stipend in addition.
 
If you are talking about funding after graduation, that is to say, finding a job, then yeah the job market is pretty bleak. But that is the case for solid academic jobs (i.e. tenure track) in all fields actually. If you are interested in this, every couple of months, there's a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the tenure system, what universities are prioritizing over supporting their faculty, etc. 
 
If you are talking about funding from organizations like the NSF, then yeah, the non-STEM fields are at a disadvantage. But I think (among other things) that this is a matter of better communication between, e.g. linguists and the public about what Linguistics is as a field and why people should care about what we discover in our research. 
 
Point is, there are a lot of complicating factors concerning funding at these different levels, but you seem to either be conflating them or not providing us enough information to disambiguate what you mean. And I definitely don't get why you refer to "married housewives"? Every way I've tried to interpret it, I am left thinking that it is offensive. 

I just got an email from Stony Brook: I'm IN!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
So excited!
 
(ps. since I saw there are other SB admitted up here, feel free to PM me! does any how you plan to attend the open house?) 

Oh dear god. You're right. This is horrible.

Me too!!! Holy crap, I knew it was a possibility but still... this is totally surreal!!!

I just got into Berkeley I can't even process what's happening now ahhh what?! I don't even know how to react I was totally not expecting this!!

So, I got my first interview! At Stony Brook!
 
Actually, I just finished it
 
I got an email from my POI yesterday night asking for an interview, to which I replied as fast as I could ( SB is in my top 3), so we scheduled a Skype call for today.
I was so so so nervous. I loved it.  My POI was great: super nice and interesting. We talked a lot about my background and his research projects and the more he talked the more I falled in love with the department (really computational oriented, but with a focus on theoretical stuff and Minimalism which is rare in CL programs).
 
So I think it went very well, let's hope for the best.
In case there is somebody else here interested in SB feel free to PM me. He told me that they are planning an open house in march, so they hope to finish up with interviews in the next couple of weeks.

I also think that someone from my cohort mentioned having two separate interviews with two of our syntacticians (but I might be confusing things here). No, seriously, why would that be a rarity? =) (Apart from the obvious time pressure factor.) It only makes sense that more people want to talk to each candidate, if time permits, to make a more informed decision as a committee. And I believe whether these are collective or separate interviews depends more on individual preferences of the faculty members concerned and on the topics they wish to discuss with the candidate.

Part of my dissertation does exactly that. I provide evidence from processing experiments and also from simple judgment data in favor of covert movement, that I argue can't be accounted for by non-movement analyses. Of course I don't now "know" that the covert movement account as I argued for it has to be right and nothing else could possibly be the case, but luckily that's not how you do science. I build an argument that if we buy theory X as it is formulated now or as you might reasonably reformulate it so it had a fair chance for our purposes then we make prediction Y, but if we adopt theory A instead then we make prediction B. I show that several unrelated types of evidence converge to support conclusion B, not Y. Now lets assume for a moment that my reading of the theory is right and we indeed make prediction Y/B and that my methodology is fair and was implemented correctly (you can fight me back on all of those things too, but for the sake of argument it's more interesting to assume the result is really there). If that is the case, then if you truly believe X is the correct theory then you need to explain my data. Maybe there is an unrelated explanation, or you can modify your theory to capture my data; if you can do it, then we're back where we started. If you can't, or your modification seems unreasonable from a complexity/plausibility/acquisition point of view, then this is a strong argument for theory A. It's not normally the case that one strong argument is enough to bring down a whole theory, but you start to build a case for your theory and against the alternative. That's how you do science. Yes, it could be that both theory X and theory A are wrong, but if that's what we have to work with now, then that's what we work with. If someone has an idea for a new theory W that explains all the data in a new way, then that would be interesting and we'd want to give it some serious consideration; but we won't sit there and not do anything because W might be out there and we just haven't proposed it yet.
  What's more, your experiment (or theoretical paper, for that matter) doesn't have to explain *everything*, that's not a reasonable expectation for a paper. You have to start somewhere and work from there, and I just don't understand this view that "yes, you show that covert movement is supported by your results and type-shifting can't explain them, but what if type-shifting is still right? We can't rule that out so we can't learn anything from your results." That just means that you've decided not to accept evidence that disproves your beliefs, and if that's the case, then we're just not doing science anymore. I don't just mean to attack what you said; this is, for reasons I fail to understand, a prevailing attitude you see among linguists. For some reason it seems acceptable in linguistics to say "I cannot find a flaw with your experiment, I cannot see another explanation beside the one you provided, and yet I just don't believe it." I find it frustrating to no end. How can we have a serious discussion when the other side doesn't "believe" you? We just need to grow as a field. It's not about what you "believe," it's about what you can convincingly argue for. And arguing for something doesn't mean that you have "the smoking gun" evidence that solves Language, that probably won't happen, for obvious reasons. Your evidence is usually a compilation of lots of smaller pieces of evidence and arguments, and you just see where it points. Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics can provide new sources of evidence for/against theoretical points of view, and linguists need to be trained to at least understand these methods so we don't have an argument that boils down to "I don't like your argument." That seems to me like a major obstacle that these new types of evidence face, more than their actual validity. People don't understand them and are reluctant to accept them as valid.
 
[sorry, this is something I care about. I deal with these attitudes more often than I'd like to so I have strong opinions about them.] 

I don't know.
I think there is some work in this direction. And, if this application season goes as planned, I hope I'll be there to be part of it.    

Sorry for derailing the thread for a sec, but this bothers me and I feel like it should be addressed. Most people do find grad school stressful, especially at first, including people who have already breezed through grad courses as undergrads. The expectations are just different, both from faculty and from yourself, and there's a lot of pressure in doing high quality research while juggling your other program requirements/your life. I would suggest waiting until you've been in grad school for awhile to adopt this kind of attitude (though even then it's still kind of ill-advised).
 
Back to the original thread:
 
I am in the same boat as others, coffee-wise! Inexplicably, drinking coffee (even one cup) gives me shoulder tension (?) and toothaches. Does anyone else experience this? But I can drink cups upon cups of black tea (which I do), with no problem, so it seems to be coffee-specific, rather than a caffeine thing.

Sorry for derailing the thread for a sec, but this bothers me and I feel like it should be addressed. Most people do find grad school stressful, especially at first, including people who have already breezed through grad courses as undergrads. The expectations are just different, both from faculty and from yourself, and there's a lot of pressure in doing high quality research while juggling your other program requirements/your life. I would suggest waiting until you've been in grad school for awhile to adopt this kind of attitude (though even then it's still kind of ill-advised).
 
Back to the original thread:
 
I am in the same boat as others, coffee-wise! Inexplicably, drinking coffee (even one cup) gives me shoulder tension (?) and toothaches. Does anyone else experience this? But I can drink cups upon cups of black tea (which I do), with no problem, so it seems to be coffee-specific, rather than a caffeine thing.