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What should I do?


Umar

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I'm currently finishing my junior year with an anthropology/classics double major and education minor. My eventual goal is to earn a PhD in classical philology, but I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the linguistic experience most grad programs seem to require. Right now I've only had one full year of Latin courses (neither Latin nor Greek was offered at the junior college I attended for my AA) and although I've taken to the language fairly well, I'll still only have two years by the time I graduate. Even worse is my Greek (nonexistant). I'll take Greek 1 in the fall, and only have a year of it by the time I graduate, and I'm totally lacking in French, Italian, or German. Should I be applying to grad programs despite my limited experiences with Latin and Greek, or would it be better to spend a few years as a postbac student honing my skills in the ancient languages and acquiring a modern one? If I take that route, could I get letters of recommendation now and save them for when I apply in a few years, or do programs prefer recent letters? Apologies for all the questions, any help would be quite appreciated!

-Umar

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I'm currently finishing my junior year with an anthropology/classics double major and education minor. My eventual goal is to earn a PhD in classical philology, but I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the linguistic experience most grad programs seem to require. Right now I've only had one full year of Latin courses (neither Latin nor Greek was offered at the junior college I attended for my AA) and although I've taken to the language fairly well, I'll still only have two years by the time I graduate. Even worse is my Greek (nonexistant). I'll take Greek 1 in the fall, and only have a year of it by the time I graduate, and I'm totally lacking in French, Italian, or German. Should I be applying to grad programs despite my limited experiences with Latin and Greek, or would it be better to spend a few years as a postbac student honing my skills in the ancient languages and acquiring a modern one? If I take that route, could I get letters of recommendation now and save them for when I apply in a few years, or do programs prefer recent letters? Apologies for all the questions, any help would be quite appreciated!

-Umar

I would recommend you take at least two years before applying for a PhD programme - be it to terminal MA programmes with funding or to postbacs. I would not recommend a 1 year postbac because it seems that your language knowledge is extremely lacking (not to be too harsh). I would recommend you take a look at the UCLA postbac programme which lasts 2 years.

I think that trying to do what you need in 1 year or less is going to be too much. I'm not sure what the language requirements for classical philology are (or how many programmes offer it) but for classics at least 4yrs and 3/4 yrs of the two ancient languages are an absolute minimum. And then you also need as much knowledge of German, French and/or Italian as possible.

Maybe you could also take French or German during your current programme. If you have some of the basic grammar, it will speed up your studies later on and will certainly look better than nothing.

As for the letters, I suggest you find 2-3 professors that you have a good rapport with and talk to them a bit about your goal and your plans and options and then once you leave your institution, stay in touch with them and of course mention that you'd appreciate a letter of recommendation once you start applying for PhD programmes.

You'll probably also need some reference letters for a postbac programme, so whoever you ask will already have written what you can ask for later applications should you require it (although its better to get more recent letters). It is not possible to get letters in person, keep them and send them off later - as this defeats the whole purpose of a letter of recommendation.

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Long story short, you'll need to pull up your britches and get a good handle on Greek and Latin if you're going a philology route. No doubt about it.

As for how to do it - there are many options and it all comes down to what you want, how fast you want/need it, and how you learn the best. I'm writing this from Berkeley where I'm taking their intensive summer Greek couse. It's definitely not for the faint of heart but is an excellent way to kick start your Greek during the summer. There are a number of other Universities which have well regarded summer programs as well (for instance - Cork's Greek summer).

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on an official Post-Bacc unless it's the only way. For instance, Penn's has a big fancy name but it's friggin expensive. Before I got my funding for UCLA I had plans to stay at Alberta in a special student status and take/audit/sit in a variety of courses I needed to bring my languages up. Since I knew all the faculty they were all cool with it (and it was easy as cake to get acceptance as a special student as an alumn).

Although you could try to apply to some programmes I'd definitely say take an intensive year to kickstart those languages if it's philoology that you want.

Best of luck!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you both for the input.

I think I'm going to spend an extra year at my undergrad school to work on my languages - that way I'd have 3 years of Latin, 2 of Greek, and one year of German by the time I enter a postbacc program. For the postbacc, money isn't really an issue: I'm interested mostly in Columbia, UPenn, and Georgetown. What are my chances of getting in to those programs with these statistics? I took the GRE earlier today and got 720 verbal/710 quantitative, and my GPA is 3.94 cumulative, 4.0 in Latin thus far (assuming it will be around 3.9 by the time I've taken all the language classes I'm planning). Assuming a writing sample and LoRs in line with those statistics, should I feel good about my chances of getting into a postbacc program? I realize that this is a question better addressed to the program coordinators, but again I'd appreciate any input.

Thank you,

Umar

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