Follow your bliss - advice needed

[Alphonse23]

Hello social science people,

I just recently watched the Bill Moyer Documentary on Joseph Campbell and his saying "Follow your bliss" is especially resonating with me right now.

I finished my undergraduate degree in computer science a few years ago, and now I am in a masters degree for CS right now-- sort of. I'm actually taking a break from grad school right now because I've been having trouble deciding on a thesis topic to finish my degree. I really can't decide because my heart just isn't set on anything. So now I'm thinking maybe I really don't like computer science, and maybe I should switch to a social science. As Campbell says: "Follow your bliss."

So I was wondering, if any one has experiences with the computer sciences, which subject in social studies would be the best fit for a CS/Software engineering type to switch into? I was thinking linguistics, because their analytical approach to language is very similar to the way computer scientists analyze programming languages. But I don't really know. I've never studied linguistics. It looks like a pretty broad field though from wikipedia.

I'm a huge nerd so I read books in every subject. I have no academic experience in any of them, though. I mean, I could just continue reading into the subjects just out of interest, but I'd rather be an active participant, and find something interesting to work on within the community. Something where I'd be given the chance to meet lots of interesting people in the field. That would definitively beat working on some boring software project in CS.

Thanks if anyone can give me some advice.

[calire89]

It depends on your reasons for going into computer science in the first place, I guess. Do you like the idea/act of programming itself? If so, you might be interested in computational linguistics. I don't know much about it (just what I could learn from an introductory linguistics course - my field is sociolinguistics), but basically it involves the systematic understanding of a language through statistical and data analysis. I would definitely say that would be a great transition if you do like the programming side, since computational linguistics requires a lot of that.

On the other hand, if you went into computer science because it's "practical," you might find anything about linguistics intriguing, depending on your personality. I suggest that you take an introductory linguistics course - Rio Salado has a good one online, with self-paced assignment dates and helpful teachers - to find out more about the field in general and see what pops out at you.

[Alphonse23]

yup, I'm doing exactly that. Except I'm taking the online class at UCLA extension -- well maybe. I found the text book for the class online, "English Vocabulary Elements" ed. 2 Denning, as a pdf. I'm reading it now and I'm enjoying it. I just finished the first chapter and I went through the ending chapter questions. They're pretty easy so I think I'll just save myself the $600 and just read the book instead of taking the class. After I finish the book I'll have a better idea if I want to switch into the subject or not.

If you know of any other introductory books on the subject, or any other general linguistic books that are interesting, that would be helpful.

Thanks for the reply.