Asmhan Posted August 9, 2012 Posted August 9, 2012 I have a scholarship from my country to do a PhD degree next year(fall 2013), I studied English Literature for my bachelor degree, and TESOL for my MA. I am still indecive regarding what I want to do. My interests lean towards Sociolinguistics, but I am afraid this won't be a marketable degree. I want to do Arabic computational linguistics and my concern is my educational background does not meet the requirements for computational linguistics. Right now I am focusing on the gre and I am able to take a class in the fall to help my profile ( probably search skills- related). As you know, studying a PhD is a big investment, and I want to study something that can add some guarantee to my future. I know by now, I should have had a lucid idea regarding what I want to do, unfortunately, I am still lost. So any advice or input is very much appreciated.
sbowman Posted November 19, 2012 Posted November 19, 2012 While doing computationally-inflected sociolinguistics would likely be hard, and not extremely marketable outside of academia, but potentially great if you wanted to stay within academic sociolinguistics. If you want something almost as fun and likely far more career-safe, consider going into natural language processing (applied computational ling) but focusing on dialect and speaker variation, and drawing on sociolinguistics for insight. A PhD in NLP is gold in the tech industry job market. I don't know the lay of the land for variation-leaning NLP that clearly, but here at least (Stanford), that kind of work would be heartily encouraged, and both the CS and Linguistics departments would give you space to take classes from the other.
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