Continuing with Linguistics while working

[movement_violation]

I am currently an undergraduate Mathematics student who is interested in Linguistics, having taken six classes since I started Linguistics late in my undergraduate career. I have a full-time job next year outside of Linguistics, but I want to continue with my Linguistics studies in my free time, with the possibility of one day getting a Ph.D. How do I continue with Linguistics in the future in a productive way? I have a number of books that I would like to read post graduation, but would it be better to enroll in a night course (I'll be in the MD/DC area) and possibly generate a writing sample? Or, should I be doing something different from both of these ideas? Thanks for the help!

[fuzzylogician]

Well, what kind of time frame are we looking at? How much time do you have to invest in this and what do you hope to get out of it? If you want to just stay plugged in but keep it low key, you could try and attend colloquia or other talks in the area. The best school in the area is UMD, and if you can become someone they know, you might be able to get a nice letter out of that eventually. There's also Georgetown, which is great for some subfields. The LSA headquarters are right there, and they also have events once in a while. You could seek some kind of part-time summer research opportunity -- those sometimes exist in that area. You could attend summer institutes, if you can take a week or two off work (e.g. this year is the LSA summer institute in Kentucky, but there are also a variety of summer schools in other parts of the world, including NASSLLI, ESSLLI, EGG, the new summer school in Crete, the school in St Petersburg, there's even one in the Himalayas). There are conferences you could show up to (UMD is hosting SALT this year in May, if you're into semantics). I don't think there are too many night classes and I don't know how those schools would feel about a visitor in their first-year classes, but it's also not clear that you could attend because they are usually offered during the day and require quite a bit of a time investment. So showing up to events and starting to make connections might be best, and from there you might after a while schedule a meeting with a faculty member you think you connect with to explicitly talk about how to stay connected and perhaps prepare for a PhD in linguistics.