Don’t you hate when you send off an email that illuminates your ignorance, only to find the answer not too long after the email is sent?
I wrote to the linguistics department yesterday saying “I’m not sure how this works”, then later that night I found out exactly how it works. Ughhhhh. Now I just feel stupid and foolish because this is a prestigious school and I just look like a dummy dum dum.
I discovered that you can apply as a post-baccalaureate to seek a second undergraduate degree. This is exactly what I need/want to do in order to prepare for the Ph.D. program. Now the question is how the hell will I pay for it. I’m trying not to let that very important detail deter me. At least for the moment.
So let’s look this over…
The linguistics undergraduate degree requires the following classes:
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The Linguistics Major
The following is an outline of the required courses for the Linguistics major:
Introductory course in linguistics. (5 credits)
- For details, see Introductory Courses page.
- Introduction to Linguistic Phonetics, Phonology I (LING 450, 451)
- Syntax I, II (LING 461, 462)
- One LING 4XX (Excludes LING 400, 419, 430, 480, 490, 499)
- One year each (or the equivalent) of two languages, one of which must belong to a family of languages different from the student’s own native language. For native English speakers, this means one year of study of a non-Indo-European language. Non-native speakers of English may count English as one of their languages. A student may test out of one language, but not both. For full details, see the Language Requirement page.
- Additional credits in linguistics or related fields. For full details, see the Elective Requirement section below.
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I have the introductory class covered from my previous unversity experience, though truth be told I wouldn’t mind retaking it (or, as I had initially planned, self study) to reacquaint myself with basic knowledge.
As far as the language course requirements go, I have one of those languages covered (Japanese), which I plan to review between now and prior to entering school. I also want to take Spanish – I have Rosetta Stone for Latin American Spanish. It would be the most immediately useful language to learn. Plus I wanna teach my children it.
The elective courses are going to be hard to narrow down. I was reviewing their list last night and there are about a million classes I want to take. All the Japanese linguistic classes. Rhetoric courses. Sociolinguistic courses. TAKE ALL THE CLASSES.
The tricky part will be the timing and cost. I don’t know if I could take more than one class at a time mostly due to being unable to afford more than that, both in terms of time and money. I would love to be a full time student, taking three courses at a time to complete the major within two years. Then step right into the Ph.D. program.
Guess we’ll see what happens. I’ll probably make another post later to talk about the elective courses I’m interested in.
Saffron Coelho 