Why did you choose to study Linguistics?
I came to UVM completely undecided and had absolutely no idea what to major in. I was jumping around classes until I took Linguistic Diversity in the US as a D1 and was introduced to Linguistics. I thought it was super cool and at that point it was like, the last week to declare a major so I just chose Linguistics. A random choice but it was definitely one of the best choices of my college career.
What was your favorite LING course at UVM?
I really loved phonetics. I appreciated how it was more on the sciency side of things. I really liked being able to pick out differences in speech – now my party trick is to test people for the cot/caught merger and then talk about dialectal differences. I also really like semantics. It absolutely kicked my butt but once I put in all my effort (I had to stop doing my readings for my french lit class for semantics) it made a lot of sense and it was really interesting to learn to compute sentences and such. Also now I can scare people with lambda notation so that’s always fun.
Do you have any advice for current or prospective students?
Learn the full IPA. It’s cool.
What are your hopes/plans for the future?
I never really had any plans on using my college major in my direct future after college. I’m moving home to teach and train at a circus company and then applying to contemporary circus schools with hopes to get (more) into (higher level) performing. But once my body breaks/gives out I think I’ll probably start doing something linguistics-related. No idea what though.
Recent Comments