This fall, I’ll be entering the graduate program in linguistics at UCLA.
They told me I’d been accepted back on the 2nd, and I’m still getting butterflies in my stomach thinking about it. Mild bouts of impostor syndrome do strike me from time to time, but, well, that’s normal.
The current grad students greet me when they pass by in the hallway and chat with me in the reading room. They’ve been very welcoming, and it’s awesome, but what’s really making me happy is the fact that we actually have stuff to talk about. Just the other day, I was speaking to two of them about the English word cabbage, which was borrowed into Japanese with a palatalized /k/ (kyabetsu) and borrowed into a certain Bantu language (the name of which currently escapes my memory) with the /k/ changed to /kl/; neither case seems to have any rhyme or reason to it. It’s particularly puzzling in the Bantu language, where this is the only instance of a /kl/ consonant cluster; it’s completely ungrammatical elsewhere in the language.
…Uh, what was I talking about again? Oh, right, grad school.
They’re still sorting out the exact details, but all UCLA linguistics grad students are guaranteed funding for five years. This is also awesome.
I’ve also been invited to the open house, which will take place at the end of the month. Fortunately for them, since I live out here in LA, they won’t have to spend anything bringing me here.
Most importantly, though, I’ll be attending my top choice; UCLA is known for its work on phonetics, which is one of my major interests, and since it’s LA, there’s no shortage of speakers around. We have Garifuna speakers, for crying out loud.
I’m excited.
