I’m currently in love with this obscure field that most of the colleges I’ve been looking at don’t have.
I know all of the Ivy League Schools have these programs, as does MIT, but I can’t afford any of them. My dad wants me to graduate college without debt, so he doesn’t want me going anywhere that costs more than 20k a year, (maybe I can convince him of 25k). He says if I go to community college for 2 years he can afford 40k for 2 years, but I still really don’t want to go to my community college, especially since it doesn’t offer any linguist courses. I won’t be eligible for any need-based financial aid.
My best option currently is UMD, but the in-state tuition is still 25k, not even counting the other fees.
I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts, I’ll leave some additional facts here along with plans for the future or whatnot. I do still have time to think about this, I’m in 11th grade.
Grade: 11th
GPA: 4.0
Activities: Girl Scouts, Writing, Art
Some classes taken: AP World, AP Lang, AP US, AP Comp Sci Principles, Ceramics 1-4
What I want to do after college: Peace Corps, and then hopefully a grad school that’s cheap? My dad went to his grad school for free and they paid him, but he’s a biologist, so I’d imagine it’s different for a non-science career field.
Linguist Fields I’m Interested In: Historical Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Documentation (I would imagine this list will grow when I actually take a course, instead of just reading from books.)
“UMD” refers to the University of Maryland - College Park?
UMCP seems to have a pretty good linguistics department.
For what it’s worth, most of its NRC department ratings are quite high (http://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124741). Furthermore, the Baltimore Washington area may be a good location for linguistics-related internships.
Oh okay, yeah he got his PhD at Johns Hopkins without having to pay. Not sure how exactly, but he’s mentioned that they paid him to go there, or something of that sort.
It is normal for PhD students in the sciences to go to school for free. They normally have a tuition and fees waiver, and a teaching or research fellowship that pays them enough to cover their living expenses. In exchange, they help teach classes and/or help do research in their professor’s labs. If you are good enough, you can get that kind of support for PhD programs in the humanities as well. And to be perfectly honest, if you aren’t offered full support, the grad school is telling you that they don’t think you really have what it takes to be successful in that field.
What county do you live in? Which CCs can you commute to easily? All of the MD community colleges have articulation agreements with the state universities. If you plan your classes well using ARTSYS you will transfer in as a junior with no problems.
Talk with your parents about the money situation. Have they run any of the Net Price Calculators at the college you are interested in? It is entirely possible that your parents can’t afford to pay what the colleges are likely to ask (we couldn’t) for all four years, so CC to MD public university could well be your only option.
PhD programs are typically “fully funded,” which means that the department pays your tuition and fees and gives you a modest stipend to live on. This is true across most fields, from science to the humanities. If you’re not intending on a PhD, it’s unlikely that your graduate degree will be fully funded, but it’s too early to worry about that much yet.
As for the field - are you talking about linguistics? It’s not exactly obscure, although it’s true that many colleges don’t have it yet. If you’re currently in 11th grade, you don’t need to get overly attached to one specific major especially if it’s not widely offered. Consider some other ones you might be interested in.
For example, the total cost of attendance at Towson is just under $22K, which is much closer to your budget. They don’t have linguistics but they do have communication studies and speech-language pathology and audiology. Different, but related. Frostburg State has a communication studies major as well. UMBC is around $26K a year and has an applied linguistics track in its modern languages major.
