hi everyone! i would love if you all could recommend me colleges with good linguistics departments with stats that would match mine. i would prefer a smaller liberal arts college, but i know that’s not always possible with linguistics majors.
my gpa right now is 4.377 weighted, and i’m not sure about my unweighted gpa. this year i’m taking honors physics, latin 2, ap spanish, ap lang, ap calc bc, and apush.
next year, i’ll be taking ap gov, ap latin, ap bio, ap lit, ap calc bc, and spanish classes at my local state university.
extracurriculars:
member and secretary of gsa for the past 4 years. we also create presentations on cultural competency for youth serving professionals around the nation.
captain of english academic superbowl team, past 2 years.
job 15 hours/week as page at public library, since august 2017
volunteer with program that provides free books to incarcerated people3 hours/week, past year
intern at language conservancy, helping to build level 1 textbook for acoma language (3 hours/week, started last week!)
member of operation smile (raises money for oral surgery for people in impoverished countries) since this year, because it was just founded this year
latin club member
participant in immersive spanish program summer 2017 in spain
participant in swahili education program summer 2015
awards:
best linguistic student in aforementioned spanish program
achievement in honors biology, honors chemistry, honors world history
i’m white, but i’m a lesbian (i would also prefer colleges with a diverse student body)
Are you interested in foreign language, theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics…? I ask because a lot of people who say they want linguistics don’t really understand what linguistics majors study, and from your post, all I see is that you like foreign languages.
Also, if you do end up in a linguistics program, even if you’re at a big university, the linguistics department will likely be a small community within the school, so you will not be dealing with the same big school experience (academically) that a Bio major might face.
Swarthmore has for a while been the LAC with serious linguistics. You can find a few others, but they really only have 1 or at most 2 professors who are actual linguists.
Johns Hopkins and Rochester are two medium sized universities that can feel like a liberal arts college. Both have serious linguistics. At Johns Hopkins, linguistics is fully integrated into the department of cognitive science, but they have linguistics professors.
Brandies has some linguistics and has a computational focus.
Apply to UMass Amherst as an academic and financial safety. It’s huge, but their honors campus, which is brand new and right in the middle of campus, feels like it’s its own small LAC campus within a large school. Linguistics classes are not big anywhere, neither are language classes. Comp Sci classes are big anywhere you go. The food is amazing. The campus is beautiful - has that expansive mid-west land grant college feel to it, but you have Amherst town and college within walking distance. Plus the 5 college consortium has free buses running among the schools, and you can take courses at any of them. You’d have social and academic access to Smith and Northhampton, which has a strong LGBTQ presence. And UMass Amherst has the best undergrad Linguistics in the world.
A student with your stats would surely get honors and maximum merit, bringing OOS cost down to about 30K/yr.
My kid is a total Linguistics nerd, had high stats but chose UMass Amherst because it had the best Linguistics, without costing too much. Kid is incredibly happy and academically fulfilled there.