How is linguistics as undergrad major at UChicago? Is it popular for pre-law ?
My daughter really liked the intro course, which she took first quarter of her first year with no background in the field and found quite accessible. Law schools don’t care what you major in. And linguistics will be less generic than Poli Sci. At UChicago, the major requires coursework in two foreign languages (one non-Indo-European), which could prove professionally useful down the road. And some of the subfields involve discovering rules by analyzing a series of cases, so there’s that, LOL!
In general, linguistics has been going through a hot period, in part because of the commercial importance of AI and common language computer interfaces, and in part I think because of a lot of pretty romantic publicity about dying indigenous languages and Indiana Jones-type linguists working to preserve them. Fifteen years ago, there were only about 7 linguistics majors per class, but it has been around 20 for the past decade.