Trinity term is exam term at Oxford. Not sure if the JYA program requires students to complete the same exams as the “regular” Oxford students. My son’s exam timing experience has been all over the lot. Last year he had an exam in 10th week (the terms are 8 weeks long). Prior two years, 9th week. This year, done at the beginning of 7th week.
The schedule did make it challenging to find an internship in the US. Ended up doing one summer in London as a result.
I am confused by the whole thing because her paperwork says they do not sit for exams- but also says they must stay until the end of the term to receive credit. I would honestly have absolutely no idea what kind of internships even exist in the fields of Italian and (non-computational) linguistics, but there must be something. She’s mentioned in the past that all the ones offered through her school seem to require Spanish. I can’t imagine how she can afford to take an unpaid internship either (in a normal non-virtual year), so that would narrow things too. This is all so foreign to us- I never realized that internships were such a big deal until I came to this site. Were I not on here we would all just be completely clueless and she’d figure it out when she had trouble getting a job/getting into grad school.
The classic research thing would be to work as an assistant in a phonetics lab, recording and/or processing data on speech patterns. My wife (modern languages undergrad and linguistics PhD at Cambridge) spent one summer compiling and checking a dictionary before it was published. On the other hand she also spent a summer as a tour guide escorting coach tours around Europe which was much better paid and where the ability to speak four languages was really valuable.
Also, there’s a number of tech firms that are always after polyglot linguists to help them figure out translation algorithms—and when they say linguists they don’t necessarily mean computational linguists.
Do they not need to be tech capable? That’s such an interesting path!
I think it’s more of the idea that they can learn the tech parts on the job.
The computational linguists would be doing the actual programming and corpus tagging and such, but they’re not going to be the ones doing the front-end work of corpus development, and they often don’t have the background that other linguists have in connections across languages.
D19 is finally home. I flew to New Orleans Monday and helped her pack up her room and bring everything to storage Tuesday & Wednesday. It was nice that we had a few days to spread it out so we could pack during the day and have some fun at night. We probably could have crammed it all into one or two days but we shared a rental car and storage unit with a friend so we had double the trips to make back and forth to storage. The four of us drove the 12 hours home yesterday, kind of a boring drive but not bad. We made it back a little after 1am so she is currently sound asleep with her dog in her bed. 
She has no plans for the summer yet, way behind her friend and most of your kids. Guess we will work on that the next few days. She was sad to leave New Orleans but we go back in a few weeks to move her into her off campus house.
Summertime update-
S19 will come home next week for a couple of weeks. We have a family wedding to attend mid June and then he’ll head back to Maine to live with some friends near campus in a house they are renting from a professor. He was able to get himself a NASA internship and, as a student who only had two semesters of work under his belt when he applied, that’s pretty good! (Maybe you all remember that he took fall off and had an internship at a small aerospace company,)
Internship is remote which is a bummer but sounds like they will be teaching him quite a lot. Hopefully being in Maine with friends will give him the social outlet he won’t get at work! We expect he’ll come home for a couple a weeks at the end of the summer too and will hopefully join us taking D to Colgate in August. Her drop off day is five days before his and we’re going to try to make that work.
Judging by my kids, she’s definitely not alone in that!
Nice to know we are not alone! S19 will be flying back next week. He really had a good sophomore year at Denison, academically, socially and athletically (is that a word?), notwithstanding the COVID restrictions. In Japan, we are still in a state of emergency and almost no one has been vaccinated, so it’s quiet. He will focus on getting his driver’s license, which is pretty time-consuming under the system here, and that should keep him occupied. If the Olympics happen, he will probably be able to help out one of the teams coming in for the Games, but it is looking more and more like they will cancel. I am torn. Cancelling is probably the right thing to do, but as the parent of two athletes, I feel a lot of regret. (Also, we theoretically secured some great tickets in the lottery held before the pandemic.) Wishing everyone a great summer!
D19 is home for the summer, just in time to attend S21’s HS graduation. She had lined up a summer position in a lab on campus, but Princeton isn’t letting anyone but rising seniors stay over the summer (even once vaccinated!). She’s disappointed, but the lab will let her do some work from home and presumably she’ll finally be able to get in there in person when she goes back in the fall. We’re happy to have her home, even though it’ll make it harder to drop the weight we gained during the pandemic - D loves to bake. 
And she too will be learning to drive this summer - never had the time in her schedule before!
Thought we would have DD for over a month but after two weeks at home she decided to spend this week and next living and working with her sister like she did over Christmas break. Making a little money and hanging with her sister will be better than sitting here. She doesn’t do well with being home alone all day every day…but she did get a lot of Survivor episodes watched while she was here!
Hi, haven’t been on the site in a while, so hope all is well. I will have to go back and read thru the thread in a bit to see what’s up.
Son19 is coming home this week, he has one more track meet left. The semester went well, he enjoyed school a lot and had fun competing. He was injured most of the year but was able to come back last week and was able to set the school record in one event and hopes to break another later this week. We were able to go watch, so that was cool to see.
He found a nice house to live with some friends and teammates next year so he’s looking forward to that. He’ll be home soon and plans to start up his coaching clinics again to earn some $$. He basically trains and instructs a group of kids in town a few days a week and he likes that.
My older son is home now too, so it will be fun to have everyone home again. And now that we are all vaccinated it should be a good summer!
My D comes home in less than two days, which is very exciting for us all. We will be crisscrossing the country this summer in our car, first from MN to NJ and back, then from MN to CA and back- and then in October we will be driving to PA so D can see her friends one more time before she flies from the east coast to England for her year abroad. My husband found out yesterday that there is a very high likelihood that we will be moving to NM around Christmas to finish out his last few years before retirement, so I’ll be driving from MN to NM this year too, probably. Then I might want to sell my car and never drive again. Ha ha ha!
You know it’s odd that it hasn’t happened before now, but my D and I had a discussion yesterday about how the sky will absolutely not fall if she doesn’t get all A’s (or A+s in haverford’s case- As are 3.7 there). We were talking about her language intensive- the director for the program told them yesterday to expect every single day of class to be the equivalent of a normal college class’s work for a whole week- and they go five days a week. She talked about how she was nervous she might get her first ever B… and we talked about how that would still be a great outcome. Then we talked about the fact that she won’t get As at Oxford… it just isn’t like American schools… and how that’s ok too. And that it being ok goes beyond the fact that haverford doesn’t accept grades from outside classes, just the credits. She knows that grad schools will see all of her transcripts, from community college (DE) to haverford, to Oxford and both of her language intensives. And not having a 4.0 just will never be the end of the world.
The Oxford undergraduate grading system will be an eyeopener versus traditional US grading if she’s going to be evaluated on that basis. There are no letter grades - only actual scores based on your assessments (usually end of year exams). An average of 70+ is top tier. My son had to do a lot of explaining to US firms during the job recruiting process once they saw his transcript.
I’m not sure she’ll even get grades- even though she’ll be there for a full year she doesn’t sit for exams- so I’m not sure how they’re even evaluated if I’m being honest. However it is, I want her prepared for it being much different.
ETA: I did some poking- she’ll get grades that will be based on her progress shown in her papers over the term. The tutors will assign a number grade and it will be translated into an American grade as well, with an 80 being an A+ and a 70 being an A (and so forth). There are no mid term grades or individually graded papers. The more you know!
Grad schools will know to expect different grades from UK vs US institutions, don’t worry on that front.
Great to see the posts and see what the other CC19’s are up to. For us, we are heading into summer 2021 and all 3 (adult) kids are at home and it’s not winter break! That hasn’t happened in forever. But it is a small window before each of them head back to school: 2 to graduate school and S19 to sophomore summer at Dartmouth. ‘sophomore summer’ is a required summer term after sophomore year. We are all vaccinated now as is everyone in our social circle so May was a month of visitors at our rural house. We had to set up a huge car-camping tent on the property to accommodate everyone!
After some time at home, a vacation, and a couple weeks working with her sister, DD is now at her camp job. This is also a Field Experience class for her. First few days were rough as she didn’t know anyone or anything there, and it’s been an issue being allowed to use wifi to do her class work. I don’t love getting unhappy phone calls!
But now she’s made friends, had some training, and has a plan to do homework on weekends either at her sister’s or in town on free wifi somewhere. So everybody is happier now which is good because it’s a little too late to back out now.