<p>Shoebox: Had there been no linguistics department, I might not have applied. :p </p>
<p>AFAIK it's not that small, just very interdisciplinary, which is my cup of tea.</p>
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Doing something basic like biology or neuroscience or psychology would be good, then going on to grad school for more specialized topics.
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<p>See, if it's possible to think of a possible engineering career later (like perhaps starting from professional or graduate school, etc.) I would opt for that. But I don't know about this. I'm also concerned about paying off loans quickly. I'm kind of concerned about finances after I graduate, which is why I want to also employ a mixed strategy. As a long-term concern, I'd also like not to get stuck in the ivory tower .</p>
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Psycholinguistics is still not going to fall anywhere near the realm of engineering.
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<p>Not presently -- actually what I'm envisioning is working towards a common goal from different ends (the abstract and the tangible). </p>
<p>Is it possible to dual-major in the SEAS? SEAS students take courses in the College all the time, so ...</p>
<p>I try to stay anonymous on these boards. I'll pm you.</p>
<p>It's VERY difficult to double major when in SEAS, especially with biomedical engineering. Also, if you transfer in, you're already going to be behind in SEAS because you'll need to take STS classes, ENGR162, and any other pre-reqs.
A mixed strategy is more likely to do you harm than good. Like I said before, it would be better to pick an area of concentration, or two that are linked together (seen by the majority of the world, I mean), and start a career, then specialize after that. You may have great ideas, but unless you can fund your own research or company, you're going to have to fit into others' ideas momentarily. You need to realize that your goals and ideas may not flow well into the world, but if you scaled it back and normalized it a bit, you'd stand a better chance.</p>
<p>Also, we're all trying to help you. Not to be mean, but your attitude is turning against us. Remember, some of us have been through 2, 3, or 4 years of college, or more. We have somewhat of an idea of what's going on. Being a first year your mind is full of fresh ideas, but college is meant to tone those down and bring a general direction to your studies.</p>
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Not to be mean, but your attitude is turning against us.
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<p>Oh no, that was not my intention. I hope I didn't seem that way. :o</p>
<p>I'm slightly worried about how finances will work after I graduate. I suppose there's no time speak to career advisors during Orientation?</p>
<p>Anyway, cognitive science and linguistics are linked together in the UVA programme, as well as in many other schools, and cognitive science, neuroscience and biomed are also linked together. In this case it's cognitive/neuroscience that links linguistics and engineering together. But it's true that linguistics and engineering don't directly intersect each other, but then again other dual majors share a common theme that have non-intersecting "ends". </p>
<p>Anyway no, I'm not trying to be resistant or anything, I just want my interests to be represented correctly. ;)</p>
<p>If you want to combine BME with whatever and get a decent-paying job after 4 years, ain't going to happen.</p>
<p>I don't think I'm necessarily holding a single job. The standard BME will get me through the short-term, but combining it with other disciplines will get me towards my long-term goals. Anyway...</p>
<p>See, you're trying to double dual major, and you said it yourself. Sure, cognitive sciences/neuroscience go together. One duel major. BME and neuroscience could go together. Another duel major. Throw linguistics in there, and I'm sure you can figure out, with basic math, that you have a ton of "duel-major" type options. MechWahoo put it to you pretty bluntly what we're all trying to say: you NEED to narrow down your fields! Just because you see the combination doesn't mean there is a real world need for it/place for it. A standard BME will not get you very far "short-term", because like all engineering fields, you need years and years of work before you make anything of your degree. I'm in an EE internship at a top (or THE top) semiconductor/EE company (hint: calculators, but I don't work on calculators, persay) and I cannot begin to explain how much work experience you need to be successful in an engineering field. They don't even begin to touch on vital, practical stuff in school.</p>
<p>BME is not the way to go if you want to work with cognitive science and linguistics and neuroscience. Sure, they all MAY overlap at some distant point, but do you realize how much schooling and effort and work and experience it will take to be successful at these things? You may say "this is my passion, blahblahblah" but if you try to do too much, you'll never fully be successful at any of it. And, if you're soo concerned about finances (which you bring up, a lot), you're going to need one heck of a loan/miracle to put you through all of this schooling. There is no way to duel major in BME and something completely opposite, like linguistics (even cog science and neuroscience would be very difficult) in 4 years. I've seen the outline of courses for BME and they have very few electives. I barely have enough to get a minor in EE (and I'm sure the same is true for ME and others), and I've had to take classes over breaks. </p>
<p>Look, we've been around the block (Mech and I, and a few others) with engineering. Life blows because not only is our subject of choice ridiculously hard and demanding, and set in stone pretty much, but we are very limited in taking classes outside of engineering. You're setting yourself up for a letdown if you plan to do BME and another major. And, you can't combine a non-science major outside the E-school with an engineering program. I think all of us are trying to say: stick to the College. Duel major if you want. Figure out what you really want to study, narrow it down to two subjects, and be done with it. Be super good at only a couple of subjects and let your career bring about diversity. And one last thing about career planning: it's going to be very difficult to go to someone and say "this is exactly what I want to do" and give them something very, very narrow like what you have said above. They're going to tell you to broaden your scope and study something related to multiple fields and have options and an open mind.</p>
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And, you can't combine a non-science major outside the E-school with an engineering program.
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<p>Linguistics is a science, not a humanities subject. ;) </p>
<p>But I get what you're trying to say and have taken it to heart. </p>
<p>My Orientation date gets closer ...</p>
<p>Galoisien,</p>
<p>My final comment on the matter (and I hope that there will be no more comments about rented fridges as well). </p>
<p>I may be ignorant about linguistics, but my impression that it isn't a field where there are lots of job openings, especially if you only have a BS degree. You will have quite a bit of open time during orientation, why not make appointments with Professors Dobrin and Condron and get their views? </p>
<p>You might want to move this conversation to the Engineering forum at CC and get their input.</p>
<p>Point taken. I want to clarify though that linguistics has a pure side and an applied side. A lot of pure linguistics work will be restricted to academia, creating findings applied researchers can use. Indeed, developing models (an admitted passion) is a pure-research pursuit. </p>
<p>But there is a big applied research side to linguistics: statistical translation engines, voice recognition and speech synthesis (we want to get away from artificial-sounding/tinkly voice production yarr), especially a multilingual theory of recognition/synthesis, and child language development. </p>
<p>Of course it's true that this is my impression from reading books/papers, rather than knowing the actual job market. But I do get what you are saying.</p>
<p>FYI: Linguistics, at least at UVA, IS a non-science major. You receive a Bachlors of Arts degree. </p>
<p>So, I served you some good and looked up linguistics. I have some advice for you: narrow down which area of linguistics you want to pursue. My guess is phonetics or phonology. Work from there. Neuroscience and linguistics might be a good idea. But, know that it is a BA program and will get you little where in the science world of linguistics.</p>
<p>I don't want to be doing pure phonetics/phonology though, which is why I'm thinking of submitting a custom major in biolinguistics that combines biological, neurological and linguistics coursework. Wouldn't that solve the B.S. / B.A. dilemma? I can eliminate the portions of linguistics I'm not interested and eliminate irrelevant linguistics coursework. The only thing though is that I don't have a very clear idea on what the process entails -- just a lot of discussing with professors, department heads and committees.</p>
<p>(Also, as far as academia goes, I've never known a distinction between the science-world of linguistics and the humanities-world of linguistics. What I do know is that classical linguistics emerged from philology, history and anthropology, and then Noam Chomsky helped spark the Cognitive Revolution that impacted areas as wide ranging as psychology and computer science. In fact, minoring in computer science [or something related to information theory] is also something I'm thinking about, since computational linguistics, while a subfield in its own right, is used by all the other subfields.)</p>
<p>You're now throwing in CS too?</p>
<p>I give up. Have fun.</p>
<p>...Why not?</p>
<p>Penn's Cognitive Science dual program had both linguistics and computer science as options to be included. As far as information theory goes (information entropy, logical systems etc.) linguistics shares a lot with computer science, which also explains why the foremost linguistics blog, Language Log was previously housed at Penn's Department of Computer and Information Science, why Geoffrey Pullum (coauthor of Cambridge Grammar of English Language) is both a Computer Science professor and a Linguistics professor. Why Computational Linguistics is currently the foremost linguistics field that receives the most private research funding ...</p>
<p>Which is why of course I thought that linguistics was something that could find dual disciplines in engineering. How do you think Google came up with Google translator, or how do companies design speech synthesis products? Do polyglots manually translate each request (there are n! possible translation directions for the n languages that are supported), or must there be people involved who deal in both linguistics and computer science? Then of course working</a> with eye-tracking systems in order to make inferences about cognition, attention and focus. (This field is still in relative infancy from the late 1980s, so tracking things like "second-pass reading times" of say, a word, or a character, is only one of the things that we will begin looking into ... there's a whole world of linguistic elements to explore an independent variable in order to create a huge variety of controlled experiments. The implications are vast.) </p>
<p>More theoretical intersections include designing AI to actually try to comprehend regular human language (and not merely design engineered logical languages, or cop out a la ELIZA), with all its prosody and variability. I think machine language translation, recognition and production is actually the "hot" field right now.</p>
<p>I'm not "throwing in" CS. It wasn't my idea. If you can ask academia to stop publicising all these dual-disciplines such that their papers stop showing up in my Google Scholar searches, maybe I can become less enthused. I don't know why you're so incredulous.</p>
<p>Re: CS and linguistics, I think it is the ultimate voice recognition worker's (engineer's? programmer's? eh peu importe ...) dream to be able to take a sound stream's spectrograph, apply a bunch of Fourier transforms (discrete/discrete-time, etc.) and vector formulas and get (say) /tulm̃odɛmlal̃ɛɡɥistik/, all while accounting for the fact that human speakers have different voice pitches and ages ... </p>
<p>Many translation and synthesis engines today use top-down statistical-modelling, which is seen as crude/inelegant/inefficient and often results in errors. I'm sure you must have loaded a song into a sound editor before. With a large resolution you don't even need to play the file in order to know whether the consonant the cursor is "on" is a fricative (f, v, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, θ, </p>
<p>New prehealth advisor starts tomorrow for UVa. </p>
<p>From Arizona State. I would have preferred someone with Eastern school experience but hopefully it doesn't matter.</p>
<p>is uva known for getting their students into top tier med schools?</p>
