"the which professor would you like to study with?" question

College Essays
1

<p>It's not really an essay per se (the supplement only gives me 1000 characters), but compared to other applications, would it be disadvantageous to list a professor who's already quite famous, e.g. one who runs a blog on linguistics [<em>cough</em> <em>cough</em>], and say that you would love to work with him because of the subtle phenomena he notices, often with a touch of wry humour -- the same phenomena that drove you to linguistics?</p>

<p>Are they expecting you to do "more in-depth" research into their other faculty and look up their other papers? I'm wondering, because as far as research papers go however, this other professor has a more extensive fascinating (for me) body of recent already published work (maybe because it seems so because I can access them without having to pay for subscription to various journals).</p>

<p>I'm sure that citing a professor's papers will be better (more rigourous) for answering the question than citing another professor's blog posts, yes? However, I wouldn't have as much to write about personality, which they may also desire.</p>

<p>Which would be more advantageous to write about? Or am I going about this the wrong way?</p>

2

<p>Also, how much should this overlap with a "describe your desired courses of study and the unique characteristics of this school you like most would suit you", etc. essay? For example, I want to conduct studies on my own English creole, Singlish, as well as possible dialect continua running from Singapore to northern Malaysia -- would it be disadvantageous to include this in both responses?</p>

3

<p>Just curious, but what professor are you referring to and for what institution?</p>

4

<p>This is probably for Penn (I've already submitted my app).</p>

5

<p>yeh it's probably penn, submitted my essay too. good luck in your admission search.</p>

6

<p>Mark Liberman, who runs Language Log.</p>

<p>Of course, I could be totally mistaken in my assumptions here (I'm just looking at the papers listed on their homepages and Google Scholar, and of course, I have the posts I read on LL).</p>