Hi everyone. I was recently admitted to USC and UCLA as a transfer student and I’m having a really tough time deciding. My intended major at both schools is linguistics, but at UCLA, I plan to pursue the linguistics with computer science major whereas at USC, I might aim for a computer science minor. My ultimate goal is to be a computational linguist as I have a real love for language and am decent when it comes to programming - my username on here even reflects my two loves (zetta being the prefix for zettabyte and syntax being my favorite field of linguistics).
Anyway, which school might be better for linguistics? Both would be just about the same in terms of finances for me, so it really comes down to the academics/courses for me. UCLA seems to have a wider variety of linguistics courses, but USC seems to have some pretty cool courses too (they have a course called Human Language Technology that just seems so fascinating). I’m really split.
Thank you for reading and for any help.
if you’re purely talking about ranking, UCLA has one of the top linguistics programs in the U.S. But if you’re talking about fit, then it’s up to you!
UCLA has one of the top linguistics programs in the world… but that is more a ranking of its graduate program. I honestly don’t think there will be all that much of a significant difference at the undergraduate level, so you should probably consider fit as a more important criterion.
USC has a graduate [computational linguistics program](http://cl.usc.edu/). Would it be possible to contact the program administrators to find out how easy it is for an undergraduate to join one of the research groups? UCLA’s CS program also houses a large program on machine learning which may be of interest to a prospective computational linguist.
Can you tour both departments as well as schools to find out which you prefer?
I think grad school rankings may matter for undergrads seeking to do research with faculty.
UCLA and UCB are tops in Linguistics. That said USC makes it easier to double major or minor if you change your mind.
Someone mentioned machine learning and it’s a huge field but neither USC nor UCLA is in the top 10. Read the comment in this Quora link about dearth of machine learning at UCLA.
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-graduate-schools-for-studying-machine-learning
@DrGoogle I was referring to UCLA’s Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning, and Art as well as its Automated Reasoning Group. I was under the (false) impression that these CS labs might somehow pertain to computational linguistics.
UCLA has AI, one aspect of machine learning. I have a certificate of AI from UCLA years ago, I don’t know how it’s morphed into nowadays.