Yesterday our program took an excursion to Stonehenge, Stourhead, and Avebury. The largest portion of the day was spent at Stourhead, exploring house, gardens, and the pub. The Spread Eagle, in fact. Perhaps the most inappropriate extant name for a pub. Anyway, while at lunch, Adam, Paul, and I discussed the future. Not surprising, because all three of us are greek, and have found that rush and greek life are what we most have in common.
Once all of the ins and outs of fall rush were hashed out, we moved onto other things that will be occupying our time come August/September. The GRE, for example. Well, really I’m the only one who’ll be taking it, but it brought up standardized testing and how we (okay, I) thought we were finished with that once we were accepted to a college. Not so! Adam will be taking a year off to prepare for the MCAT, and Paul is doing his study abroad semester during his sophomore year, so that he can focus on prepping for the LSAT his junior year. My housemate Phil will be in London in less than a month to take the LSAT for the first time, and is devoting quite a bit of time to books and computer programs that will hopefully improve his score. He has this whole schedule, and took the books with him yesterday.
I admire that kind of dedication, but at the same time, wonder if it’s really for the best. For me, at least. I’ve been trying to come up with a post-graduation plan, or at least the barest outlines of a plan. I’ve never wanted to be locked into anything, but free floating makes me anxious. I need a plan. So I’ve spent the past few nights looking into graduate linguistics programs. “Linguistics”- the word is like adrenaline for my brain. More than once when I’ve heard someone else use it my reaction is a little squeak. I don’t even have to be involved in the conversation, it gets my blood flowing and I want to know what they’re talking about! Say it, out loud: lĭng-gwĭs’tĭks. It’s fun to say, right? Now think about everything it entails… the study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. (from the American Heritage Dictionary). I mean, that’s awesome.
When I graduated high school I thought philosophy and psychology were the fields for me. I was going to minor in French, and laid out a four year plan of how that could be accomplished. Double major and a minor can take some finagling, especially when you throw Great Books on top of that. Hours were spent absorbing the course catalog, totally freaking out about how many wonderful classes Mercer had to offer, and trying to figure out how I could take them all. I don’t get quite that excited anymore, but I still enjoy registration. Even if it means sitting at a computer in Paris at 11 pm on my 21st birthday. I’m excited about possibility (even though I haven’t always maintained the same level of excitement when it’s time to actually learn the material).
The four year plan didn’t last long. My Intro to Psych class showed me that I really wasn’t interested in psychology. It’s absurd how much I allow the teacher to control how positive my class experience is, but I decided that if I had to take that psych. professor again, I wouldn’t major in psych. Looking at the class schedule for sophomore fall semester, it was either take that professor, or no psychology class until sophomore year. I haven’t looked back. During that second semester I had met teachers in the French department, and decided to major in philosophy and French. Since I’m double majoring, I don’t need a minor, and at the beginning of sophomore year I declared my majors and thought I was set. (It was actually a difficult thing to do, since declaring majors meant new advisers, and my freshman year adviser had been phenomenal.)
I should have been set. But since learning and interests aren’t static, I found other things. I met people who majored in economics (Economics? Really?) and found out through conversations that I might have enjoyed economics as well. One might think that since my favorite news publication was/is The Economist, I would have figured it out. Hell, it was my favorite even in high school! Alas, I’m not so big on the obvious. As for philosophy… well, I enjoy it, I really do. But it isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my life. At least, not exclusively. I don’t remember when I first… wait, yes I do. Sophomore year I took a French class titled “Les Femmes Ecrivains”. Our textbook grouped them by theme, but also by era. Marie de France was born in the late 12th century. Simone de Beauvoir, the early 20th. That’s a lot of time, and a lot of women in between. But I was interested in the changes that took place in the French language between the two. Some of the oldest stuff we read in translation. Not to English, of course- to modern French! Yeah, that’s what sparked my interest in diachronic (historical) linguistics. Now that I’m thinking about it, I can see how the fuse might have been laid out even earlier, in my high school French class, but that’s really a story for another time.
I picked up the art minor studying in Paris. Having not expressed any natural talent when I was younger, I hadn’t really given art a thought when it came time to collegiate education. At least not a serious one. In high school, if you did music and foreign language there wasn’t time to explore other subjects. C’est la vie. But in Paris, taking the time to really look, and focusing on getting the image on the paper… well, art minor it is.
This isn’t even what I had intended to write about.
