What unique qualities can I bring to the graduate program?:
- …a thorough and well-rounded background in linguistics that can communicate across disciplines. Specifically, I imagine I will keep in touch with the enclave of phoneticians and sociolinguists involved with the Wisconsin Englishes and Wisconsin Speech Chain projects.
- …a very strong understanding of descriptive synchronic linguistics. I try to keep up with the cutting-edge of English variation, and I’ve studied very minute but undocumented English phenomena like nasal-flapped /nt/-clusters (where “winter” sounds like “winner” but not quite). Since the ASHA clinical competencies require practitioners to accurately parse out disordered language from dialectal variation, I will be a very valuable asset to my peers in the graduate program.
- …one male student for the program demographics? That’s a joke.