Good point. Right now I really love the all-ages hardcore/punk scene in portland and go to shows several times a week (in the summer). I’ve just found a lot of my friends that way and like the community. I guess it’s that as much as the music, more that i think I’d want to live in a place with that vibe and those people, if you know what i mean.
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Which is 100% fair! I’ll just note that at a decent-sized college, you’d have a good chance of finding people with the same vibe regardless of the surrounding scene.
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yeah, the GPA is unweighted, but you’re right that test scores are a big unknown.
@dfbdfb since you’re in linguistics, wondering if you have any follow-up thoughts on certain schools/programs based on my response about the kind of linguistics I’m interested in? Appreciate your time.
I found a Reddit thread discussing the cities with the best punk scenes. Can I paste it, I wonder?
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thank you!
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First off, I’ll note that you really only truly specialize in grad school, in great part because lx is a less frequently offered major—graduate programs can’t assume the pool of students applying to them came from a full undergrad lx program, so they (mostly, there are exceptions ahemMITahem) simply expect some exposure to the field, from whatever angle.
If you’re majoring in lx, you’ll take the “theoretical core” (not really theoretical and not really necessarily core, but it’s the term we always use, for whatever reason), and then build onto that with electives—so it’s really a matter of what courses are offered. Unfortunately, you’re not always going to get course offerings in both sociolx and psycholx. (F’rex, Maryland is one of the best places around you could go for psycholx—but they effectively ignore the existence of sociolx.)
But different programs have leanings by reputation. So:
For sociolx: Penn, Georgetown, NYU, Berkeley, Minnesota, Reed,* Swarthmore, Macalester, and if Canada is a possibility, McGill and Victoria.
For psycholx: UMass, Rutgers, Northwestern, Stony Brook, Buffalo, and the aforementioned Maryland (College Park—the Baltimore County campus also has lx, but it’s more of an applied lx major), plus Alberta in Canada.
And places that reliably offer coursework in both: Stanford, Ohio State, Washington, Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, and in Canada, Toronto and UBC. Also, UCLA is worth highlighting as having lots of different lx majors, including ones that are half linguistics plus half (your choice of) anthropology or psychology.
(And also Oregon for both, despite your OOS preference.)
I’ve missed several, I know, but those are the ones off the top of my head.
*For LACs with a lx program, it all comes down to the faculty. That’s a plus and a minus of them, because LACs tend to prioritize undergraduate exposure to faculty, but for a specific case, having mentioned Reed, they have one of the best sociolinguists in the business on the faculty, but their faculty is small and she’s the only one, and if she were to leave I don’t know if they’d replace her with another sociolinguist, you know?
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Thank you so much!
Speaking as a recent transplant to Portland myself, I think you’re going to find that Portland is a hard act to follow, in terms of enby-friendliness and etc.
And I agree with others that you need to take a closer look at finances up-front. $125K in a 529 is a great resource to have, but if you’re a full-pay family and your parents are expecting those savings to be the primary source of funding… even if you take the guaranteed loans, you’re looking at an under-40K/year budget, which few schools that you’ve mentioned are going to hit, even with merit. I wouldn’t be too quick to write off UofO, which checks your boxes quite well other than the “familiarity breeds contempt” factor of staying in-state. I would take a closer look and try to get more excited about this possibility. UofO will set the bar in terms of affordability plus offering all of the programs you want, a welcoming campus culture, etc. It may be that you can find out-of-state options that will work as well, but UofO will be the one against which those others are measured.
I agree that privates like URoch and Macalester could be great, but the more merit you need to make them affordable, the less likely they are to end up working financially. So run the Net Price Calculators and gauge, first of all, whether it’s worth applying to a given school, and then if it is, what amount of merit money you’d need to make that school a contender in the end.
There are some great options among the OOS publics - UMass and SUNY Buff are great suggestions, and the more reasonable sticker price of these schools will mean that the amount of merit needed to reach affordability may be realistic. UW Madison might also work. UCSC probably does not have a path to affordability, though.
LAC-wise, Lawrence University has a linguistics BA and is very artsy, and they’re pretty generous with merit, often offering what is effectively a “flagship match” amount to compete with in-state publics. It has a lot of the positive attributes of Oberlin, but with better affordability and less-regressive state-level politics. Appleton has its own punk scene, and it’s close enough for excursions to Madison and Chicago. But local politics are mixed, and lean conservative outside of the city proper, similarly to what you’ve seen in Portland, but skewing a bit less progressive. And the ling program may be more languages-oriented than you prefer. Worth a look, though.
Do you have any thoughts about where you think you may be headed, career-wise? Do you have something in mind that would combine your artistic interests with linguistics?
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Wow! Thank you for such a long response!
I was going to mention Lawrence, glad you brought it up.
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Among the places that @dfbdfb mentioned that reliably offer both sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, I think these are the U.S. institutions that are likeliest to either meet or get close-ish to your budget via merit aid only:
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Ohio State: For many people outside of Ohio/the midwest, Columbus might seem like a smaller town. It’s not. Not only is Columbus the state capital of Ohio, but, per a quick internet search, it has a population of about 940k in city limits and 2.2 million in the metro area.
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Michigan State: Not as big as Columbus, but the East Lansing/Lansing metro area has around half a million residents (and Lansing is also the capital of Michigan).
My sense is that Wisconsin is not as likely as the above two to get as close to the budget, but it may not be out of the realm of possibility either. Madison has about 285k residents and a metro area of about 700k (and is the capital of WI).
So even though Columbus, Lansing, and Madison don’t have major professional sports teams, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t meet the definition of being a city/urban.
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Places where a Portland music lover can find a vibrant punk music scene:
Philly
L.A.
Chicago
Richmond, VA
Northampton/Amherst, MA
Matching those locations to schools suggested earlier, I’m seeing marches with Penn, Northwestern, and UMass.
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It is highly major-specific, because otherwise they might have an honors college community made up of only Comp Sci students. Linguistics is a premiere boutique department there; chances are high for honors for a good solid student who has signaled intent for linguistics.
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Here is a link to the Ling department’s offerings. There are also cross-listed classes, and about 8 combined linguistics + other subject majors. It’s really a very large selection of classes, unusual for an undergrad ling dept.
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Thank you everyone!
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Have you considered Canada?
I’ve heard UBC has a well regarded linguistics department. Vancouver is a great city, is very trans friendly, and at least used to have a thriving punk scene, I don’t know how it is now, but I bet it at least has some!
I was involved in the Portland punk scene in the early 80s, but it has been a while 
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But… Ohio is hostile to trans people: Ohio - Movement Advancement Project
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If I missed it earlier, apologies, but I’m thinking that U of Richmond could make sense too. That would give the OP another slightly less selective/rejective private school option.
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Richmond doesn’t offer a major in Linguistis, only a minor.
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