Where do kids like mine go? Smart but no hooks [ME resident, 4.0 GPA, 1570 SAT, <$50k]

Very valid points. OP & their daughter should consider making a short list of “must have’s” in a college/university, some “nice to have’s”, etc…that will help narrow down the search and will help finding some schools that would be a good fit. For example, if OP’s daughter doesn’t want anywhere west of the Mississippi River, then that eliminates a big chunk of schools. :slight_smile:

In terms of U of A, Tucson is way more liberal than other parts of the state. Congressional districts there are usually won by Democrat candidates, for example. And the U of A campus vibe leans more liberal than ASU. But is it along the lines of Evergreen Valley College? No.

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Upstate NY is pretty red, but the cities tend to lean blue…including Buffalo. The linguistics dept is very strong, and I have to assume this student would make honors.

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Some thoughts/ideas to consider:

  • Every college/university is going to have events that your student will view as “forced fun.” Whether or not she chooses to participate in those ‘forced fun’ activities is her choice.
  • If she doesn’t like the idea of ‘forced fun’ activities, then she should not apply to colleges that require participation in them. For example, there’s a couple of highly rejective colleges (can’t remember which ones right now) that have required participation in a week-ish long outdoorsy trip with other incoming freshmen.
  • On the other hand, colleges & universities offer these types of events as a way for students to make new connections with other students. If you’re going to just go to the dining hall and class and hibernate in your dorm room the rest of the time, then you won’t meet anybody and that’s a great way to end up miserable and lonely.
  • Thus, meeting new people is going to require any new freshman to be willing to be a little uncomfortable for awhile, while making new friends.
  • Art museums are great. What type of art museums? Or what about access to public art (i.e., art in public spaces, that isn’t in a museum)?
  • Something to consider re: Utah - there’s a lot of great outdoorsy things to do there. It’s also a state that is very very conservative. So even although University of Utah will lean more liberal than the surrounding non-college area, it will be a lot more conservative than one might be used to in New England (more conservative than AZ, for example). It can be a bit of a culture shock sometimes if you’re not prepared for it.
  • But maybe instead, look at a school like University of Denver…access to a lot of outdoorsy things to do nearby and will be more left leaning than anything in Utah would be (I don’t know if they have linguistics there though).
  • Univ of New Mexico has a linguistics program AND it attracts students from all over the US. AND your daughter would qualify for a boatload of auto merit $$ there. Temperate weather year round (although they do get snow in winter a little bit, it’s not Maine level of snow). There’s an Amtrak train you can take to go to Santa Fe (which is on par with NYC with the # of art galleries & art museums). New Mexico is a beautiful state, liberal, and they don’t call it the Land of Enchantment for nothing. UNM’s honors program is great.
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You are right about Utah. And SLC is a strange mix because on one hand it is very LGBTQIA friendly and on the other hand it is very Mormon. Not as Mormon as rural Utah or smaller town Utah, but it’s still a big presence.

UNM is an interesting suggestion. New Mexico is so gorgeous and unique. I actually thought of UC Santa Cruz but it is not urban and it would be expensive, and far of course. I’m just envisioning a school without a huge sports culture and a less rah rah traditional university.

You make another interesting point about community. My daughter is attending a school with a huge focus on school wide community, school traditions, group activities…that is what she wanted, but it sounds like OPs daughter would hate it. Still, students need to find a way to bond.

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Yeah, it’s… jarring sometimes. We were there spring 2023. The area around the university is full of pride flags, etc. There was some kind of church convention going on in town and when we got down to the city it was full - and I mean full - of people in traditional conservative dress. Like a real split personality. The outdoor options there are absolutely amazing though, and SLC has (I believe) a lot of direct flights, so it all depends what mix you’re happy with - and whether you’re happy to be a blue spot in a deep red state or if the state laws themselves may be a dealbreaker.

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You can almost see the U in the top right of this photo…

My D is very liberal (and atheist) as are most of her friends. But they all wanted to stay after college as it’s a great place for young adults, with a booming economy, low prices and amazing outdoor opportunities. OTOH one of her classmates got married at the end of sophomore year of undergrad.

SLC is a Delta hub.

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Slight correction–not Amtrak (which does have a stop in Santa Fe–though it’s way outside the city) Amtrak only stops in Santa Fe as part of cross country trips.

The Rail Runner which is the light rail system, runs multiple times per day between Santa Fe and Belen which is about 30 miles south of ABQ.

The Rail Runner station closest to UNM is in downtown ABQ–which is close to UNM, but not exactly within walking distance. The final stop is in Santa Fe and leaves passengers off about 4 blocks from the Plaza–which is where all the museums are. It’s an easy walk. I’ve done it many times. The area around the station now has many amenities like restaurants, brewpubs and stores like REI.

But northern New Mexico is a beautiful with mountains and high deserts and gorgeous red rock formations.

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The son of a friend of mine is just finishing his PhD in computational linguistics. (He’s still writing his dissertation, but has left his university since his research was complete to move to Colombia so his husband can finish his PhD in chemistry back in his husband’s home country.)

The son speaks 8 or 9 languages fluently, and picks up new languages easily has lived all over North & South American, Africa and Europe. His project was (I think) to develop a computer program to improve phoneme articulation and speech recreation by computer generated voices.

He did his undergrad at Beloit College.

I don’t think he had any formal computer coursework, or any advanced math save for what he taught himself.

He did his PhD at McGill in Canada.

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I had similar stats and maths level to your daughter in high school. My interests are now broader than your daughter’s, but I have taken courses in both computational linguistics and linguistic anthropology with some brilliant profs at Brandeis. You are welcome to PM me if she has any questions.

If she is a NACLO nerd like me, she might be interested to know that one of its cofounders, James Pustejovsky, is at Brandeis. :nerd_face:

ETA Linguistics and Computational Linguistics | Brandeis University

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I will note that Salt Lake County is minority-Mormon (and has been for decades), and Salt Lake City even more so than the rest of the county. And as deep, deep red politically as Utah as a whole may be, Salt Lake City is equally blue.

It’s kind of an amusing geographic split.

(My first job out of grad school was in Utah. If you’re left-leaning and want something LGBTQ-friendly, you just have to make sure of the neighborhood—but anything around the University of Utah will be fine for that.)

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I would like to nominate this thread for the CC Excellence Award 2025. Such a great and relevant conversation.

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That is different.

There aren’t a lot of programs in the US that allow a focus on historical linguistics as an undergrad—you find them scattered around Europe, but here it’s much more limited, and one of the few subfields of linguistics I consistently point to the Ivies (other than Penn) for, because Cornell, Harvard, and Penn all have strengths there, plus UCLA.

But, that said, since historical linguistics builds of necessity on other subfields, you don’t start with it anyway, and even in a program that’s strong in it you don’t really spend most of your coursework there. So really, any comprehensive linguistics program should be fine for that.

For computational linguistics, there are a couple directions you can go. One of them is to look for a program that has a computational track, which is sometimes disguised as a “cognition” track (like at my undergrad, Maryland), though sometimes that label means psycholinguistics, just to confuse everyone. Another direction, and probably the easiest/most straightforward, is to either major in linguistics and minor in comp sci, or major in comp sci and minor in linguistics (or double major, but with those majors that would be tough). And finally, you could look for a cognitive science program, because linguistics and comp sci are core disciplines within cognitive science.

But this really does broaden the scope from the linguistics side. Most any large linguistics department will do.

Unfortunately, most of those are in urban centers, which (if I got this right) is a negative. But there are still a solid number of comprehensive linguistics programs outside of urban areas (yay! for land-grant colleges), like UIUC, Delaware, UMass Amherst, Stony Brook, Wisconsin, Oregon, Michigan, and Michigan State (depending, for some of these, on where the line of urbanness is drawn), plus many others.

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Yes, I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of applying to the U.K., for a student with such strong stats (but it’s a very different application and due very early). My spouse did a PhD in historical linguistics (at Cambridge), her advisor left to become a professor at Edinburgh. Both great options (and relatively cheap compared to top US universities, $50K might be slightly optimistic at current exchange rates but Cambridge is only 3 years), especially now Cambridge has an undergrad linguistics degree with both computational and historical papers:

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I was not aware of Evergreen Valley College (a community college in California) having much of a political reputation, or much political activity at all, although it is in an area that is left leaning politically. EVC also does not seem like a school that the OP’s student would be interested in.

Its Evergreen State College in Olympia WA that has been in the news for liberal activism:

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That’s the one I meant. Thanks for correcting me. :slight_smile:

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Late to the party here but chiming in about nerdier schools offering good merit aid since we just went through the process.

My son got into Case, Rochester, and Brandeis. (I guess Case isn’t on your list due to lack of linguistics major?) Brandeis gave him enough merit aid to get total projected cost around $50K/year. Case would have been around $60K. He got nothing from Rochester. He had lesser stats in every dimension and was applying for engineering, so if anything, your daughter might fare better.

I really liked these small private research universities (+ WPI and RPI, which are engineering-focused and thus not relevant to today’s discussion) – they seemed to offer a larger variety of potential majors and research opportunities than the liberal arts colleges we were also considering, didn’t seem as Greek/football-obsessed as some of the more popular state universities, and tended to feel on average nerdier (which I think is basically what it sounds like you’re looking for). I think honors colleges at places like UMass and Pitt might also be interesting options (not sure how the numbers work for you).

@NiceUnparticularMan had a kid with similar stats to yours who got into Rochester and Pitt – can’t remember if they gave him merit aid or not, and how close it came to your $50K threshold. (I guess they were in-state for Pitt so it’s an apples-oranges comparison though.)

On the liberal arts front (and @dfbdfb may dispute their quality, in which case, listen to him), Macalester has a linguistics program and offers decent merit aid – not sure if it’s exactly the sort of linguistics that your daughter is looking for but intellectually/culturally I bet it would be a fit – and it’s in the middle of a nice urban neighborhood in St. Paul, 10 minutes from the airport, close to a bunch of other universities as well.

(was going to suggest Reed, which felt like another potential intellectual fit – but they apparently don’t do merit scholarships.)

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No dispute on their quality from me!

Though you have to be careful, because most LACs don’t have the faculty strength (in terms of simple numbers, not talking quality here) to offer a fully wide-ranging comprehensive program in linguistics, what with it being a smaller/less frequently offered field.

Macalester is a notable, almost certainly the most notable, exception to that, though—they’ve put serious resources into linguistics in a way that even a lot of much larger colleges haven’t.

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UNM is a good thought. If it was in Santa Fe itself-she’d be sold. She loves that place. Never been to Albuquerque.

I agree-she can’t hibernate and forced fun is a way of mixing kids for their benefit. I will say-her friends are mostly kids she met due to common interests. She does initiate conversations when she thinks someone is interesting or nice-but she won’t do it on a whim. It takes some time.

As for public art-“If it’s a pretty building or tree-sure. Otherwise it has to be in a museum. I appreciate art better when it’s in a quiet place meant for that.” She is the kind of kid who can stare at a piece for twenty minutes entranced, then if I ask her what she likes about it-she shrugs. She likes Islamic art, mosaics, textiles, European paintings post-renaissance. Not so much modern, renaissance or sculpture.

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She has no problem being away from Maine.

Her politics are maybe less liberal than most girls her age. She occasionally complains about the feminist lens in some of her classes and is definitely not social justice oriented-but she tells me about sexists in her math classes, became friends with immigrant kids who didn’t speak English. I don’t think the day to day politics of the campus affect her-she will ignore it. She and her friends do talk about politics. She admires people who have religion-but isn’t that religious herself.

She isn’t typical-but I don’t think “quirky” fits either. The first thing you’d say about her is not-“she has lots of quirks.” She doesn’t gravitate to people who are loudly unconventional. Though I am her mom-so maybe I am wrong.

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