Here's why I eventually chose linguistics as my college major.
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You won't find linguistics on any Top 10 Majors lists, and it definitely wasn't the first major that I considered before entering my university. I hadn't even heard of linguistics until my senior year of high school. Despite all that, here's why I eventually chose linguistics as my college major.
The entire time that I was in high school, I was convinced that I would go to college and earn a degree in English, literature, creative writing, or something else of that sort. English has always been my best subject; writing was what I loved to do. My goal was to become an author and write novels that resonated with people the same way my favorite books had done with me. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I even began to think about what linguistics was.
Several years ago, my high school English class was studying SAT words, and every week we memorized the definitions of a list of terms. Each word on dictionary.com has more to their entry than the definition. There’s also the history of the word, its multiple uses, and what caught my interest was immediately under the term. Every entry has the word written phonetically, so that readers know how to pronounce it. However, this was not limited to using the letters in the alphabet. Some words required symbols that I had never seen before.
So, I googled those symbols, and that was when I discovered the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. As any English speaker knows, letters in English can have multiple sounds associated with them, and many other languages have their own writing systems. The IPA takes some of the guesswork out of pronunciation, and that was intriguing. How much easier would it be to learn a language if you could use the IPA to learn how to at least pronounce things properly?
Ultimately, it was this discovery that jump-started my interest in phonetics, which inevitably lead to my interest in linguistics in general. At the end of orientation at my university, my freshmen counselor asked me what I wanted to major in. Literally up until that point, I was still convinced I wanted to study English and double major in graphic design, but I gave it more thought. English class was where I excelled, and I felt proud of my abilities there, but linguistics was foreign territory, a chance to challenge myself and learn something brand new. We talked for a while, and I made up my mind.
I was going to major in linguistics and minor in studio art. Sure, it meant that I probably wouldn’t get a job without going to grad school, but it also meant exploring a direction I had never considered before.
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