Suboptimist » Blog Archive » A socio-psychological study of something or other.

A socio-psychological study of something or other.

I’ve got a whole bunch of incoming links that I’m not linking too myself. I really need to fix that…and…fixed.

I’m at that point in my M.A. program where I have to put together my committee and decide on a thesis topic. This part kinda sucks. The two people I actually need on my committee, a sociolinguist and a phonetician (sort of), sort of…hate each other. Welcome to the world of academia!

My graduate coursework up to this point has been kind of silly. Having done my undergraduate work in the same department, there are so few classes that I can actually take in my specialty that will be of any use to me. Take this semester, for example. Only one of my classes is actually being offered through linguistics. I’ve had to go the Speech Pathology department to take an acoustics class (I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of hilarious stories about this), and I had to go the Middle East Center to take a historical linguisticky course.

To this point, all of my most interesting work has been outside of the classroom as a research assistant at the Center for American Indian Languages. Here I’ve actually been able to do leading edge (though perhaps not bleeding edge) work in sociophonetics. Basically, I’m excited for not having to deal with coursework anymore.

I’ve kicked around a few ideas for a thesis topic. It will inevitably be related to some phonetic feature in Utah English. Whether it will be a perceptual or acoustic study is up for debate, but I have cool ideas for both. Oh, wait…I’ve actually never written a paper longer than 25 pages. Okay, actually, I’m f****d.

I’d like to talk about a hot topic in Utah recently: the BCS and its fairness/legality. Our Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, has been considering a probe of the BCS system to determine whether it violates anti-trust laws or something (link). I’m not sure if it’s because I really don’t care what happens in college football beyond the Utes being successful, or if the entire idea of investigating the BCS when our economy is tanking is just a stupid idea.

In a bizarre twist of events, a reasonable letter was printed in the Salt Lake Deseret Morning Tribune News opinion section yesterday. I know, I’m scared too:

Let’s get our priorities in order. I am a huge Ute football fan. And the BCS is the wrong format for determining the championship team, but there are other more important and higher priority items for our attorney general to look into. Being the No. 1 law enforcement officer in the state, he should focus his efforts toward crime and consumer rip-offs. For example, look into the college text-book racket. Someone is making a killing on text books. There are some real crimes to investigate.

Richard Turnbow

Kaysville

Even if we choose to limit ourselves to potentially criminal activity in academics, there are much bigger fish to fry. While I was lucky enough to have a useless major where books rarely costed more than 60-dollars each, the students who are actually studying things that are, well, practical are getting screwed having to buy 4 200-dollar books each semester. I’d go on and elaborate how ignoring this problem and focusing on the BCS is an example of the dumbing down of American higher education or even of increased militarism in American society, but honestly, I really don’t care. My school pays my tuition these days.

Sorry undergrads.

EDIT: Since I’m committing to reinvigorate this blog, I’ve updated my bio page and added a current CV, if you’re interested.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

A socio-psychological study of something or other.

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SuboptimistI’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

A socio-psychological study of something or other.

213 Responses to “A socio-psychological study of something or other.”

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Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.