Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Did you know? - Discussion Groups

University of Michigan Undergraduates! You are in a really good linguistics department for an undergraduate student to be in. One word: variety. While many linguistics departments focus on one subfield (as those who attended Željko Bošković's colloquium lunch found out), ours has a wide variety of topics to choose from. This gives us as undergraduates the freedom to explore the entire field of linguistics to find out what we like. 
One way to take advantage of this opportunity is to take a wide variety of linguistics classes in many different subfields. However, a lot of us can't fit all the linguistics classes we want to take into our busy schedules. For those people, you should take advantage of Friday discussion groups in the department! They tend not to take a lot of commitment, and are welcome to everyone. Best of all, they give you an hour's worth of exposure to research in a specific subfield done by grad students and professors in our department. Or use the discussion groups to hone your already keen interest in a specific subfield! Here's a breakdown of the groups which meet (generally) on Fridays before colloquium lectures (some are more frequent). You can check the Linguistics Department calendar (we have a link on Links We Like) for more information:
Phonetics/Phonology  at 1:00 pm 
Syntax/Semantics at 2:00 pm
Historical Linguistics at 2:00 pm 
Sociolinguistics/Language Contact/Discourse Analysis at 3:00 pm
As of right now, only a handful of undergraduates take advantage of this awesome opportunity. Try it out!

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