I was told about the program in passing
from a now fellow classmate in the
program and during undergrad she
mentioned it I wrote it down and forgot
about it and grad school applications
were due and I remembered Hofstra
University Forensic Linguistics I read
about it fell in love and threw out
every other application and decided that
this is where I need to be. Forensic
Linguistics is the study of language in
the law and we analyze authorship
analysis which would be who wrote a text,
we analyze recordings which would be
who's speaking, and we're not human lie
detectors like a lot of people think. My
favorite class was the applications
course and we had Jim Fitzgerald from
the FBI come in and we got to discuss
real-life cases that he dealt with in
the FBI and it was interesting because
we got to work on it as a class and he
didn't give us the outcome until after
we worked on our answers and we were
right a couple of times and it felt
really good that we were really applying
what we've learned correctly and
accurately we worked on the Unibomber
case, the JonBenet Ramsey case, a lot of
other cases, DC sniper case, well-known
cases that were not really seen behind
the scenes in the linguistic parts. For
some of the cases we had actual
documents such as ransom notes in the
JonBenet Ramsey case a few others were
possibly threatening notes that were
left on somebody's car or emails that
you know somebody had sent from
anonymous email addresses and it's
really interesting because we got to see
the text in action we would analyze how
we think the author is where their
background is education level and
applied all of our skills to narrow in
our view on to who we thought the
suspect would be. I absolutely loved the
faculty they all know my name I know
them we often get together as a big
group of the program in one of the
buildings and we talk about cases,
internships, thesis topics, and what we do
in class and where we want to go in the
future. It's really close-knit group of
people and
thankful that it's small because I
really know everyone and I've made
lifelong friends. I think there's a high
potential for growth in this field
because there's all these new media
outlets for people to get their voice
heard and recorded and such as YouTube
or Twitter even there's cases that have
Twitter or email and so it's always
growing and I think there's going to be
a really high need for forensic
linguists in the future. There's just
such a wide array of options, of course
Dr. Leonard has his own firm where he
does forensic linguistics, other people
are talking about being teachers, a
fellow classmate is thinking about
working in politics to do speeches and
we're all working at different angles.
Personally I'd like to do forensic
linguistics with authorship attribution
analyzing text to figure out who wrote
them to help solve cases such as ransom
notes or threats. I would highly suggest
somebody with the background in
linguistics because we do rely heavily
on theoretical patterns and stuff like
phonology and phonetics semantics so
background in linguistics although it's
not required I would highly recommend
that and so indeed it's driven because
it's a new program we have to make our
own future for it so you have to think
outside the box
