(calm orchestral music)
- I chose linguistics at
Cambridge really because
it offered a really broad course
that allowed me to get to grips
with the whole range of
linguistic phenomena.
- There was a really
satisfying moment in which
I suddenly understood
so much about language
and the mind and processing,
it's a fascinating subject.
(upbeat music)
- The linguistics course at Cambridge
is a three year course.
In the first year, usually,
you get the basic areas of
linguistics and then you
can specialise in areas
that interest you more.
- We cover the whole range of subjects,
grammar-related things, syntax,
but also sound-related things,
phonetics and phonology, things
like the structure of words,
which we do in morphology
and of course semantics
and pragmatics, but then
we combine that with areas
that we refer to as more applied areas.
- You're bringing to bear
other scientific disciplines
neuroscience, psychology, computer science
and they're all converging
on the study of language.
- In linguistics we have
our own laboratories,
one of them is the phonetics laboratory,
where students do their own research.
We also have a computational
linguistics laboratory,
then finally we have what we call
our psycho-linguistics
lab, that has equipment
for doing all sorts of
psycho-linguistics experiments.
- We have eye-trackers and an EEG machine,
so that's for measuring brain waves.
- Linguistics is a lot
about thinking and trying to
philosophically work things
out before we can test them,
so there's a lot of libraries and books.
- There is the faculty library,
there's the university library
and there's also the college library.
- Teaching involves lectures.
It involves supervisions.
Supervisions are an excellent way
of developing their essay-writing skills,
but also doing exercises
in particular subjects.
- There'll be two or three
students and a supervisor,
very often the supervisor
will be the actual lecturer,
or an experienced
researcher in that field.
- There's plenty of advice and guidance,
both pastoral and academic on the course.
- There's a tutor at your college
that can always be there
to help you with anything
and then you have multiple supervisors
for all your subjects,
who are always willing
to lend a helping hand
and there's the course directors,
your director of studies.
- There's student
representatives in linguistics
and in the welfare
community at your colleges,
there's plenty of people to
ask if you've got a question.
(string orchestral music,
background discussion)
- We have students that
became journalists,
we have students that
became language teachers.
- Lots of our students
go into jobs in the city,
consultancy, could be consultancy
on language, translation.
- They could continue of course,
with post-graduate studies.
- Now that I've graduated,
I have started my Mphil
here at Cambridge, the
course just was so fun
and I just wanted to
keep learning about it.
- My message to anyone
applying would be to
just go for it, just apply.
- Obviously read as much as you can,
but don't panic yourself
because linguistics
is a new subject for everyone.
- What they're looking
for is someone who has
just an interest and a deep hunger
to learn more about how languages work.
(quiet orchestral music)
