Academics

Matt Now to work on my next production! It’s a one man show documenting the emotions, trials & tribulations, joy, & utter insanity of a lone student fighting against superior & overwhelming odds, entitled: The Paper I Didn’t Know Was Due Tomorrow! Starring me! Running tonight only in the UL! Tickets start at 1 Red Bull!

(Facebook status post)

It’s that time of year… finals!  Yay!  Please excuse me as I go crazy from a loss of sleep and from strings upon strings of projects and papers to be finished.

• 12/7 – LING 541 final paper due (10–12 pages)
• 12/9 – LING 520 presentation (10 minutes)
  • handout
  • Powerpoint
• 12/9 – MUSC 234 group presentation (20 minutes)
  • reading
  • handout
  • Powerpoint
• 12/11 – LING 520 project write-up due
  • second recording impossible
  • sound analysis – vowels
  • actual write-up
• 12/11 – LING 541 final (not cumulative)
• 12/11 – MUSC 234 final (cumulative)
• 12/11 – MUSC 234 two-page write-up due
• 12/14 – LING 520 final (cumulative)
• 12/14 – RELI 103 final (cumulative)
• 12/14 – SPHS 196 final paper due (5 pages)
  • reading
  • write-up
• 12/15 – Gamelan concert
• 12/15 – Gamelan reflection due (or 12/18 if schedule too tight)
• 12/16 – FLIGHT HOME!  Yay!

Now you understand why I’ll basically have no social life for the next week.  See you after winter break, hopefully with my sanity intact!

My final paper for my sociolinguistics class is due in less than a week.  Over the past two or maybe three weeks, I’ve been collecting articles and books on Singapore English and Singlish: on its phonetics, phonology, morphology; on policies, governmental and popular attitudes; on its place in Singapore and its place in the world as a world English.  I currently have about 90 sources, and, of course, I won’t be able to get to all of them by next week.  I’d be more than satisfied if I managed to tackle even a quarter of them for my paper.

On Sunday, I went to Davis Library and checked out Language as commodity: Global structures, local marketplaces, edited by Peter K. W. Tan and Rani Rubdy (I definitely have a couple of articles by Rubdy sitting in my collection, and perhaps one by Tan).  I flipped through the book and checked out the Singapore articles and recognized two of the three names (Lionel Wee and Lubna Alsagoff), as I have a number of their articles on my computer.

A little while ago, I subscribed to the LINGUIST List listserv which, I think, is generally meant for actual linguists in the field and not undergraduates, although a few conferences here and there are open to undergraduates.  In any case, yesterday, I got in my inbox an e-mail detailing the table of contents for the latest issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics.  In the book reviews section?  A review for Language as commodity by Gregory P. Glasgow.  I literally did a double-take; I’d just checked out the book and read a few chapters from it.

But this feeling—recognizing names, recognizing titles, feeling integrated—is just really amazing.  It’s a whole new sense of fulfillment.  And I love it.  I feel like I could belong in this field, that I could really connect and do something.  A good chunk of the articles I’ve been collecting on Singapore English have been written by professors at the National University of Singapore, where I was during the summer; everything just feels so much within my reach when I realize that these professors are really only a step or two removed from me, that I can actually, potentially, have contact with people in this field.

It’s just a great feeling, knowing that I can accomplish things and that I can be part of something academic.  That, hey, academia isn’t as unknowable as I first thought it would be.