Surviving Linguistics: A Guide for Graduate Students

by Monica Ann Macaulay

This fully updated guide offers linguistics students clear, practical, and focused advice on how to succeed in graduate school and earn a degree. Surviving Linguistics is a valuable resource for students at any stage of their graduate career, from learning to write linguistics papers through completing their dissertation and finding a job. Along the way, the author explains the process of submitting conference abstracts, speaking at conferences, publishing journal articles, writing grant applications, creating a CV, and much more. Throughout Surviving Linguistics, Macaulay emphasizes the importance of working with advisors, dissertation committees, and fellow graduate students. The second edition includes new exercises as well as helpful references to many new books and online resources. Macaulay focuses on North America in explaining the structure of graduate school and the process of applying for academic jobs. The advice in this book about writing and research in linguistics is useful to linguistics students everywhere.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Yu-Hsien Kuo]

A fairly comprehensive guide for linguistics students (mostly in the US) with links to other resources. Quite helpful in that it tackles the more day-to-day problems a graduate student will face, and not linguistics per se.

[Thomas]

This book offers some nice advice and resources, although it can come across as very belittling sometimes. Furthermore, it seems to be oriented mostly on the American linguistic graduate community, but with the drawback that the rest of the world is overlooked.

[Othman]

I guess I should’ve read this before I got into the graduate life. I recommend it.

[Rebecca]

Although this book focuses heavily on PhD students (dissertations, defending, finding an academic job, and the "publish or perish" phenomenon experienced by faculty), I still found it quite useful as a general guide to the academic conventions of linguistics research and to a few universal facts about grad school in general. This book also has a wealth of print and web resources listed throughout. The best aspect of this book is the author's realistic (sometimes even blunt) tone -- she certainly doesn't sugarcoat anything, which is sometimes exactly what you want before undertaking something new.