First day of class

... And incidentally, due to somewhat wacky scheduling, also the last day of class for the week, since I don't have any Friday classes!

Anyway. This grad school thing? Is going to be awesome. Hard work, for sure, but awesome. I can't express how cool it is to be in a building full of people who all have the same passions as I do, including the teachers.

First class was Field Methods, taught by one of Dad's former students. This sounds like it's going to be a lot of work - gathering data from a native speaker of one of three non Indo-European languages (in other words, not closely related to English), figuring out what sounds they have in that language, doing a rudimentary phonology (figure out which sounds are important to native speakers), and composing a theory about one aspect of the language, as well. The three language choices are a language from the Philippines with a really long name that I've forgotten (not Tagolog), Karen, and Arabic. I'm a little hesitant to choose Karen, despite some family connections, because it's tonal. But we'll see.

After that class, we chatted a bit with the teacher, who is extremely nice. Then, since we had plenty of time before our next class, we checked out the collegium - basically a really nice student lounge - that's available for ACTS students, and then got our student IDs. My picture is at least a bit better than the one I had for my UW ID, so that's good. ;) Next, we decided to check out the CanIL lounge. It's also very nice, and full of awesome people. We met a lot of new friends, both further on in their degrees and our same year. We also shared in a lot of awesomely nerdy linguistics jokes. Yay! :)

After a quick stop at the library to get the ID card activated, we spent some time in the CanIL computer lab before our next class. We did a lot of ice breakers in Syntax & Semantics, so I feel like I know all of my classmates at least a little bit. They all seem cool, and as usual, come from a very wide variety of places, from other areas of Canada & the US, to South Korea, Romania, and Norway. The professor is from the UK, so I especially enjoy hearing her accent. :) And she is also very nice, with a great sense of humor.

The only question brought up by class today was whether or not Mackenzie and I should drop Greek. We'll already be doing a lot of language learning in Field Methods and Language & Culture Acquisition, so adding another whole language on top of it was not recommended to us. But the teacher for Field Methods suggested we try one day of Greek (first class meeting is on Monday) and see what we think. If we drop it, we might add Ethnography to our schedules, which would also be cool.

So yeah - I think this whole thing will be really, really fun, if I just keep on top of all the work I have to do. I guess it's a good thing that the on-campus jobs I applied for mostly only offer less than 10 hours a week!