to new england and back

james and i just came home yesterday from our northeast coast outing. the purpose of our drive was to survey two universities' programs in First Language Acquisition. the first was Boston University located in the middle of Boston. first impression of the city/campus was great. i loved it there; enough green space, lots of little shops/restaurants, seemed to have a great population base (a general intelligista attitude), and had some awesome tunnels. the program director was out for the day, and i met with one of the assistant directors. she seemed overall optimistic in my potential for acceptance into the program, gave me a few pointers on what they weigh more in their candidates, and supplied me with some graduate pamphlets - pretty general stuff.

from BU we headed south to maryland. University of Maryland was a beautiful campus as well, but the city surrounding it left much to be desired. the general population was a little more diversified than i'm used to, the traffic around Baltimore and D.C. really blew. as far as the program, it was amazing! the linguistics deptartment is really well funded and supported through the university and the labs they had! my, they were nice. now down to business: the director informed me of the "competitive nature" of their program and advised me to try to pick up some more experience for my CV before i apply to make me a better candidate. this pretty much boils down to me being very nervous for actually being accepted. i don't know if i'm ready for such an intellectual-heavy field yet. i feel like i am very much behind the curve and i have a lot of work ahead of me that i need to make up. i do know that i thought that all of it (everything that i had seen in the dept there) made me very excited.

moral of the story is, it looks like my free time is going to go down to 0 if i have any shot at getting into a school of my choice. we'll see how this story will turn out.