#sooooooo glad to have switched to ling

[helenreddy]

the story of how i changed majors from physics to linguistics is lowkey wild

for context, i was taking an intro linguistics class as a gen ed - i figured it'd be at least a somewhat interesting way to fill the social science requirement, and an easy A since i'm good with languages. anyway. one lecture, the professor was going over affixes and saying how english doesn't have infixes except for one thing... and asked if anyone could give an example.

sitting front and center in a lecture hall filled with almost 500 students, i knew this was my time to shine. my hermione granger ass shot my hand up and confidently said, "abso-fucking-lutely, expletive infixation." the professor responded, "looks like we have a linguistics major here" - mind you, i wasn't yet!! but that lecture... that short interaction changed the course of my college career. looks like we have a linguistics major here echoed in my head to the point where i submitted my major change application within a week and never looked back

#i do still love physics but hated how i was treated as a woman in my uni's physics dept #plus it was just so underfunded... the labs were decrepit and the whole building was janky af #your choice would be either run up 4 flights of stairs or the creepy elevator that was broken half the time anyway #sooooooo glad to have switched to ling #my program was apparently within the top 10% of the country i think? #my ling advisor was a pretty well published dutch linguist and i had wanted to speak in dutch to him but was always so intimidated #and most of the grad students were hot.... ridiculously so