Enrolling in Lots of Units

Ideally, all intellectual activity on the part of graduate students (insofar as it concerns linguistics) should get academic credit. The reason is that it increases the total hours the department is credited with teaching, which increases our chances of getting resources from the University. The same holds for the University’s relationship with the State of California. More specifically, you are actually required to sign up for at least 12 units.

This is really quite easy to do, because there are so many outlets for assigning credit to activity that doesn’t fall into the category of traditional course-taking. These are:

a) 26X: The seminar courses (syntax-semantics, phonology, phonetics, and others), numbered 260-264. 4 units for giving a talk, 2 for just listening.

b) Directed studies courses, of all kinds:

596A: Work on research, meet with your adviser. The adviser is the official instructor. 596B: Same as 596A, but with native-speaker data.

597: Prepare for orals. See related essay on orals.

598: Write your MA thesis.

599: Write your dissertation.

c) 25X: Semi-auditing of proseminars = special topics courses in the 25X series, as taken for 2 (not 4) units. Amount of work is set by the professor.

d) 422: Spectrogram reading, etc. This is fun, by the way, and you can eat lunch while you do it.