Linguistics degrees and beyond, any experience?

[Kango]

DS considering Linguistics degrees, possibly in combination with Languages or Psychology. He is attracted to the idea of forensic linguistics, or voice recognition tech as an ultimate aim, but appreciate things might change a lot over time. Have looked at the modules and structure at a number of universities. Has anyone experience of Linguistics, is it as interesting as it seems? And in terms of career is it pretty futile thinking you will get to use it and you should accept you are learning transferable skills to be used in a range of grad jobs? He is not (currently) interested in SALT or teaching. Y11 so no grades yet, but would not be aiming at Oxbridge.

I agree it doesn’t hold you back. But neither does it elevate you particularly above say, classics, history or other degrees that require good research and communication skills. Everyone should do what they are interested in. My DD wasn’t interested in linguistics on her MFL degree but she still learned many transferable skills which were useful.

DD studied French, Spanish and Linguistics at Newcastle. She found Linguistics really interesting though hard and spoke Spanish fluently after spending several months in Ecuador in year 3. She now works in Marketing and SEO.

I’m a PhD student in linguistics.

Natural language processing is a huge and growing area and encompasses pretty much every aspect of linguistics from phonetics to syntax to morphology, semantics and pragmatics, etc etc. IME employers in this area are often looking for post-grad qualifications especially doctorates but this may not be true in all cases (and if your DS wants to work in the area, he may well want to do a doctorate).

It’s also a good degree for all those grad jobs where you just need a good degree, if you see what I mean, and linguistics students often have strength in a range of areas (maths, sciences, languages, English, philosophy) which can be useful.

Not sure that I’d agree with PP that a linguistics degree improves your communication skills, unfortunately. Learning how we communicate doesn’t seem to make people any better at actually doing it IME!

Yes, he is aware that further study would be required should he wish to pursue anything subject related. It really does sound very exciting though. To complicate matters his other real interest is in doing a vocational degree in a completely different area. Even trying to decide on A Levels is hard!

I have friends who are programmers who swear that their linguistics background really helped lay the foundations for learning various programming languages. I'm a SALT though (well will be qualified in a few weeks) and wish I'd done linguistics as my first degree now because I really enjoyed it, and the phonetics elements of my course.

I would say if he's not being drawn to SALT - just make sure it's not just that the perception of it in terms of teaching kids to say their s-es or the Kings Speech that's in his mind - I've spent time with lots of different teams within it - this year I've worked with autistic adults showing challenging behaviour, ex-offenders with learning disabilities, adults with mental health issues - all the really complex stuff that doesn't spring to mind - and I'm applying for posts in adult learning disabilities, adult autism and adult mental health - or combinations of all of the above. I like the problem solving aspect of figuring out where things have gone off-track in people's lives and trying to support that part of the role (spoiler: it's usually gone wrong because of communication somewhere along the line). If you'd have told me three years ago that I'd be sat having a chat with a sex offender - I'd have looked at you like you were crazy.