Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 7

Sept. 30.: Spent the last few days deciding what I'm going to do course-wise and research-wise this term. One interesting consequence of the egalitarian climate is no one hands you a list of courses you have to take and things you have to do before you graduate. You have to be independent and make your own plan. I've lined up two lab positions for myself, one with my advisor and one with a professor who I met at the boot camp. I'm sitting in on two seminars outside of my department, but considering dropping one of them because the professor is too 'linear' for me (thanks to Steve Pearce for introducing me to the term). I've never thought it was useful to suppose there there is only one right answer when doing science, and this class seems to be going that way. It's a great class for someone who wants to learn rigorous methods for solving a very specific subset of questions in linguistics, but that's not me – I like to be more creative (i.e. nonlinear) in my approach to cognitive science. To each his own, I guess.