FAQ for prospective PhD students in KU Linguistics

In our department the answer for this is almost always "yes", but maybe not for the reason you think. When someone starts a PhD in KU Linguistics, they sort of come in as a student of the whole department, rather than a student of any one particular professor. Over the course of a degree here, a student will take classes with most or all of the faculty members here, and over time will settle on what project(s) they want to do and who they want to do them with. In our department, before a student gets admitted their application gets looked at by all of the faculty; therefore, you don't just need to get accepted by me, you need to get accepted by the whole department. If you do get accepted by the department, then during your degree I will be available to work with you if you end up doing a project that it makes sense for me to help with. Therefore, it's not actually necessary to confirm whether I am accepting PhD students before you apply. I always am open to working with new students, and I think my colleagues almost always are as well, except in rare cases (e.g. when someone is transitioning to a new role that has little student-facing time—this sort of thing does happen but it's uncommon.)

But, that being said, even if we are accepting new students, there are limits on what students we accept. In particular, to have a chance of being accepted, you should have research ideas that align with the strengths of the department (see the question below, "What can I do to improve my chances of getting accepted?").

No and no. You should have one or more specific research interests (see below, "What can I do to improve my chances of getting accepted?"), and based on that it should already be pretty clear which faculty members you might be interested in working with. But, for the reasons discussed in the above question ("Are you currently taking PhD students?"), it's not necessary for you to be in touch with those individuals before you apply. (That said, I am happy to talk with potential students, so feel free to reach out if you have questions you'd like to ask. Just don't feel obligated to.) When a student begins our program, they are assigned an advisor until they select which pathway they pursue for the master's degree. They then choose a doctoral advisor (which could be the same person, but doesn't have to be) after completing the MA.

Ultimately we're looking for applicants who are likely to succeed in our program. Our program focuses heavily on coming up with your own novel research ideas in multiple areas of linguistics, and carrying out research on those ideas. That means that we're really looking at what kinds of ideas you come up with and how you talk about them. Coming up with exciting linguistic questions and discovering answers to them is really hard, but it's what graduate school is all about. For example, can you explain what's important or interesting about the things you want to do? When asked questions about them, can you answer in ways that show you've thought a lot about these issues, and/or that you're receptive to feedback about them? When you talk about research you've already done, do you also raise ideas of what new questions it raises and where this line of research could go next?

Because your ideas are something we care a lot about, the strength of your ideas will matter a lot more to your application than things like your technical skills. Statements about how many software programs you know, how many research positions you have held before, etc., will have much less impact on your application than just being able to carry on an interesting conversation about research ideas and make me excited to see where your research will go.

This also means that we are evaluating you more on your potential for future research than on your previous research. Having previous research papers or presentations can be one great way to demonstrate your potential, but it's not the only way; an applicant who hasn't published papers but can raise interesting linguistic questions and suggest interesting ways to test them might demonstrate more "potential" than someone who has published several papers but doesn't have much to say about them.

Other than your potential to come up with great research ideas, another thing we care a lot about is how well your research interests align with the strengths of the department. If your research ideas are about very different kinds of questions than the questions we tend to address, we may be less likely to admit you—not necessarily because you're a bad candidate, but because we wouldn't feel that we are going to be able to give you the support you need for your research, and we might even worry that you'd eventually be unhappy in a department that's not doing the kind of research you wanted to do.

Potential and alignment of research interest are both pretty necessary for admission. No matter how great of a researcher you might be, you probably won't be admitted if your research interest is, say, frog genetics rather than linguistics. And no matter how well-suited your research interests are to those of people in the department, you also probably won't be accepted if you don't demonstrate that you have the potential to carry out that research.

All the above is a very long way of saying: to improve your chances of getting accepted, make sure you are demonstrating your ability to come up with and talk about exciting linguistic questions, and check out our website and our faculty and student profiles to get a sense for what kinds of research we do and see if that aligns with your interests.

Somewhat, but not exactly. You need to at least have research interests that are roughly in the area or field that someone in the department works in. If, for example, you apply to a department that doesn't have any faculty with substantial expertise in historical linguistics and you say your main goal is to do historical linguistics, then you would be unlikely to be admitted, simply because the faculty will not feel like they would be able to give you good advice on your research.

That said, the research you plan to do doesn't need to be exactly on a topic that I do (or that anyone else does), and doesn't need to be part of "my" research program. Faculty here are committed to helping each student come up with and carry out their own original research projects (and we're excited to learn new things through our involvement in the new research projects our students come up with).

So just how related does your research need to be to fall into the "sweet spot" of being related enough to my expertise that I can advise you, without necessarily needing to be exactly what I'd do? This is difficult to quantify (for me it's a bit of an I-know-it-when-I-see-it thing, but that might be harder for you to gauge if you don't have as much experience as I do). Speaking for myself only, as a rule of thumb, I'd say that if your research is not in the realm of psycholinguistics or neurolinguistics I would not be able to offer you the sort of advice you'd need from a primary research mentor (although, depending on what area you're working in, I might be able to be one member of your bigger research committee), but if it's in psycholinguistics/neurolinguistics and uses a methodology that I use then I probably can offer you that kind of advice, even if your research is trying to answer a different question or address a different issue than mine does.

No, you do not. Our Graduate Admissions webpage lists the documents you need. Your statement of purpose very likely will say something about what sorts of research you hope to pursue, but that doesn't have to be at the level of detail of a specific proposal with methodological details. Of course, if you have a proposal like that in mind, it's valuable to be able to talk about it—if you are invited for an interview, the amount of thinking you've put into your proposal will probably show up in how well you are able to talk about your ideas in a fleshed-out way. But we don't require a research proposal as part of your application, and if you are admitted we often expect that your research ideas will evolve, or you might even come up with new ideas, over the course of your study. A student entering our program is under no obligation to continue pursuing the same research interests they wrote about in their application! So even if you had a research proposal, it would not really be a commitment to pursuing that particular project; it would mainly be useful as a way of demonstrating how good your ideas are and how much potential you have as a researcher (see the previous question, "What can I do to improve my chances of getting accepted?"). It's more important to have a good "elevator pitch" for your research ideas than it is to have a fully fleshed out proposal with details about how many participants and stimuli you would have, what statistical analysis you would use, etc.

The best explanation of what Ph.D. study involves comes from Matt Might's "The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.". Start off by reading that (it's really short!) and then I can proceed to give some more details specific to our department.

As Dr. Might's post explains, the main goal of a Ph.D. is to do some kind of novel research that will answer some question that nobody has ever answered before. (Others may have tried to answer it before, but you will be arguing that those previous answers are missing something, and your research will finally get it right.) In other words, the sort of "research" that you do in a Ph.D. program is not like the kind of research that you may have done [or at least that I did] through much of college or earlier. That kind of "research" involved going to the library and reading a bunch about some topic to learn what people have said about it, but not necessarily contributing your own voice to the discussion. Learning what people have said about the topic is one part of Ph.D. research (you can't discover new knowledge until you first identify something that is unknown, and to identify what's unknown you have to figure out what is known), but it's not the main part. The main part is figuring out how to make a novel contribution to that body of knowledge. In our department, and in linguistics in general, that novel contribution almost always comes through collecting some kind of new data (such as behavioral or neurophysiological data from an experiment, recordings of speech, acceptability judgments or sentences produced by consultants who know a particular language, etc.), although in some fields (and sometimes even in linguistics) a contribution to knowledge can also come in the form of putting together existing knowledge to make a new insight, as opposed to discovering new empirical facts from new data.

While your new contribution to knowledge (i.e., the answer you argue for to some question that has never before been properly answered) will be the pinnacle of your Ph.D. study, there is another big challenge that comes before it. When you begin Ph.D. study, you might not even know yet what will be the question that you will try to answer. Of course, you may have a good guess at what sort of question it will be: based on your research interests, you will certainly come into your Ph.D. program (whether it's here or elsewhere) with some question in mind that you hope to answer—indeed, at KU you have to submit a statement of purpose, and a good statement purpose will talk about what that question is. But over the course of your Ph.D. study you are likely to refine or change that question—or maybe even abandon it and pick up a new one—as you learn more about what has been done to address this question before. The bottom line is, nobody here is going to tell you what question to answer in your research; nobody is going to hand you a project to do and say "go do this experiment in this way". A major part of Ph.D. study is figuring out what meaningful question is out there to answer. Only after you've done that can you start the [difficult in its own, different way] task of designing a novel experiment or study that can try to answer that question.

More detailed information about this is available on our Funding webpage, and we also discuss this at our annual virtual open house in the fall, which I strongly recommend you attend (stay tuned for information about it, or send me an e-mail if you'd like to get a reminder when there's a date scheduled). Long story short, we are committed to providing 5 years of funding (tuition waiver and stipend) for students admitted to the PhD program, but we cannot commit to fund students admitted to the MA program. Funding for PhD students is often via a teaching assistantship, which means that in order to receive the funding you also need to meet the requirements for being a teaching assistant, which include a language requirement. (This requirement has problems—particularly its reliance on the problematic concept of "native speaker"—but it's not a requirement that comes from us, it's a requirement imposed on us by non-linguists who run the Kansas university system, so we can't get around it.)