#like if i'd studied anthro in undergrad

[quatregats]

Am attempting to apply to anthro grad school and why does anthro make me feel dumb :’)

[uh-velkommen]

Guys I gotta admit this isn't living up to what I expected it to be. I've been becoming more and more depressed because I thought going to grad school would be this big life changing event where I was really gonna find myself, engrain myself thoroughly into a new culture, learn so much about the topic I enjoy, and maybe even meet some super cool people along the way. And while I'm not particularly struggling in those departments, I just feel like this was a waste of time. I wanna just move back to the US, refund my student loans, and pick up where I left off in August. I keep thinking about how I had my apartment furnished exactly how I dreamed it would look and how I was able to stock my kitchen pantry with fresh ingredients to bake desserts every night from scratch and I just enjoyed living in my own peace. When I was in school I didn't want to leave because school felt like where I belonged. When I was an "adult" I didn't want to leave because I felt at peace. Now I'm back at school and I don't want either thing. I don't want to restart my meshing into adulthood but I don't want to financially struggle and only talk to people for 3 hours a day each week.

I decided to meet with my academic advisor to plan out my two years because I felt like that would give me motivation to keep going. I want to study multilingualism and neurolinguistics. All of which was advertised when it came time to search for graduate programs. But then I meet with my Advisor and she tells me they're not offering classes like that in the near future. I ask about taking classes in Copenhagen or Stockholm at the same time, she tells me I'd have to pay double tuition as a non-EU student. I tell her, okay how about language evolution, that was something I really emphasized having an interest in when I did my application. She offers me, "Variations of English" and "Sounds of the world's languages." These are classes I already took in my undergrad. And this is a recurring problem. Linguistic departments are always so small and understaffed that they end up offering the same things over and over again. I'm currently taking classes on things I already know! To make things worse, they keep telling me that I need to take B.A. level courses here since I didn't major in Linguistics in my undergrad. I explained to them over and over that I took classes in those general subjects, phonetics, syntax, semantics, etc. and my advisor replied with, "We want to make sure you take classes that cover linguistic theory" Okay so like, Chomsky and Sapir, I can do that, what are the classes called? "Syntax and Semantics." OH MY FUCKING GOD. I can't bare another semantics course, I've taken like 3 already. Finally I just show her my transcripts so she can see what classes I took and she goes, "huh, I don't see a lot of linguistics here?" And I can just HEAR her thoughts floating around saying, Why did we even admit you??

I mean, shit I've been thinking the same thing. I'm not struggling though, I was a straight A student in all my Anthro/Ling classes. And I told them over and over that I was a Linguistic Anthropologist and that's why most of my classes are listed under Anthropology and that I'm here to really narrow down my studies. I WANT to do the hard stuff. I want this interest to be reignited and I'm just not getting it here. This is a waste of time and money because this school isn't providing what I need.

But I'm not a quitter, I can't just stop something a month into it, I just don't know how. So I remind myself that this is a means to an end. We do this for two years, we get a job, we live in Sweden, we're happy. But linguistics isn't exactly a lucrative field, in fact, I know exactly what the job market looks like in Scandinavia and nobody is looking to hire an M.A. Linguistics kid. Finding work here is not garaunteed. So then what, I do all this, go into debt, go broke, ruin my credit score, end up with no job and no home to return to, scrambling to find an apartment in a city I've never been to with a job I have no true passion for and the remorse of an opportunity wasted weighing on my conscious? But hey, at least I got to live in Sweden!/s

[anthropolos]

I'd like to do grad school (curently shooting for a bioanth degree) but messed up my GPA pretty badly by failing some math classes in the first couple of years of undergrad. Is there a way to get grad school back on the table even if your grades weren't too great?

Many grad programs are willing to look at your major GPA. So if you didn’t do too hot in things outside of anthro, they could be understanding. It will really depend on the dept., and I would say that it would be fair if you asked the graduate director about it. Otherwise, I’d say put your major GPA on your CV (labeled as major GPA), and try not to mention it. But I would study extra hard for the math portion of the GRE. 

GPA is not the end all be all of getting into grad school, especially if you prove yourself in other ways and get cozy with professors at the grad school you’re applying to.