/ break
Today was the first day of Spring Quarter classes for me. It went really well. I’ve only got two classes this quarter, and they’re both things I’m sort of inherently interested in and professors I like. Today was Historical Linguistics (i.e. language evolution) and it’s taught by a professor I’ve not had before, but who I rather enjoy. I’ve been working with him a little on a creolization project, for which Lewis and I recorded stimuli a while back, and he’s someone I get along with very well. He called me a ‘kindred spirit’ in class today, and we had some hearty conversation after class about some of the applications of theoretical phonology in the functionalist / non-formalist domains. I really feel like he may be the last missing piece of the advisor Frankenstein I’ve been trying to build. He’s not into neuroscience, but he’s very interested in the applications of cognitive science to phonology, as I am, and that puts him more squarely in my camp than most neuroscientists anyway. His class is being run in a discussion-oriented manner, and I did a surprisingly large amount of talking today for a first class sort of day. It’s nice to have a professor teach to you sometimes, which he tends to do since I’m really the only phonologist in the class, and I’m feeling quite up on the theory points we were debating today. Anyway, it should be a good class and I think I may ask him to be on my committee before too long.
Other than that, I’m feeling generally really on top of things here. I’m surprisingly confident about my project and my ability to do it and write a good paper from it. I did my first fMRI scanner operating this past weekend and it’s certainly not hard. After so much practice in the operator training, it doesn’t feel strange to stick people in the machine, and running the controls is quite straight-forward. I thought it might be more scary than it really was, but it’s all so automated and the magnetic field is so basically harmless I don’t feel like I can do that much wrong. I’ll be doing my next session this weekend, and I have the first date to try my own study booked already. It’s coming up really soon, but I’m so excited to get it off the ground and get my first subjects in the scanner, I really can’t wait. I keep telling myself that doing it at all is a laudable achievement in my own eyes – I’ve been wanting to do an fMRI study since I learned it was possible in my first lingusitics class. I’m so excited that it’s finally going to happen, even if I don’t want to stick with cognitive neurolinguistics after this, I’ll be glad I had the chance to try it.
So it’s going to be a good quarter. I’m being paid to do my own research this quarter in stead of TAing, and I’m taking a few units with my advisor for that same purpose. I can’t help but finish getting my data together this quarter. If only the analysis goes smoothly, I may well have this QP out on time!