By Jennifer Lewington
Record numbers of first-year university students flocked to campus this fall—but that hasn’t stopped nagging questions about the value of a bachelor’s degree. Despite persuasive statistical evidence that graduates find careers related to their studies and earn more than others over a lifetime, Canadian universities are under the gun to demonstrate what it means to have a degree.
Prodded by rising expectations of students, parents, government demands for greater accountability, and a push from within to rethink undergraduate education, Canadian universities are expanding efforts to link academic studies to the “real” world. “We know the [degree] credential has value and that employers are looking at it and making hiring decisions based on the credential,” says Glen Jones, a professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “Universities now are trying to expand the notion of what is associated with the credential that could be helpful to the student, make a better educational experience and yes, that may have down-the-road implications for employability. ” In addition to co-op education and internships, universities offer co-curricular records that recognize work-relevant skills, such as communication and leadership, developed through volunteer activities either on- or off-campus.
Some universities have started pilot projects to include résumé writing and career exploration in the curriculum, while others spell out course-level learning outcomes—such as the ability to think critically and work with others—valued by employers. The idea is to help students develop knowledge and skills that will apply whatever their chosen career. “You don’t want to equip students to be bankers; you want to equip them to do whatever they might be inclined to do,” says McMaster University president Patrick Deane, a leading advocate of reforming undergraduate education. His university and others have embraced “experiential learning” —such as undergraduate research projects that offer learning opportunities outside the classroom—as integral to the academic experience.
Melding theory and practice is old hat for professional schools, such as business and medicine, but new as a campus-wide phenomenon. “It’s a relatively recent thing for universities across the board to think in terms of the outcome of the learning process to reasonably equip students for what they want to do,” says Deane.
Since 2002, McMaster’s faculty of social sciences has offered undergraduate research awards to a dozen or so top students. Over the summer, they earn $6,000 to work on a project of their choice, in collaboration with a professor, an experience designed to provide insights into potential careers.
Last summer, fourth-year anthropology student Ana-Maria Dragomir assisted Canada Research Chair and McMaster professor Megan Brickley with an inventory of skeletal remains of soldiers from the Stoney Creek battle of the War of 1812. “It was not just a summer job; it was a life experience,” says Dragomir, who has landed a part-time job with Brickley this fall. “My research over the summer helped me develop a lot of skills that will be transferable regardless of the career I will pursue,” she says.
· Increasingly, students draw strong links between a degree and a job. A 2010 survey of first-year students by the 39-member Canadian University Survey Consortium found that future employment ranked highest among eight reasons to earn a degree. In the survey, 43% cited preparation for a specific job while 24% ranked getting a good job as the prime reason to attend university.
(https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/will-an-undergrad-degree-really-help-you-get-a-better-job/article601007/?page=all)
d) Translate the following messages from a linguistic forum:
Hello, all! ^_^
I'm a new user, so be kind lol.
I'm a senior in high school and seriously looking into a major in linguistics. I adore language and I'm teaching myself 3 different ones right now, and I would love to study how language works in college and yada yada yada... Only... what happens after that?
What careers are there in linguistics really? I've been looking and all I can really find is a translator, but I feel like there is so much more than that!
I can barely even find a college that offers it; when I get those silly "Come visit our college because we rock!!" fliers in the mail, I look under language and more often than not, all they offer is Spanish.:/ I've read in several places that a degree in linguistics is useless, but I really, really hope that that isn't true 
Help?
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It depends on if you want to stay in the field of linguistics - if you want to graduate with the degree and then get a job where linguistics is directly applied, your choices are more narrow.
You could work in speech pathology (as a speech pathologist or assistant), become a translator or interpreter if you are fluent in more than one language, or you could research and lecture in higher education (which is where opportunities for fieldwork or authorship would most likely come up).
Of course, once you get a degree in linguistics, you can work in many other positions that find social science/humanities degrees useful. I'm working in the charity/fundraising sector, and there are others in my office that have a degree in linguistics. It's not a bad degree to have, really - you learn a lot of really useful things, and it shows on your CV.
Here are some careers/work that can use a linguistics background:
- academic linguist (obviously)
- translator
- speech pathology
- language instructor (not just at a university level, individuals also pay to have language instruction from someone who knows how language works, also the military)
- dialect coach (think: theater, movies, immigrants)
- accent reduction
- bioacoustics (studying animal sounds)
- forensic speech analysis
- speech recognition work (a CS degree would help)
- transcription (transcription of garbled messages is forensically-relevant)
- testing speech hardware and software
- consulting on issues where you have interacting languages (e.g., bilingual education in the US)
- it would aid audiology
- dictionary creation
- it would aid being an editor
- language documentation
- language revitalization (there's money in preserving native languages)
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I personally think that a degree in linguistics is pretty much useless. I realize that I'm probably the only one on here who will say such a thing, but I hope that that's something that will be appreciated.
Actually, the question "Is a linguistics degree useless?" is very different from the question "Is a linguistics degree worth it?". I suppose that technically it's not useless since no degree is useless, in that there are jobs out there that require a degree but don't care what degree it is. Obviously then, having a linguistics degree will make you more likely to get a job (or a higher paying job) than having no degree whatsoever will. But that doesn't answer the question of "Is it worth it?".
My advice to you would be to come up with a career plan and then only bother with the college courses that will help you to achieve it. We all need to make money, and we all have past-times that we would never kid ourselves into thinking can realistically provide paychecks. Personally, I never bothered with trying to get a degree in linguistics because I realized that there is no job that corresponds to what I enjoy about linguistics (that is to say, no one is going to pay me to sit around and study how the grammars of native American languages work). So, like with so many other things I enjoy (such as listening to music, or whatever), I decided to keep my passions separate from my source of income.
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You can try to become a professor if you want, and since you speak languages, then you also have the option of possibly becoming an interpreter or translator (though, keep in mind that there's more to those than simply being bilingual). But if those aren't your passions, then they're just jobs. And if your only reason for having a passionless job is to get money, then there's no reason why your job needs to have anything to do with linguistics or languages whatsoever.
Take me for example. There's nothing I love more than studying languages, but I'll soon be going to college to pursue a degree in biomedical engineering. It's not that biomedical engineering is something that I necessarily find interesting, it's just something that pays decently well and something which is expected to be in demand over the next decade without much of an increase in the supply. Provided then that this job (and the schooling that goes with it, which I plan to take slowly and with no job on the side) isn't much more demanding than the jobs I've had to work in the past, then there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to continue reading grammars in my free time. More importantly than that though, because this job pays as well as it does (much more than my wife and I require to live), early retirement is a feasible option.
I'm sure that a lot of what you've heard at your high school had nothing to do with early retirement, and instead had more to do with finding a job that you won't hate for the next 40 years. I think it's criminal that they put such ideas into kids' heads, and so I just wanted to present a different option to you.
There are of course other reasons for going to college too. Some people go to college to learn. Personally, I think that's a bit of a joke, especially when it comes to linguistics. ---- After being forced to take a bunch of classes that have nothing whatsoever to do with linguistics, you'll end up getting to the linguistics classes only to find you're being taught a bunch of various hypotheses that don't really directly relate to any actual languages. Maybe that's your thing. Maybe you'd be interested in learning about tree diagrams and "universals". But if you have an interest in ACTUAL languages, then my advice to you would be just to go straight to books and get your info that way. (I could recommend some books. Just message me if you're interested.)
Anyhow, in conclusion, my advice to you is that your pursue some other degree.
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Well as ever its use depends on what you want to do with it. If you have it combined with a foreign language degree as I have then that gives you more possibilities (or another as in the States I imagine is more widespread i.e computer science). Toshiba are currently recruiting people who specialize in phonology to make more artificial voice systems. There is also some work in artificial translators (but you need skills for that that many linguistics degrees won't give you). In Britain we are lucky that there are many jobs where the entry requirement is a degree in any subject. In Britain you could become an English teacher with a linguistics degree (we do a fair bit on dialect, register etc). There is the route of therapy as already mentioned.
Linguistics could look good if you want to get into language teaching. Knowledge of linguistics, I have found when teaching in France, helps to get the best out of your pupils too.
There is of course becoming an Academic, but that can be hard to get into, but if you think you can, never say never. That does require a lot of dedication, including a PhD minimum and an academic job isn't certain after that (it helps to have at least one member of staff at your own university that you get on really well with). I'm not saying that to put you off, I want to do it myself.
(https://www.lingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4513&view=previous&sid=5c08e542d118d5405eaff4bd84f01222)
D EFFECTIVE WRITING
Getting started
I Defining your purpose
Writing is a process of discovery, and it is so exciting.
(From Keys for Writers by Ann Raimes)
WHAT TO WRITE?
Before you set off on a writing journey, think of what kind of writing it is going to be. Remember, writing is often described as a ‘messy adventure’ and a ‘process of discovery’ (Raimes, 3). It means a variety of tasks: defining your purpose and topic, generating ideas, formulating a thesis statement, organizing your ideas, drafting, revising and proofreading. The process is not linear – you can do it in any order you like!
Still, a reasonable thing to do before you begin writing would be asking the question “What is the main purpose of this piece?” It leads us to three types of writing that generally correlate with the main purposes behind college writing:
1) Expository, or explanatory writing,
2) Persuasive, or argumentative writing,
3) Scientific, or analytical writing.
Answer these questions to define what category your piece falls into:
Is your main purpose to describe an experiment or a process or to report on lab results?
__________________________
Is your main purpose to explain the idea or provide information?
__________________________
Is your main purpose to persuade readers to see things your way or move them to action?
__________________________
For the purposes of this book, we will be focusing on scientific writing. Nevertheless, significant attention will be paid to the principles of persuasive composition as these writing skills will undoubtedly benefit your overall writing capacity.
According to Jack Raymond Baker and Allen Brizee (2011), “a research paper is the culmination and final product of an involved process of research, critical thinking, source evaluation, organization, and composition”.
A research paper is not simply an informed summary of a topic by means of primary and secondary sources. It is neither a book report nor an opinion piece nor an overview of a particular topic. Instead, it is a genre that requires one to spend time investigating and evaluating sources with the intent to offer interpretations of the texts. The goal of a research paper is not to inform the reader what others have to say about a topic, but to engage the sources in order to offer a unique perspective on the issue at hand.
Exercise 1 (B1/B2/C1)
Define which type of text (expository, academic, or persuasive) these introductions belong to:
1 An analysis of the college admission process reveals one challenge facing counselors: accepting students with high test scores or students with strong extracurricular backgrounds.
2 The life of the typical college student is characterized by time spent studying, attending class, and socializing with peers.
3 High school graduates should be required to take a year off to pursue community service projects before entering college in order to increase their maturity and global awareness.
II Useful Vocabulary: Purpose (B1/B2)
We can use in order to – so as to – to + infinitive to express purpose.
Our research team used only local materials in order to cut the expenses.
They visited him so as to offer their condolences for the death of his wife.
He agreed to cooperate with police not to fall under suspicion.
We can use so (that) to express purpose (so that is usually followed by modal verbs can, could, will or would).
The police locked the door so that no-one could get in.
Michael went to England so that he would study art.
Exercise 2 (B1/B2)