Hi everyone!

I thought I would give you all an update on my schooling and stuff.

First, the semester is almost over. I don't look forward to returning to school tomorrow though. I have to go for two weeks, then one week of exams and then I'm done!

Of particular note, I have been carefully examining my career and what I actually want to do. As I have been here, I have had some interesting experiences with the ESL community. I won't go into detail, but I don't think that teaching English is what I want to pursue. It is a good skill to have, but focusing my current education on it will not strengthen me. I have been prayerfully considering a change in my linguistic focus.

Having said that, my current plan is to pursue computational linguistics. There are many advantages to this. First, I can still realize my dream of being a linguistics professor. With my Ph.D. in Linguistics I can get a job at Universities. Second, studying computational linguistics opens up many more job opportunities.

What is computational linguistics? That's a big question. A lot of it deals with computer applications to solve linguistic problems. Speech/text recognition and natural language processing are just two areas. You know the automated phone conversations that recognize you saying yes or no or maybe numbers? That was developed by computational linguists and computer programmers.

So I will keep you all posted!