grad school advice

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i'm 34 years old and looking at applying to grad school to study linguistics. i graduated with a bachelor's degree in asian languages and literature (chinese) about 7 years ago (with a final gpa of 3.88) and have been thinking about going back to school lately, but there are some significant obstacles in my path.

first, i've spent most of my adult life working in some kind of service job or other. right now i work for a service company in a law firm, which handles mail processing and document production. i don't have a very impressive array of experiences to show a prospective school.

second, i've taken the gre and my results were perplexing, at least to me. i got a horrible math score, as expected, 95th percentile in reading, but somehow only a 3.5 out of 6 on the essay section. i don't understand how my reading score and my writing scores can be so far apart. and please don't take this plea for advice i'm writing here as an example of my academic writing, i'm being a bit lazy because i'm on the internet and i feel like it. anyway, i don't know if i can really justify retaking the gre as it's quite expensive and i don't make very much money. also, i have no idea why my score was so bad so i wouldn't know how to improve it anyway. i also took the HSK (the mainland chinese gold standard for language testing) at the highest available level (there are 6 levels of difficulty), and was very close to passing. i'll retake it again in june and i'm fairly confident i'll pass this time.

third, i'm not sure how i'll get academic references. i've been out of school for a while now, and even when i was there, i never really got on with any of my teachers. nothing acrimonious, but i just don't really make an impression on people, i guess.

fourth, while i do really enjoy studying languages and want to do research on chinese and related languages, i am aware that all career paths would seem to lead to teaching. i'm not a good teacher. i taught english for a couple years and was terrible at it, because while i am fairly versed in matters of language acquisition and the english language (at least i thought so and was always told so by my teachers until this gre test), i am an absolute failure when it comes to the social dynamics of the classroom, motivating students, and presenting material to a group. it was a really unpleasant experience for me, and i feel bad about the bad experience my students got.

i'm really anxious about all this because i'm not getting any younger, and really feel the need to be engaged in a career that i genuinely care about. also, i really need to get away from the service industry, with its low wages and lack of respect for its workers. at the same time, i feel a lot of doubts that maybe i'm just kidding myself that i'm qualified to get into the grad schools that cover the areas i'm interested in. and i know my failures in the social realm will weigh especially heavily against my favor in this regard.

so, what do you think? is it worth my time to continue trying to apply to grad school? am i doing something horribly wrong? i can't escape the feeling that i am screwing something up, but i don't know what it is.

i don't mean to be obnoxious, but i really could use some input.

If you want to do research, yes, then a university teaching career is probably the option, but that is one of the worst job markets in the world right now. Linguistics has other options, however, because professional translators are always in demand in government and business. If you can work with Chinese, Russian, or especially Arabic, you would probably have some good career options. There are even (relatively low-paying) freelance opportunities available; they pay better if you have a specialty, like biology and Chinese, or mathematics and Chinese. Another big area for linguistics now is computer science -- everything from machine translation to theoretical studies of language structure. The general field might be computational linguistics. So there are a range of options out there I would think.

If it isn't yelling in your ear by now, get out more.

I can't do school, did well for 3 months and done, every time. Took a while to find my heart and then it was up hill and loved every minute of it.

I worked with PHD's every day and they listened to what I had to say on the problem of the day. It was a calling, it was my life, I wasn't born with it, maybe, my name rings true with someone long dead that was pretty influential, so who knows, lol. I know more about Archaeology in my area than anyone alive, past or present, and I'll die with it, because I can't write. You can write, you have a gift I didn't start with. You also have a degree, again, something I didn't start with. I had drive, a need, a question, two questions and no one to talk to. I couldn't stop.

I did it late in life, wish it had bit me earlier, but I might not have known it for what it was. No regrets.

There is a book titled Getting what you came For by Robert L. Peters, PhD. I'd suggest getting a copy, and studying it for a while. I think you'll find it helpful in understanding what grad school is like, the process of getting in, and how to explain why you are there.

If you can contact some old professors now and get them remembering you, then you will have an easier time getting recommendations later.

It's my experience that most of academia runs on personal contacts. You stand a much better chance if you get to know some professors & researchers in the fields you're interested in, who might have PhD spaces available, rather than putting in an application "cold" without talking to anyone. See if there are any conferences happening locally to where you live, or if your local university would let you drop in to see one or two lectures or for a networking evening.

Do you have or are you willing to learn some basic computer programming? Python is probably the most popular language at the moment for computational linguistics, as there are some good libraries. That would broaden your career options beyond teaching (and your research options as well).

I recommend Language Log blog as a good place to start for interesting linguistics stuff, and there's always loads of Chinese. You might find one of the authors worth writing to to start a conversation. (Apparently I'm not allowed to post a link for you because I'm new here, sorry about that! But you can google it.)