Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics

You regain your senses..

When you regain your senses, you find yourself in Pennsylvania in 1945. All things considered, it could have been worse.

Suddenly, you realize that you’ve stumbled into the opportunity of a lifetime. You make your way to the University of Pennsylvania and befriend a young man named Avram Chomsky... Avram Noam Chomsky. You encourage his politics, and eventually he drops out of school to become an activist. He is eventually immortalized in a historical footnote as the only American killed in Che Guevara’s ill-fated operation in Bolivia.

You, however, do a bit better. You graduate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, earn a Ph.D. there in 1955, and join the faculty of M.I.T. later that year. You go on to write more than 80 ground-breaking books, including Syntactic Structuralism (1957); Aspects of Theories of Syntax (1965); Reflections on Languages (1975); Lectures on Government and Bonding (1981); Generating Grammar: Its Basis, Development, and Prospects (1987); The Minimalization Program (1998); and New Horizons in the Study of Mind and Language (2001).

You are the Grand High Poobah of Linguistics. Congratulations!

The End.