Daniel Greeson is a junior studying linguistics in the College of Arts and Letters. He highlights the positive experiences he has gained from undergraduate research.
I would like to pursue a career in research, so I think I would like to go to graduate school for linguistics. I would like to do research in syntax and in language acquisition — looking at how children acquire their first language.
When I discovered that there was an opportunity to work in a linguistics lab, that was the best because it combined the hands-on aspect of working with data that I liked with the theoretical research area that I was interested in.
A lot of times, I feel like in classes, it's not clear that you're ever going to use the knowledge that you've learned, but I just get really excited when I'm looking at different types of verbs that I need to code.
I also really enjoy demystifying the profession because when you're an undergrad, you think that this is something that's figured out because it's neat and in a box. I think it's exciting to see how messy it actually is, because that means there's still work for us to do.
Doing research gives you that authority, and you're not just taking other people's word for it. I think that participating in research as an undergrad has really benefitted me in that I know how to interact with other researchers better and what questions to ask.
A lot of the big "Aha!" moments that I've had doing research are just moments when this really abstract-seeming syntatic structure that has a lot of moving parts and seems overly complicated — suddenly I see the implications of it and think, "Oh, that's why they did this!"
I can see behind the veil, and that has been really beneficial.
