Having sort of decided to try out Linguistics as an MA subject by attending the free evening classes first, thinking, “That’s at least one decision made for now, phew!”, I then happened to mention it to Paul Thompson, my ex-tutor (academic and personal on the BA course) and ex-supervisor (on the Chinese computer research projects).
Having the sort of mind he did, always exploring different arguments, testing them out, Paul Thompson then laid out his arguments for my case:
Quote [in the spirit of how he’d said it, as far as I can remember it]
So, you are trying out the MA option because you don’t know if you’d want to do a PhD.
[The reason he said “trying out” is: an MA can be converted to a PhD if one so wishes and if one passes the exam at that level, or one could just leave it at an MA.]
And you’re trying out Linguistics because you don’t know whether you want to do an MA in Linguistics [or in Education].
So, you’re going for the evening classes in Linguistics to try out Linguistics, and you’re going for the MA to try out if you’d want to do a PhD.
You’re therefore trying out [Linguistics for the subject field] for the trying out [doing an MA or a PhD].
How long is that going to take you? You might as well just go straight ahead and do the MA Linguistics, which means that you’ll at least get a master’s degree at the end of it.
Unquote
Once he presented it like that, it was dead easy to decide.
What a wise man he was!
(More in another blog about his earlier counselling as my BA Personal Tutor.)
(London, 1992)
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