I'm pretty sure that this is an unusual request: advice on how to get into ecology and evolutionary biology. It's quite long because I felt like more than a bit of background might be needed to understand where I'm coming from.
I'm a 4th year student who is just about to graduate from Edinburgh with an MA (Hons) (basically a BA anywhere else - Scotland is weird) in Linguistics. I'll probably have a 2:1, which means I may not get funding for my masters degree or PhD (since I won't be exceptional). I am an American, so I can't apply for any British funding anyway, but I don't know anything about conditions for Linguistics in the states. I've applied to somewhere around 10 PhD programs, and so far been rejected from 4, although I did get into a Masters in the Evolution of Linguistics and Culture in Edinburgh (although not funded, meaning another £14.5k on top of my six figure undergraduate debt, just for tuition.) None of this has anything to do with ecology; the thing is, my main interest lies in Evolutionary Linguistics, in particular the coevolution of culture and homo sapiens. I do a lot of extracurricular reading on genetics, wetlands, ecology, and evolutionary studies, mainly focusing on primates and prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes. My thinking is that it would be great to get involved in biological linguistics, drawing analogues from Molecular Biology in particular to improve the field of comparative Phylogenetic Linguistics. However, this field is very small - there are around 10 teachers in it that I know of, and they all have dual PhDs, one in Science, and one in Linguistics. With that in mind, I've been contemplating doing the switch to Evolutionary Biology or Ecological Sciences. I've been subscribed to ECOLOG for around 3 months now, and I've already seen a hundred internships I would have loved to have had the science degree to apply for. So, I was considering taking a conversion MA course into either Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, or Genomics. Edinburgh offers these, but they'd cost £12k each (cheaper!). Do you know of anywhere else I could do a conversion course into these fields? Or whether it would even be worth doing now, before I have a Masters degree (much less a PhD) in Linguistics? Would you suggest doing another undergrad somewhere cheap? I'm not opposed to going anywhere in the world (obviously). It's odd, as well, because I'm not opposed to starting over in Ecology or Evolutionary Biology, in general - what I'm worried about is employability, however. So, I'd be really interested in any thoughts you might have on this. Cheers, Richard
