1. "The future is shaped depending on our current thoughts. This is the philosophy I believe in and practice in my life.Therefore, my future is already set in my mind. The only thing that remains to be done is to set free my future into thereal life, pretty much like how a sculptor first envisages what the sculpture he is going to sculpt should look like andthen realizes it.My academic goals revolve around the world of Linguistics. As I will officially be a linguist -a scientist who simplycannot afford to stop following the developments in his field- after my graduation, I am going to strive to obtain bothmy M.A. and Ph.D. degrees to try and become a fully competent linguist. As one of the worlds most developedcountries, America is going to play an accelerating role in achieving my aims. Getting all bits and pieces of knowledgeon Linguistics and using all the facilities available to me in the United States are going to be my primary tools forreaching my destiny. After this process, I am going to return to my home country and become a Professor ofLinguistics, giving lectures and taking part in Linguistics-related projects throughout Turkey and in other countrieswhen possible.Specifically, my areas of interest include Psycholinguistics, Phonology, Computational Linguistics andSociolinguistics.Psycholinguistics intrigues me, because it is really fascinating how human beings acquire their mother tongue in amatter of few years, understand any piece of its written or spoken form in a matter of few milliseconds and use it inany length at will.Phonology is of importance to me since I have always liked the idea of breaking up language into its segments. Tome it is most of the time about knowing the smallest -and seemingly unimportant- part of a system if one is tounderstand the functions of a bigger part. Thus, the sounds of a language play a major role in the way that languageis used and the study of these sounds is equally important to me.Computational Linguistics not only combines two of my favorite sciences -Linguistics and Computer science- but alsodeals with one of my favorite subjects; artificial intelligence. No matter how much I am interested in ComputationalLinguistics, I am far from being sufficient in this field. I am eager to specialize in and make big contributions to thisfield by making use of the opportunities provided to me in the United States.As a member of a multilingual and multicultural society, I have developed an interest towards Sociolinguistic studies. Iam keen on integrating my Psycholinguistic and Phonological interest into Sociolinguistics to better understand theeffects of society on language.If I were given the option to pick only two of these sub-fields of Linguistics, however, I would choose to specialize inPsycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics in the future. My reasoning for choosing Psycholinguistics is that thepsychological phenomena behind the use and understanding of language are still shrouded in mystery for the mostpart and I am particularly interested in the unknown. Then, I would choose Computational Linguistics, because weare progressing towards an age where almost everything, including language itself, is molded to a certain extent bycomputers and I strongly desire to take part in this progression.Consequently, I am going to resort to every means necessary to become an important name in Linguistics, do mybest to make my country one of the most efficient and productive Linguistics centers and work diligently to contributeto the field. "