Olivia Honeycutt

What have you most enjoyed about your area(s) of study? Was there a particular discovery, new skill or way of thinking, or insight that you found especially valuable? Please share an example from your favorite class or experience. 

Looking back, I most appreciate that I was able to take classes on both sides of Linguistics. Getting to take the classical MIT approach as taught in the Language and Its Structure series revealed the empirical value of theorizing about language in a vacuum, while engaging in seminars like Language & Power, Sociolinguistics, and Lab for Psycholinguistics inspired a conviction within me about the importance of the human behind the language. Without exposure to both, my admiration for language as the most human parts of ourselves would have remained abstract and uninformed.

How does the knowledge from this field, or your interest in it, combine with your other major or minor studies at MIT?

My other major is Computation & Cognition (6-9), so a lot of my undergraduate coursework lay at the intersection of language, computers, and the brain. Taking classes like Computational Psycholinguistics, Language in the Mind and Brain, and Machine Learning have enabled me to engage critically with the reality of Artificial Intelligence’s computational limitations when compared to the plasticity of the human brain as well as the neurological question regarding the existence of an innate linguistic faculty. Being well-trained in all these disciplines allows me to contribute novelly and meaningfully to both.

An MIT education includes study in the scientific, technical, social science, arts, and humanities fields. How do you think that the wide range of knowledge and perspectives will be valuable to you – for your career success and for your enjoyment of life?

For me, majoring in Linguistics, as a relatively recent field, highlighted the power of scientific rigor to organize and analyze a vast amount of chaotic, human-centric data. Learning how meaning is built iteratively through hidden structures within letters, words, and sentences taught me valuable problem-solving techniques about how to make sense of often contradictory data, build a theory from the ground up, and check my assumptions along the way. As someone who plans to build a career in nuanced scientific solutions to social problems, practicing linguistics equipped me with the skillset needed to approach a problem with excitement about the potential for progress and understanding rather than frustration at its apparent complexity.

What are your plans for the future?

I am planning on pursuing a joint degree in law and policy! I am excited about the opportunity to apply my scientific problem-solving skills to the complicated problem of governance, specifically to the subproblem of education policy. Equipped with the knowledge of what it takes for a child to acquire a language, to foster real learning on a neurological level, I hope to collaborate with emerging countries to build equitable education systems that value linguistic diversity, neuroscience-backed teaching programs, and economic mobility!