If you don't mind correcting common misunderstandings on the daily, you've come to the right career. Hopefully, you have plenty of patience.

As a linguist, people will assume you know a billion different languages, and that you travel the world looking for more Rosetta Stones and deciphering hieroglyphics and ancient cave drawings. People will also probably assume you're more qualified to correct people's grammar.

Well, that's only partially true. Not all linguists are polyglots, and anthropological linguistics is just a small fraction of the entire field of linguistics. Also, most linguists won't really care about "correct" grammar.

In short, a linguist is trained to analyze sound patterns, meaning, and structures in language—usually in one particular language. These skills can be applied to many, many different career fields. You can go the social route and see how language differences influence politics and whatnot. You could also go the hard science route and study natural language processing, which is just a fancy way of saying "getting computers to talk like us."

Then there's applied linguistics, which includes second language teaching, translation, interpretation, and international relations.

Yeah, you got choices.

Me, a college graduate? With choices? Dude. (Source)

The everyday linguist might work for the government, for a university, or for a private company or organization. They usually make around $70,248 (source), but that's where the stats get fuzzy. Someone trained in linguistics can use their skills to get jobs all over the place. So if you have a BA in linguistics, you could go into many different fields...but your job title will most likely not have "linguist" in it.

Instead, you'll probably be a foreign language teacher, localization manager, translator, speech data analyst, accent coach, speech language pathologist...even a lawyer. Pretty much all the more scholarly or research-oriented job positions have "linguist" in the title, like historical linguist, research linguist, computational linguist, etc.

All professional linguists have been to college, and a pretty high proportion have a graduate degree or PhD. Hey, nobody's gonna just hand you seventy big ones a year to tell them about language if you're still reading at a YA fiction level.

Then again, you're allowed to indulge...sometimes. (Source)

Real Talk: Let's face it, language is a pretty complex thing. Trying to figure out why we use it the way we do is a little like asking a dog why dogs bark—you'd need a pretty well-educated dog to get any sensible answer. But there are lots of great programs where you can study linguistics.

It would be really useful to figure out what type of linguistics you'd like to get into so you can choose the right school. Into math and science? Find a school with a good theoretical or computational linguistics program. Want to teach a foreign language? Look for schools that do applied linguistics. Don't worry, though—this decision isn't super final. You can switch in grad school.

After an undergraduate career in linguistics, a goal-oriented Shmooper might go on to grad school to study law, computer science, philosophy, education, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, communications, psychology, a specific foreign language, or just about anything else where a knack for focused use or interpretation of language could come in handy (source).

If grad school isn't for you, you'll have almost as many career options as you do professional skills. The job someone would (eventually, hopefully) get with a background in linguistics could relate to any of these fields.

The job outlook for prospective linguists is pretty great. All of humankind is starting to build a global network—imagine having access to people in Belgrade as easily as your next-door neighbor. On top of that, new voice recognition technology is generating a need for language experts.

Language is involved in pretty much everything that we do, so it makes sense that the science of language branches out into almost every academic discipline. If you're thinking of getting into linguistics, you'll be working with nerds of all varieties.

Except the nerds who are obsessed with shrink rays. Those pretty much have nothing to do with language.

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