It took a lot of agonizing, making pros and con lists, and research, but I finally made a decision: I will be attending the University of British Columbia for their MA Program in Linguistics in Fall 2020, and if all goes well, I will transfer to the PhD program after my first year!
Although I loved the department and the people at UC Santa Cruz, and I love McGill’s home city of Montreal, the program at UBC won me over. They’re committed, moreso than any other university in North America, to the documentation and revitalization of indigenous languages, especially of the Pacific Northwest. They have established relationships with these communities, a robust program for grad students to get involved as early as their first year, and are developing a program focused not only on research, but on pedagogy — to capture the nuances of these many languages without oversimplifying like many language teaching courses do, but to make said nuances accessible in a learning environment so that you don’t need a PhD in linguistics to understand them.
It’s weird to be thinking about going to graduate school in a time like this — I’m not having to deal with online classes like everyone else, but I do have to find housing in Vancouver somehow, and it’s almost certain that effects of the virus will still be felt in August/September when the semester actually starts. Nevertheless, I’m very excited to start this next phase of my academic career.