school stress

so i'm definitely feeling the stress of the new semester. taking two classes (perception and computational linguistics) and ta-ing one (undergrad perception). both of the classes i'm taking are harder than most of the classes i've taken in my grad school career thus far. the perception class isn't hard in the conceptual sense, and the info is fairly interesting (though less related to my research interests than i thought it would be), but the prof tends to explain things in terms of equations (she is trained as an engineer, so it follows). i've never been good at thinking in terms of equations. given time, i can associate equations and concepts, but don't get it in the snap of the fingers. at least i'm not alone in feeling that way, in that class--everyone else i've talked to has expressed essentially the same sentiment.

the computational linguistics class is worse. comp ling is a field that investigates computational (i.e. computer-based) ways to parse language. people like bill gates say that statistical nlp (natural language processing) (a subfield of comp ling) is the next big frontier of the computer industry. applications include automatic translators, good web search engines (i.e. not like the ones we currently have that return a whole bunch of junk from a search), and (eventually) computers (like the one on star trek) that process and produce natural language spoken by a real person.

anyway, the field is interesting, and is currently "hot". i'd like to know about it because i'm interested, and because i'd like to have a job upon graduation, and nlp jobs are more plentiful that psycholinguistics jobs. but, back to the point, the class i'm currently taking is hard. at least, for me. i have the linguistics background, but not the programming background. most of the class is the other way around. they're whipping out programs that manipulate corpus data in useful ways, and i'm still trying to figure out how to get python (the language we're using) to open a file. gonna be a long semester...

in addition to the courseload, i'm getting close to panicking about what i'm going to do re: research. what interests me? nlp, but i don't have the background. acquisition, but i don't know where to start in terms of narrowing that down to something manageable that hasn't been looked into yet. bilingualism, same problem as acquisition, but i've at least got the glimmer of an idea. we'll see how it goes.