USC: Academic interests and why USC

When my grandmother forgets the English word for something, she says it in Armenian and waits for me to catch up. I usually do. That gap between us, the half-second where one language hands off to another, is the thing I want to study for the rest of my life.I plan to pursue linguistics at USC, but specifically the computational kind, where the question is not just how language works but how we teach a machine to mishear it the way humans do.¹I have been building a small Armenian-English translation bot on weekends, and it fails in the most interesting ways: it cannot tell when my grandmother is being affectionate versus sarcastic, because tone lives between the words.USC is where I can chase that gap with people who take it seriously. The Linguistics department sits beside the School of Cinematic Arts and Annenberg, and I want that proximity.²I would minor in something from Annenberg, because translation is also a media problem: who gets believed, who gets subtitled, whose accent gets called an error by the algorithm. USC lets a linguistics student wander into a communication seminar without asking permission, and that crossing is the whole point for me.I also want USC because it does not treat code and culture as rivals. I would join the student NLP groups, take an Iovine and Young course if I could earn my way in, and keep building that bot until it finally hears my grandmother right.³