Welcome to Stanford! Here's an unofficial guide to some things that are useful to know. This guide complements other publications by providing information from the linguistics students' perspective. If you want to argue legalistically about requirements, you'll want a copy of the Guidelines for the Ph.D., which are on-line at http://bhasha/~kyle/guidelines.html. (These incantations that begin with an abbreviation such as http then :// are URLs, addresses of pages on the World-Wide Web. Fire up netscape and type the URL into the ``Open...'' window; or, on a non-graphics terminal, start lynx and type the URL as an argument to the G command.) If you want to know everything about life in the Bay Area, then you'll want to consult the guides that attempt to provide that information, such as The Guide to the Good Life at Stanford. This is only one source of information. Others will give you conflicting, often better, advice on various points.
But if you just want to know a bit more about the mess you've landed yourself in, from a student's perspective, then this guide should help.... Well, actually, we hope that you enjoy grad school, and hope that this guide helps make life seem a bit less confusing.
Thanks to the various people who contributed to this guide, whose names appear on the title page. We also stole content and ideas from guides produced by Jon Barwise for Philosophy and by various people in the Computer Science Department. Thanks also to the people who wrote those guides.
This is now the third edition, but that doesn't mean that it can't still be improved. The editor would be most grateful for contributions and suggestions for the next edition; email kessler@csli.
The Editor