linguistics at cambridge

hi everyone, I'm a year 12 student looking to apply for cambridge linguistics, currently studying german, spanish, maths and fm. I just wanted to ask what would be worthwhile preparation for the course - I've read around the subject quite a bit but I'd love to have some new book/podcast/video recs 😁 also if anyone has any interview/other advice that'd be greatly appreciated ☺️
i can provide any context i.e. grades, predicteds, supercurriculars etc. where needed/useful
Thanks in advance!

Hi, I did languages at undergrad but then a linguistics masters at Cambridge – I'm curious, what areas of linguistics have you read into and enjoyed so far?

I've enjoyed many things, but particularly historical linguistics, especially PIE and germanic stuff & then also syntax & inflection so stuff like ergativity, tense/aspect/mood stuff in languages like navajo, etc.

If you're interested in PIE and Germanic, have you come across the Standard Average European hypothesis?
It felt accessible at the time but I liked this article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247869081_The_European_linguistic_area_Standard_Average_European
It sounds like you've done quite a lot of reading on it so far! I don't consume much linguistics-based other media other than following Geoff Lindsey on YouTube and the Lingthusiasm podcast mind

I have actually! It was quite a while ago but ya, thanks for the paper rec! learning about SAE was really interesting coming from Greece, where there's the Balkan language area in action too
If you don't mind me asking, what's the masters like? i intend to continue on after a bachelors so it'd be great to know 😁

With the masters it's a bit down to whether there's a supervisor there in the dept who works on the sorts of things you'd like to do – obviously academics come and go with their careers and it's a small department so can't offer everything. But having switched into 'proper' linguistics having dabbled in it via my MML degree and on my year abroad, it did give me a decent grounding to go on and do a decent project on dialectal variation. I hoped at the time to carry it on to PhD (at the Other Place because my supervisor moved there ) but ultimately didn't get any funding for it. In the end I'm not sure I'd have liked doing a PhD anyway though!