ALUMNUS REPORT: JOEY SABBAGH

After two years in a postdoc at McGill, alum Joey Sabbagh (UCSC B.A., 2000, MIT Ph.D., 2005) is now teaching at UC Berkeley. He reports:

Things are good here. Teaching is taking up all of my time, but I’m enjoying it for the most part. The department is wonderful. I get to see Line (and Oscar and Patrick) a lot, and I’m getting to know some of the other faculty pretty well too. I’m thoroughly enjoying Berkeley, even though I’m not getting out much (due to my teaching schedule), but its such a pleasure to be living (back) here! Classes are going well overall. Intro is a bit of a challenge: Some days students are awake and seemingly engaged, other days they are silent. Now that we’ve moved on from Phonology to Morphology (and we’re about to start Syntax), the (active) students are starting to ask more interesting questions, which is making it more fun for me. The grad course is challenging too. Because half of the students have some background in syntax, but the other half do not, the difficulty there is trying to bring some sense of equilibrium to the class. I’m hoping that I’ll soon feel at ease enough with teaching to start making time for other stuff (research and personal). My LSA abstract was accepted, so I have some work to do for that as well.