 Wonderful to see so many of you here in person for the Friday career talk today. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Alex Johnston. I'm the director of master's programs and career management here in the Department of Linguistics. And it's my pleasure to host a series of career talks throughout the year that bring in people linguists, linguists I should say, who have training in our areas, our subfields, and who have careers that take place outside of higher education in business, tech, not nonprofit and government. And today we have one of my favorite people here from all the way from Boston. I'll put some stitches on and I had this introduction prepared, I'll put some stitches on and I had this introduction prepared, but I'm going to throw it out because I already linked to his impressive academic CV. This person has a list of honors, awards, grants, funding and degrees that is so long. And in fact, for the reception today, which I invite you all to stay for, I selected some cheeses from the countries where you received your degrees and we must identify them by flavor and country. I'll do my best. Remember, never in time in the country getting those degrees, so many. And what's so interesting is that for this person who has such a passion and love for teaching and research and who has accumulated this stellar early career academic CV, he has exemplified some of the mindset that I really hope that you see modeled before you take, the mindset of being curious, of taking risks, of learning new skills, of being a lifelong learner and just taking that improvisational yes and approach to a career pathway. So it was just two years ago in the summer of 2021 that I met Alfonso Oversu when he attended the Linguistics career launch that was an endeavor of food camp produced by the linguists beyond academia of the LSA. It was a 19-day boot camp scheduled out 9 to 5 with training and with panels of linguists to show and tell how they developed their careers about academia. And this is a person who stood out in a Zoom audience for this virtual boot camp as someone who was so engaged and lively and curious. And so he quickly became someone who really made a lot of use of the workshops and networking opportunities and panels that were put on. And so this is actually the first time we've met in person. It's been wonderful. I'm so glad that you're able to come. I will let him introduce more of his background but I just want you to take note of this wonderful mindset of creativity and openness to new possibilities. And I want to give you very, very warm welcome to the Department of Linguistics here at Georgetown. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Right, sorry. Well, first of all, thank you very much for making it today. It's a Friday afternoon. I know it's a long holiday ahead of us. So I really thank you for making the time just to be here with us. I really hope I can meet the expectations that just try to provide some of my personal experience actually, that's going to try. I'm just going to try to do that, right? Just provide my own path, see how it can be somehow referential if that serves. I don't like to position myself as someone who like to be looked at too. It's just people's life. We do have different paths and all of them are very valid. So that's what I'm going to try to do. So first of all, thank you for finding the time to be in here. Second and very important for me, thank you, Alex, Dr. Johnston, for making it like this beautiful invitation to Georgetown. I always tell people, Washington was kind of a few places in the US. I was always very attracted to, you know, like, oh, I really want to go see Georgetown, see what's out there. So it's really nice to be here in person, just to be here in the Department of Linguistics. Very inspirational. Like we had this chat before, I studied several MAs, but one of them was in discourse studies. And, you know, while doing that, we actually get a lot of influence from people doing research at Georgetown. So congratulations to you all as well, just to be here. I think it's a privilege world. Now we're going to get started. Thank you, people on Zoom. I'm just going to try not to move very much. I move a lot. So I apologize in advance as I move in like around the room and just the microphone is not getting my voice, but I'll do my best just not to try to, at least move too much. Right, so also very important disclaimer. Alex mentioned, I'm currently employed by Amazon. Most of the things that you'll be seeing here just come from my own personal experience. So that's something I always like to use as a disclaimer. It's not that I'm putting here myself as a representative of Amazon or as someone who necessarily embodies, many of the values and many of the things that actually characterize that company. So that's it. I'm just going to give you the very quick introduction. I'm going to be timing myself. I'm kind of aware of time. Just see if you're okay with this. I'm going to try to provide a general background. So I'm just going to see. So planning objectives, things that I'm planning to do today, things that I'd like to share with you, then different sections. It's going to be mostly three blocks. So first of all, a little bit about my background. Most of you in this room, if not all of you in this room, have a connection to linguistics, different fields with linguistics. That's something I'm aware of. But my personal background and how I actually got trained as the linguists, discourse analyst, is something that to me is also very important just to share with you. I'll try not to use more than 10, 15 minutes for this block. I'll just keep an eye on the timer, especially because I think this is a career talk. So the interesting part will be how did I transition from this research background into something more industry related. So that's going to be the second block. So like like transferable skills, the industry prep, the interview prep, et cetera, et cetera. And then that's going to be 20 minutes, hopefully. This is ideal scenario. Let's see how I make it to that. Then the final block, it's going to be like retrospective. Like, okay, 18 months after this change, what is happening? How do I see my experience at Amazon so far? I'm going to be sharing with you the many challenges that I found when I started. Like this idea of like CDA person in industry, I'm not sure how many in this room are actually related or aware of critical discuss analysis, but it has a very interesting agenda of not very corporate. Let's let's let's leave it there, right? So it's funny because, you know, in some ways I somehow question that a lot myself, like, oh, I did just a huge career with CDA and this context is kind of completely opposite. But I'm just going to try to explain how do I see my role and my expertise fit in there? And then, well, finally, final thoughts, Q and A. I know that we do have the receptionist, I'm very happy to take the reception too, the wines and cheeses. I'm very, I'm very much hoping there's some Manchego cheese because it's the region language conference. If not, that's fine. Name, trade or job, each other's name is equal, okay? Very, very fine. If not, just make sure you get some Manchego cheese at some point. Right, so I'm going to start timing this section 10, 15 minutes and I know it's going to be a lot of information, but I don't really want to overwhelm you with my research experience. Again, like, this is not the main purpose of this talk. Well, I come from this very generic understanding of seeing discourse as social practice and by that, of course, we mean things like this. So it's just seeing how language and action correlate. This idea of language and society being so intertwined and so connected that in a way, you cannot think of one without thinking of the other. We also see discourse that this idea of like agent social construction. So discourse having the key role to actually shape and mold many of the societal practices that we are embedded in. And as you very well know, I'm sure, it's not that we do have an interest in one specific linguistic universe, say, but just, you know, like phenomena, social phenomena and how language discourse plays a role there. So of course, there is also this idea of identity and I'm sure, again, many of you in this room do have a sensitivity towards the idea of the fluidity of identity. So how, you know, it's a process embedded in social practices and actually a huge deal of that takes place in interactional occasions. It's interesting because we don't or I do not necessarily see identities as something very individual or definitely not like it's a monolithic kind of construction, but rather it's this idea of like a negotiation, a process of negotiating different identities and how that happens mostly in social settings. And of course, and that's why we see this connection between a discourse on identity and social phenomena, this connection and this idea of identities entailing this cursive word. So this powerful thought of identities are conveyed build, performed in discourse and definitely through linguistic and non-linguistic means. Okay, so of course, now how do we get into critical discourse analysis? The role of power is definitely essential here. So how do we connect this course identity on power? CDAs, the perfect place for that. So this theoretical influences that many people within CDA have, right? So this idea of power is constitutive of society and also this powerful thought of power not coming from language only, but having this retro kind of effect between both of them. If we think of critical discourse analysis, something that comes to my mind or to people's mind of many cases, is this idea of exploring social inequalities, exploring how identities are actually shaped by these ideas of dominant ideologies. So that is also why I was very interested in putting these three things together and that's something that really shaped my career. Since very early stages, I've got to tell you that my BA was in English, in Spain. We do have an interested mixture of things. So we do linguistics and also literature of the United Kingdom of the US and a lot of culture. I'm 35 at the moment. So back in the time, we studied English, English philology, which is a beautiful word but really tells you it's a very kind of like classic understanding of language, right? So we did like Greek, Latin, we also did the basics for phology, the history of language. So it was a very interesting thing. However though, I was very drawn to something more in between. So for me, always linguistics, the way that I got access to linguistics very age stages was like this formal understanding of linguistics that it's very nice and beautiful but definitely not that aligned with my own interests. So that's why I have this curiosity to know how language discourse identities can be combined and studied and actually better understood. So I'm just gonna present two main projects that I actually were very telling and kind of shaped my own personality as a person but also as a researcher. So this is something I started out. So I finished my undergrad, I went into something very, very practical which was like, okay, I was sharing that with Angeles for example or with some of the people here that I'm the first person in my family actually getting a university degree. So I'm always, and I was always very aware of the fact that I could actually, you know, I needed to get a job as soon as I finished my undergrad. So to me, what I did was like, okay, let's play it safe. Let's just get an MA in teaching English which is something that I was always passionate about. So after that, I was like, okay, I really want to get into something more specialized. I could actually see how I was connected and really interested in language, discourse, or science, identity, power. And that's how I ended up at the University of Lancaster. United Kingdom, beautiful place, a bit, you know, tiny and small for my own taste but it was a fantastic department and that's where I started up this project. So what I did here, and again, this is not something that I really want to pay a lot of attention to. This is just to show the clear social motivation of the topic that was interested in. Intimate partner violence, pervasive of a scientist, a lot of misconceptions, many people tend to think that domestic abuse, I don't like that term but it's usually, you know, like known as that. Intimate partner violence is actually pervasive regardless of the society, regardless of the class you're in. It's different manifestations but it's always, you know, like it is there. I was mostly interested in this situation and especially how women went through those and they're very interested in counter-discourse this also back in the time but also now of this very instant question like, oh, but what happens to abuse against men? And well, while it's not denied by literature, figures are really clear in that regard. It's disproportionately affecting women if we compare it to men. It's actually more women who once were killed by partners or ex-partners. So to me it was a clear motivation to actually get to see what was going on there. And I was, in a way, I wanted to know, what happens if, how do these women construct themselves discursively depending on the stage within the abusive relationship you're in? So if it's initial stage of abuse or a final stage of abuse, do I change the way I conceive myself? I see myself. I talk about myself in specific terms. So am I a mother? Am I a victim? Am I a wife? Am I different social actors that could be seen there? So this is the main thing I wanted to explore but I also wanted to see what happens to, okay, male perpetrators, how are they defined? And for that, I did all this, you know, interesting research that was part of my, one of my MAs and also the speech use rotation in which I looked at discourse online in public fora, back at the time as well, ethics around digital data was becoming more of an aware thing. Like it was, people were more aware of that. It had to, I spent a lot of time making sure my research was compliant with ethical good practice. And in a way, just to give you some ideas of things that I came up with. So from this initial abuse, initial stage where women in this online forum were talking about, okay, is it abuse? Am I being abused? We could see more of a prevalence on individuals. So I am this person. I am a victim or not. So we set more focus on the individual. I also pay attention to something that is fascinating to me, which is this social cognitive and seeing how metaphors play a role. So it was really interesting to see how whether metaphors were really pervasive in that first category. If you think of, you know, storms, if you think of snow, if you think of heavy rain, there's actually nothing you can do to actually battle that. It's just stay there and wait until that happens. That changed in the final community, in life after abuse, and it was a more collectivised tendency. So we're moving from a victim, woman, et cetera, to something like more essential. Like, okay, I'm a lady, I'm a woman. I'm not a victim or I'm not like a wife, for example. And we could also see a lot of war metaphors, which in a way was very interesting to see how this process for many of the participants studying was actually a very empowering process. Again, this is just to give you a taste of projects that shaped my personality as a researcher. Once that was finished, I came to the U.S. This is something that I started off at the Department of Government at Harvard. Harvard is not necessarily, you know, linguistics, it's very, very heavily influenced by formalist understandings of language. So things like, oh, intimate partner violence and discourse, or migration and discourse, it's not something that really fits. So that's how I ended up in the Department of Government with a professor who's very interested in seeing like, okay, which are the connections between language and society. So again, I'm not gonna go through this. We all know, I think we're very aware of how pervasive migration is in the U.S. And we do have some pretty experiences when it comes to how undocumented immigrants, especially, which was the focus of my research, are actually constructively constructed, tiny, subtle things. So Clinton wants to flood our country. Dangerous, massive, no. So things like that were things I was interested in, especially when it comes to metaphors and the use of metaphors to construct undocumented immigrants. So this is what I wanted to see. And also I wanted to see which of the variables could actually make an impact on how people construct, conceive undocumented immigrants. So social class, party affiliation, which was one of my original hypotheses. Let's see what came out. But yeah, that was the type of project I was interested in. So this came from, that was actually, that was the most beautiful contribution to Harvard. My professor was very reluctant at first to include an open-ended question, the question there. It was like, oh, well, you know, I don't think people, I mean, fantastic professor coming from this field of social wisdom, not social ethics, theology, politics, like, oh, agreeing to disagree, one to five, click, click, click, click, and finished. He was very reluctant at first, just to include an open-ended where people had to write things that. I really had to push for that because that was the main interest that I had. So that was, fortunately, we ended up gathering like 1,200 responses, which is like a very sound sample. And the two things, this was part of a bigger survey. The two things that were related to my own project were these things. So first of all, participants had like, undocumented immigrants are black, so people could actually write whatever they wanted. And after that, they were prompted with this kind of metaphorical domains. So undocumented immigrants are flooding into, eroding, attacking, invading, infesting, which is, you know, like very problematic metaphorical domains. And in a way, those of you not familiar with metaphor, to me, it's so interesting if you just, this quite, this very fast Google test, if you just go click, flood into, you got interesting, you get interesting mental schemas that you very fast get there. So of course, a lot of water, you can see a lot of people not really knowing what to do, like it's okay, this is the water that we're having, what can we do to avoid it? Whereas if you go and say, attack, you get all this white variety, a very interesting plethora of images about, you know, what implies to be attacked. So, surprise, surprise. We got some correlations and that was very interesting because party affiliation was not statistically significant. I was actually going for the most basic understanding of this, well, if you're a Democrat, maybe you just don't go for infesting the West or attacking the US, right? Maybe you showed some sensitivity towards that. That variable was not statistically significant. We did get some interesting options. So for example, things like attack the US, resonated more with men who were younger, wealthier, less educated, flooded into, so like a metaphor rooted in a natural domain, resonated more with women, older, less wealthy, more educated parts of this sample. Okay. The thing is that, as I was saying before, a lot of interesting things really happened in the open-ended issues. So a lot of interesting metaphorical domains that I have not considered. So things like a drain on the American society or something that is terrifying to me. And when I talk about these things, I don't want to be perceived as someone who's just like very away from this. It's like they should be returned to their countries. It's like, if you think of the metaphorical mapping of that, it's a very, very disturbing one. You also got interesting syntactic, like pragmatic constructions. So, okay, undocumented immigrants are fine as long as if provided that. So it was interesting to see the disclaimer that many of these people actually used there to say, you know, to actually talk about human beings. Right. I made it. It took me 15 minutes. That's all I wanted to do for my research background, but I really wanted to give you a general understanding of where, you know, the areas that I come from. This is not necessarily formal, same tax. This is not mythology. This is not phonology. This is what I used to do when I was actually in my academic career. Now, what happens? This is the fun part. Now we're getting started with the fun part. I came to the US September, 2019, fun, great. Oh, amazing. It was a great opportunity. I was showing that with some of you before, like no family issues. Like I could actually, my parents are very young. No partner, no kids, no mortgage, no nothing. I was like, okay, let's just go to America. Let's see what I can do that. So I was like, hey, September, 2019. And I think we all know what's coming, right? I went back to Spain for Christmas. Well, this is nice and great. I came back to the US and then I never left. Literally, a lot of things happened. Like, of course, the most important thing, a global pandemic, I'm sure we all went through some kind of repercussions to that. Interestingly, as I said before, I came to the US without any kind of personal commitments. Like a bit before the pandemic started, I started to get into a personal commitment. I was like, oh, this is not time. This is definitely not a nice thing for now, but that's how it happened. So I stayed in the US to a point that I need to see what to do. Remember, I came for a postdoc. I'm sure you are aware of this, but if not, I can just share my experience with this. When you're a postdoc, you're not guided, perhaps in the same way as you are guided when you're a beach team. So it's many years of a relationship with an advisor. It's a different type of relationship. In the US, actually, doctoral programs tend to be six years. In Europe, it's just three, four, actually they push you to do it in three. It's like, okay, I have to do it. So interestingly, as a postdoc, it's not that I had the time to really create academic connections with people at Harvard. My advisor was a wonderful person, but understandably, he had different priorities when COVID started, right? We all had. So I get at this point of like, okay, reference less in a country where I was not really familiar with. Academically, as Alex mentioned before, my background is strongly embedded in Europe, in Spain mostly, but also in the Netherlands, in the UK. So I ended up here as like, okay, what do I do now? So this is the second part of the talk. Jump to industry, transferable skills, industry prep and interview. What happened? Summer 2021, I can see kind of like, okay, things have just come in, kind of getting better. And something that after three, well, and BA, three MAs and a double PhD, I feel really ashamed of saying this now, I'm actually a bit hysterical. Also, mind you, the tendency in Europe is, we don't actually pay a lot to get educational degrees. People support you, like you don't need to return the money to actually get educated, which to me makes a lot of sense, personally. But after all that, and actually, I actually thought that as a, after a post look at Harvard, my ego was gonna be, okay, now I got all the skills that I needed. Not true. I reached July 2021 and I personally, and I'm not lying at all, it is honest. Me asking people around me, okay, but what are the skills that I have? I don't really know which are my skills. It was kind of like, okay, what can I do? Like with all this education, like, and now what? So, well, this is something that is covered and this is also something to you, just in case some of you may be getting this question at some point in your careers. Now, what to do? So we get to this great moment of July 2021, and very accidentally, like many things in life, I bumped into this tweet about, oh, this bookab, LCL kind of thing, two, Linguistics Outside Academia. And as you can imagine, my personal being at that time really resonated with me. So like, oh, also, it was a time 2021 where we were getting a lot of, you know, tech was really, really getting people from different backgrounds to see how we could actually contribute to, you know, these type of technologies, voice assistants, et cetera, et cetera. So I bumped into this tweet that I couldn't reach for you by the way. I was actually trying to get the initial message that I couldn't, but this is just the confirmation for the tickets that I've got. So that was a 19 day kind of bookab. Great, I'm so excited, full time, nine to five thing. And the wonderful people that you actually need to help you shape your skills, your career understanding more, how you kind of see yourself as a professional as human being. Of course, you have like leading Alex Johnstone, amazing, you're very honestly, and I'm not saying this because Alex is here, but you're very lucky, extremely lucky to have someone like Alex next to you. And I'm really hoping, yes, let's just give a very, very, very, very, very, very happy. To me, this is genuine, Alex. It was, you know, when you do something because you feel you can change people's lives, that's not something we always get in the educational settings. It's something that in most cases, I mean, we see it, but more in the long term, right? Like student reaching to you, reaching out, oh, well, there's this thing. But to me, it was a very, very dear example of how bumping into someone can actually make a huge impact on someone's life. So I found this alongside fantastic professionals that really created a beautiful program in which we actually learned a lot about many of these things. It is true, I'll check this right here. It is true that you can actually get to know a lot of information about in which to explore your launch at the moment. I'll give you some resources on that. But this is the fun part because I decided to bring a lot of materials that I used through these processes. So this is what I did actually. As you can see, you can move around if you want, but during all that time, it was taking intensive notes of everything that I heard, but this, wow, there is someone at this company that has a beach dealing with sticks. Well, let's find out, like, what was this? Like interviews, like, et cetera, et cetera. Because I'm sure the notebook is gonna be lingering. This is just an example. So honestly, things like industry names, people that, or things that I personally hadn't heard before. UX experience, what is that? Like, honestly, I just didn't think human. Of course, this was like a moment of people talking on me, old fashioned beam as I am, like writing things down, like seeing how, you know, I could make sense of everything. Something very interesting that I was definitely not aware of. But okay, which are the names for the roles that we can actually take as linguists? I'll talk about this later on, but my LinkedIn profile, apart from having like, I don't know, 40 connections because, you know, when you're in academia, you don't really care about LinkedIn. It's like, okay, you care about research, yeah, you care about school, like Google scholar, you care about many other things, but not LinkedIn necessarily. So I actually saw that my title that was critical discourse analytics. So quite understandably again, it was not very easy for recruiters, for people interested in having a linguist in the team just to actually get something, oh, critical discourse, what is this, right? So that's something I learned as well. And throughout the many interviews and many talks that we had, there were beautiful tips about how to be interviewed. Okay, again, I'm gonna talk about this later on as well, but what happens when you are in academia and then you want to move from academia and try what's out there, it's not always the skills that you have, like this academic seeding that you have that will be valid for that context, right? So that's some of the notes and some of the reasons why for me, this three week period was life changing. And it is true that don't you fret, there are options out there you can actually get to see the channel on YouTube, you can actually, if I'm not wrong Alex, but you get the actual recordings from those days, you get them here, right? Yes. You also have like the linguistics career cast where people, Laurel Sutton reads interviews, people to talk about their experiences. It's very interesting for example, when I did this for Laurel, the conversation took us to a very personal place. So I was sharing how I became interested in language, like rooted in childhood, like it was an interesting conversation with her. So I would really encourage you to have a look at this and see different profiles that people actually share in a very intimate kind of context because when you're in this interview podcast format, it's kind of like, okay, which is when we talk about things, right? Okay, so something that I also wanted to give you was this, believe it or not, but when I started or I had the intention to start applying for industry positions because of course I was interested, I was like, oh, what's out there? What can I do? Like, which are the different possibilities that I have? It's funny because I would personally send this academic CV, and this is a summarized version of it with eight pages. So you can have a look if you want. It's just for you to give us like an interesting overview of things that I would send. You, like, it's not that I have a personal interest in taking the resumes with you or anything, it's just illustrative, just for you to have a clear example, more paper-based thing, and just to see like how to do it, right? But from that, this version you could clearly tell, oh, very proud of my masters, like the book chapters, so what, right? So from that, I had to make sure and this was a beautiful exercise to condense everything in two pages. And that is not something I knew, believe me or not. That's something I had to learn when I attended the LCL. So it was crucial to do that, especially to really understand what people in the industry are looking at, right? So after the three weeks, that's one of the things that I did. Okay, let me just change my resume. Let me just start kind of considering this more seriously. More changes that came alongside, okay, LinkedIn title, remember? Remember what was the title? It's my friend. Critical Discourse Analyst, that was the first thing to go away. And I felt I was betraying my discipline and my academic self, because I was like a Discourse Analyst. I've been defined as a Discourse Analyst all my life, pretty much. It felt painful because as we can talk about this later on, but this idea of how academia is very much integrated in your personal being, in your physical persona is a very interesting thing to explore. But that's the first thing that went away. So moving from the Critical Discourse Analyst, understanding that that was not the stage of life that I was gonna need that for, and really replacing the key terms and changing it into something way more generic, linguist. Researcher, and make it a bit more, I don't like the word marketable, but easier to understand for people who are in industry, because that's a reality. Like if I tell someone I'm a Discourse Analyst, what's the percentage of population I would actually know what I know how to do? Actually, in Spain, when I would tell people, I did an M.A. in Estudios del Discuso, people would think that it was like, oh, so maybe it's politician stuff, it's just writing speeches on politicians. So it's an interesting approach that in a way, it's not always nicely understood. So yeah, that was an interesting exercise. This is a prototype, actually. I'm not sure if you have the chance to see the effect. This was the original thing that I had created for that final template. It was like, okay, how do I want the resume to look? So there are different sections. I apologize for people on Zoom, it's just not really getting. But yeah, so it was like a prototype and kind of like, okay, let's see how I can do this. Now, the question of skills to me turned out to be a real yes, I do have the skills. And actually, if you notice, when you do the critical exercise of just analyzing and understanding what's going on on your academic CV, you realize there are many skills that can be transferable to different settings. These are some examples. By the way, I just decided to give you a version of the listings, the way I submitted to Amazon. That doesn't mean that today I would do it differently, but that was my best self back in the time. Okay, so project management, yes, I've done that. Like I've actually carried out, I've dealt with people in academic setting. I did like had like a research group that in a way we had to find ways on how to operate the budget stuff like that. Of course, we do a lot of written and oral presentation. We do have autonomous problem solving. That's a reality. If some of you here on the PhD program, you know that you find ways to work independently, right? Because that's what you have to do. Of course, data science, for someone rooted in ancient Latin and ancient Greek like me, sounded like, oh, gosh, this is not really data science. But as a matter of fact, we do, I did as I tried to illustrate before experiment design. That's something that I have to stick down with my advisors to see, oh, how do we go about this? I handled a lot of data, 1,200 interviews, sampling, visualization, and of course, linguistic error analysis. I spent eight years working for Cambridge ESL examinant candidates. Don't you think that you do have like a really prone tendency to find linguistic errors? Not necessarily people learning English, people multilingual learners, right? Of course, annotation, we all do annotation. Like if you have a corpus of language, if you're interested in seeing the phenomena going up there, you tie little things. You provide labels to patterns. That's something we all do. You may think you don't, but you do. And this is something very interesting because even if it's just like grading students, finding patterns in written conversations written by your learners, that is something that in a way, it's linguistic error analysis. It's a lot of annotation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, that was me when I was getting ready for industry. Also, as I said, I changed LinkedIn and what happened. And again, if I brought all my notes was just for a very simple reason. I always had the impression when I would listen to all these people in the career launch, that happened out of magic. That happened out of intelligence that I didn't have. Like I feel like, of course, but at least people, it's just so interesting that they change this. They really know how to do stuff. I'm not, it's a very interesting thing. But in a way, it's something that really has to happen. So it's just doing that critical exercise and understanding what's going on. And that is why I decided to bring all this mess of paper and more actually rudimentary materials that I'll be showing in a minute with the only purpose of showing that there's real work behind this. And this is a real motivation of like trying to do things in a way that works for your personal life, for your personal situation, professional thing at that time. So again, that's something that I would love you to take as something to take into account. You may be listening to me right now and thinking, oh, wow, I'm not there quite yet. Well, believe me. And I'll be sharing some of these things with you. You are, believe me or not, but you are. No. So we do have the skills, we already, so let's get ready for industry. Okay. Logically, what happened was that after all these tweaks on LinkedIn, I got a call. Well, I got a message on LinkedIn from my recruiter. And I was like, oh, wow, this is very interesting because I actually, I was really interested in this decision. I, of course, was aware of voice, AI, the role of linguists there, how we can actually improve those models, et cetera, et cetera. So I would spend a lot of time actually going through all the job offers and saying, oh, this is a job offer that I really find interesting. I even bought, and maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but that was the time I decided to buy a Lexa device. Before that, I didn't have it because I was like, okay, let's get ready for this. I know how I can do this. So I got one and then I had a lot of interactions with Alexa and just trying to identify gaps there, et cetera, et cetera. But if I'm telling you this, it's just because, of course, it is a crucial, oh, I'm not forgetting about the recruiter. It is a crucial, it's very important for you to, at a time when you're not certain of how to move forward, regardless of the context, regardless of the situation, a global pandemic, a divorce, whatever, it's always interesting just to have like, okay, what is something that inspires me? And the attacks there is actually intentional. Inspiration comes from many different places. It might be a professional inspiration. It might be a mental health inspiration. It might be a salary inspiration. It's actually rooted in multifaceted areas. So to me, as you can clearly tell, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing takes to speech. Those are three basic steps in voice AI, but I'm sure if you have an interest in linguistics, that resonates with you, am I right? Just from the outside, like not really knowing what's going on, but it's like natural language processing. Wow, this is something I could see myself doing. And of course, when all this is happening in the technological environment we're in, it's like, hey, hold on a minute. How does this magic happen? How do I tell this to this device? The device thinks about what's happening, cruises that and gives me an answer. Correct or incorrect, but I get an answer. So this was very interesting and that's something that really fascinated me. So the recruiter reached out and I was like, wow, this is not possible, this might be a scam. This is not true, this is not really happening, right? So we had like a phone call. Just did you like initial screening? Okay, this is what we have. This is what the offer might be, et cetera, et cetera. So again, this is the real thing that I have. So what I did after identifying a role that might be an interesting fit for me, I just went for the description. Remember the skills that we showed before that I showed before? So I was just trying to create this mismatch, right? Like, okay, so what are the skills that I think I have? And let me just try to get some of the skills that I see in this job offer. So well, just as you can see there, text annotation, grammar writing, data analysis, organizational skills, aggressive deadlines. I'm very good at that. I'm very good at that. The day I actually finished these slides, Alex, I didn't want to tell you things, but I was like, why are you? So I'm a very last minute person and when I saw aggressive deadlines, I was like, okay, this is something that really works for me. Actually not having deadlines doesn't really work for me. And we were talking about that before, right? Like I do need deadlines to actually get my productive self to work. Okay, so I said like, okay, this is an interesting position. I networked, I actually reached out to people who vary patiently and kindly. I agreed to have a informational interview, 10, 20 minutes, just okay, what do you do? I'm interested in this position. Do you think this is the right fit? Mind you, this is a very entry level position. And I know the AI ML machine learning thing sounds like, oh, I cannot do that, but believe me, just don't forget. Ancient Greek and Latin, okay? Just I come from there. Like I come from prototypes, piece of paper. Like it's kind of like, I just want you to have that in mind, okay? So I said, okay, this seems like a thing. Let's get ready for it. So the first thing that I did was having this amazing book that I would highly recommend. I can start collecting these things in time. Okay. So this is a very interesting book. It's referenced here. You can have it if you want. I'm overwhelming you with a lot of things. But yeah, I think it's very useful to have like a real life sometimes, real life thing in your head. I'm not sure if you have the chance to get to see the book, but if you actually open the book, you'll see how I come from a background that might be very much resonating with you. That means taking notes, post it here, there. So I really took that introduction in the book, like introductory book, and really tried to understand, okay, if this is an industry that I'm interested in, what is this all about? Enough knowledge to be able to put it in my interviews and just to show some knowledge and some degree of understanding of the field. I think to me was snake for many years. And then it was like, okay, this is something else. This is way more than I thought. I was like, okay, and believe me, this was right after the career launch. I, and I think we all felt so inspired by the many possibilities that I felt fearless. And I was one of those who would get a dark screen and really switch on, switch on. Let's see if this works. The fearless attitude that we ended up having really pushed me to say, okay, let's see what's, what's private, like what this is as a matter of fact. What you discover is that despite the very not user-friendly interfaces, many cases, it's just syntax. It's just creating things here and there. Okay, I define you as this. So I call this function and then this fact, it's not something that should scare us as it does. So I took this course this for free on LinkedIn learning. I'm sure you have access to that. If not here in public language, you do. So I was actually trying to get some insights into that. Now, I feel really, I'm like, okay, I know what's going on. I just understand the architecture of this model. I can just kind of, I feel ready for this. All this was in parallel to the many long, very lengthy periods of time that Amazon would have between one interview and another one. I was also sharing this with someone before. The first thing that you get at Amazon is just something for you to check your general understanding of the business world, right? Like, oh, if a customer does this, then what do you do? I was like, okay, I'm out of here. Like this is not, I'm not gonna make it free. Stages, you know, like different phases started to happen. And then I was like, okay, this is getting serious. So what can I do? Now, a lot of preparation. I said, okay, I've identified this role. Let's see, Amazon is just, Amazon we get like, okay, I ordered this, but Amazon is more than that. You get many divisions. You find out very easily. And this is all public information, by the way. You find out very easily that you get the leadership principles, this idea like really, really articulate Amazon's culture. So, okay, let's see this. And I'm not sure if you can read it, but invent and simplify innovation. And I wrote this topic. So I all the time try to connect these things with my own background, like, oh, maybe this is actually taking me here, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Also, something I learned at the LCL is that there was something called Star Method for interviewing. And that's something maybe you'll be learning a lot when you are taking this magnificent module that you'll be having in the spring. But it's just understanding that some companies use these models to actually articulate the interviews. So I will just give you with that, but I'll show you something that I would do. Okay. How do I, this looks like an endless, endless, how do I make this into something related to my own experience? So I would create things like that. In my role as a researcher, I have this situation, task, action, resolve. There are different options around this method, but this is pretty much something that would actually help you articulate your own stories. And I set that here. Always link it to your own experiences. And even if you've been working as, I don't know what, I'm sure there will be a situation where you can actually relate to this. So with all this in mind, what you need to do is create a crazy little thing with a lot of nonsense. Like, okay, this is it. This is like, I don't know, like how many nice speakers you get in Mexico? I don't know. Like I was gonna get that question. I didn't know. Which are the smart objectives? Which are the, what is that? Kickoff meeting. I didn't know what a kickoff meeting was. So it's, you know, all these process of putting all these things together and making it into a cohesive, robust narrative. Okay. Time check. 45, how are we doing? How are we doing? Oh, sorry. Are you guys okay? Yes. Especially. I didn't know what you were doing was so humid. Okay. This is the last part. Are we okay? Yeah. Do we need a break? Yeah. I'm not gonna pass this around because then it's gonna be taking a lot of time but you can have a look afterwards if you're interested. Okay. You and I have, I got an offer, December 2021. I was like, oh my gosh. This is what you happen in. Like I honestly, genuinely, trust me here. I thought I was not ready yet. I thought, okay, let me just try this out. Let me see how it feels. It's very likely that I get rejected but let me see how it goes. Surprise. Christmas. Joe offered. Great. Big issue. I had teaching to do back in Spain and this is something that we can talk about this later but as part of my post-op, I had two years at Harvard but I also had some teaching commitments that I could roof around and put somewhere in between those four years finished. So I didn't mention this. Not a nice trick there. Like I was like, okay, I'm not gonna get it. I'm just not gonna get it. So let me get some practice and then see what happens. So I reached the final stage and I realized that I need to do my teaching commitments because believe me or not, for me it was crucial to finish my post-op time on group terms. So I reached a final point and I'm frank, open, really like, okay, I have this situation. I'm not ready to start quite yet. I wouldn't need time and I actually need, we are talking about, you know, this is December, 2021. I told them I need until May, 2022. Oh my God, it is not gonna happen. Like, this is Amazon, they don't need people fast, come on. Okay, so back and forth negotiation, okay, this yes for this no, la, la, la. Fortunately, my start date was May, 2022. So I was like, okay, $30, that was a few. Okay, so from there till now, this is the final block, learnings, initial challenges, that CDA role in industry and something like to me, I don't want you to see this as an exercise of arrogance, but more of a, okay, for someone with a very low professional self-esteem, like I kind of knew that I'm very good at teaching. I love teaching, it's my actual passion. I've always wanted to be a teacher since I was five years old, but when it comes to an industry in AI, machine learning, I was not really a person to feel comfortable about that. So I want to share with you the annual review, some parts of it, of how people in my team and different teams got to see me after a year. Just for you to see that those skills are not part of the skills you own and have. Okay, challenges, I get there, Cambridge, Kendall Square, massive building, oh my gosh. Okay, let's see what's out there. Many initial challenges I can tell you. We were talking about this before, in English you have this fun, I don't think it's fantastic, but this interesting term of believing I can teach you. And I don't know what you think about this, but you could actually use many terms. Remember like a discourse analyst? It's always about, okay, the choice of words or the collocations that stay for some reason. For me, I find it really interesting how you're leaving academia, which seems to be sort of a place, like a space where you feel cozy and nice, right? Kind of keep it in yourself. So this was a great challenge, especially when you build your personal identity around your professional identity. I'm not sure if that's gonna be the case for some of you in this room, but that was a clear case of that for me. I was Alfonso, and I was not Alfonso, whatever thing you can think of. I was a teacher. And it comes naturally to me these days, if people, oh, what do you do? It comes out naturally. I don't say I'm an AI, MLT, tell English. I normally say I'm a teacher. It comes naturally. It comes very much from within, right? So that was a process of really, really interesting times of actually understanding that, okay, maybe I'm forcing my time in academia, but it's not that I feel like I'm actually leaving and I had many projects going on there that I wanted to pursue as well. Something that to me was very interesting was to talk about the biggest elephant in the room. And, surprise, I was the biggest elephant in the room. For several reasons. I was the oldest. My manager was two years younger than me. And I had the highest academic degree in the room. Okay, how do you make that coincide and harmonically go with getting to be new as a team? As you can imagine, many things that we actually noted in academia, these ego things like, oh, gosh, I've got an HP. I know so much about everything. It takes time to actually understand that there are fields you don't know anything about. And it's fine to ask. I don't know. So it was different and a very interesting process for me to really understand that, hey, yes, you may know a lot about new mistakes, but you know nothing about many other things. So that was something interesting for me. I had a chaotic and boring experience. We were really chaotic. And this is somehow related to the biggest elephant in the room. Quite understandably, when you get into a team and you have a PhD in the Spanish Alexa team, some people may feel, okay, he's a native speaker of the language. He has a PhD. This person seems to be like a very strong competitor. So for some people, the way to act around that is just like, okay, you know what? I'm just going to ignore you, blatantly. And that's something that you also need to know how to navigate, because that's something that you find in some contexts. Also, it was actually too techy for me. Like I had to work in Command Prompt. I had to do some understanding, some Python secrets. I was like, oh my God, I want to cry. I don't want to do this. This is so difficult. The learning curve was so, so massively big in front of me. So many challenges there. And also the completely different setting. The way communication happens. Like, you know when you get an email to your professors, that you get like, you're as a professor, you're sending an email to your students. Dear all, this is just to let you know that what regards, that is not something you do in industry at all. And you may think this is a very straightforward thing to think, but when you've been embedded in a system that works in specific ways, then it's actually very challenging to change those practices. I'm going to give you one specific example. Once I was talking to my manager and I said, oh, this is very characteristic of this graph. Character what? It's like, okay, can you explain what you mean by characteristic? Well, maybe for me that was very straightforward, but for someone who's not, and it's the interesting part of just adapting to, okay, this is not a salient query. It's just, okay, I need to communicate. And it was dealing with uncertainty. This was not the best time for tech. I landed this in December 2021 at a specific time in the tech industry. November 2021, we had this huge massive layoff. And I don't know how I survived to that. But it was very coming from a world of tranquility, the coziness of academia into something that, okay, people can kick you out. And you were out. I actually took my belongings from my desk that day, hoping that I was going to be fired to find out later on that I was not. I was like, oh, nice. But I honestly felt that I was going to fail. I was going to get fired that day. Final thoughts, stay open to possibilities. I think life is very fluid these days. Ream, honestly, who in this room was expecting to get into a global pandemic? People in Europe, we really didn't think of a war very close to us. And it's actually happening. It's something that to me is crucial and this is the best learning that I take from this. Do not underestimate your own skills. You have and you have many. And I'm sure they will show when people have to evaluate your assessment. Also, really strive to be flexible and versatile. I hope that's something that comes across. Coming from my research background, I always tried, yes, this is a social approach, but I was interested in digital discourse, dealing with data online, trying to open up as many doors as you can because you don't know how they make them handy. And remember, we're learning experts. We actually do how to learn things. And that's why you're an MA program at Georgetown. So again, when you feel yourself like, okay, this is maybe not that I'm ready for. When you doubt yourself, because that's something that is very likely to happen whenever you transition into any professional setting, just think of this as a way like, what people are looking at is just not necessarily if you know how to program. In some roles, they will, but in many others, they won't. So they won't be looking at how strong you communicate or how strongly you communicate, how able you are to share the knowledge that you have. So again, that is something that if I were to finalize with, they'll be it. Thank you. Probably go with my level. Bravo, thank you so much. We are ready for any questions in the room for just a couple of minutes. And then I want to invite you to join us in the lounge area for wine, cheese and crackers. And I'll keep the questions open on Zoom. Hi Alfonso, I really thoroughly enjoyed your whole presentation, which was very captivating. I did not get lost anywhere. Okay, well, that's good to know. I have two questions. First, I'm very curious about your questionnaire design when you were talking about your undocumented immigrants survey, particularly the slide where you were showing the different factors that you were asking people to kind of rate which metaphorical words that they were choosing. I was wondering how you designed that question as in whether like the, I think the previous slide or something, like with that actual question or maybe the next slide, I don't know. Like it was the actual question with like flooding in Zoom. Yeah, so were they asked to choose like whether they felt strongly with any of these words? Were they provided with their options as well or were they forced to like choose a view? That's a very interesting question. That's the main reason why for the same prompt we decided to incorporate the blank option waiting for. Again, the slide experiment, right? If these questions would have come first, you kind of prone people to okay, undocumented immigrants are flooded into the US. So these was first and actually that's an also interesting observation. People didn't get to see the question after. So they were prompted with this, they actually had to complete information there. Interestingly, and as my professor mentioned, some people would just include like a coma and move on, right? But they couldn't actually move on without like entering any text here. It was open, there was actually no character limitation. People wrote disturbing, but interesting stuff. And interestingly, that was what actually opened up the possibilities for qualitative observation. Whereas for this one, it was more like, okay, I'm interested in each of these domains. I'm curious to see if again, the main hypothesis was like, well, I'm sure Republicans versus Democrats will actually show something interesting here. That was not the case, but it was the case for different variables. So yeah, that was how that was decided. This was part of a huge survey. Like it was a class project with people talking about, I don't know, different situations within undocumented immigrants in the West. So yeah, that was part of the survey. Did you observe most of the negative responses in the open-ended question or were there also positive ones? There were positive ones. To me, it was very interesting to see how there were very embedded in many cases in conditional sentences, which to me was a bit, come on, our human beings, but we are all human beings regardless of how much we go around in the world, right? So to me, that was interesting to say, but it was mostly negative. It was an interesting, negatively loaded and very creative way start. Like that was interesting to say. I'd like to read out one question from Zoom because I hope that all of you can stay for the cheese. And this is from Maddie who asks, I heard Alfonso say he had no coding background. If so, my question is, when you interviewed for the job at Amazon Alexa or at other tech companies, did they ask the infamous question, what technical skills do you have? Or do you have experience coding? And if so, how did you respond? Because we have technical skills at Linguist. That's a very good question, and I thank you for that. We actually had a technical section in the interview, so we had to go through very interesting problems. And okay, for example, how would you categorize this and how would you label this and how would you create syntax in a way that this makes sense to create or just to build this crate? That was part of it, what I know for sure. And I know that holds true for similar positions that different companies, depending on the nature of the role, it's not like the final yes, like, oh, this person has the technical skills. I agree with the comment. It's something that can be learned, especially if you're pushed to learn it. I think something key here is that we're a bit reluctant to actually get into those contexts of coding and just seeing what's out there. But yeah, in my case, and I'm trying to be very specific with the answer, I was asked that, especially because the natural progression for people in my role will be language engineer, which is something which is suspected to have a stronger technical component. At least when NLU, NLP was at stake with large knowledge models now, I don't know. It's of course needed, but I think the role of linguists with all gen AI, it's gonna rather change in the approach that we'll be taking there. So yeah, we have that and that's something that it's likely for a tech company, it's likely that that will come out at some point. Sure, go ahead, Diana. And I think this might be the last one for the room and then we'll break and go for some wine and cheese. I'm thinking for that just one thing. I realize for having taken a bit longer than I expected, I always counted on having a little bit of time outside when you just come and ask questions. So please feel free to use those afterwards. I have no rush, so yeah, sorry. I'll try to make it quick then. Based on your experience as kind of from the inside of a tech company now, do you think there's anything that linguists who are going that path are likely to have under their radar that maybe we should have on our radar as the next big thing? Or is there anything that we might be focusing on at the expense of skills that are gonna be more valuable in industry? Thank you. Something that I've actually really enjoyed as part of this process was when we had to work on ethical and responsible AI. I have the impression that it's something that we get exposed to in the news, like this big tech people meeting the US president, White House, just people talking about this debate and how crucial that will be. I don't have the impression that we see many roles related to responsible AI as of now. My personal gut feeling is that if AI keeps evolving the way it is at the moment, there will be a huge need to actually stop and think, okay, how are we using this technology? Something very basic, very ethical, very philosophical. Okay, where is this leading? Where is this taking us? Those are questions that, as you very well know, are actually rooted in humanities. So my impression, and this is just coming out of my own personal perception, that's something I'm really interested in professionally. And if you do LinkedIn search and we just go like, responsible AI, not many positions come up. And I have the impression that that is a step up that will be actually blooming in the near future. Something that it's actually always okay to have, especially when you're doing your graduate programs, coding, it's not necessarily something that it's out of reach for us. And if you can actually use that to implement that in your academic life, that is always welcome. And I think that's always something that will make your life easier. My personal recommendation again, don't feel paralyzed by the fact that we're not people who trained in coding, in scripting, in all these things, because it just takes a little bit of a push, like being put in a spot, like, okay, what is this about? So that is something to of course have if you are considering tech in the future. But again, and that's related to the first part of the question, responsible AI, in my view, it's likely to be a very crucial thing in being sure it's made in time. Thank you. Wonderful. Well, at this point, let's give him a warm-up. Thank you. So much, that was absolutely wonderful. And for all of you, I appreciate you staying for this period. And please, I invite you to come to the other end of the department and have a quick snack with us and we can talk more without one, so thank you so much. Thank you.