 Again, I'd like to welcome you all to today's panel, which is called Linguists in Unexpected Places. So, such an exciting and important theme. And you know, when we think about an unexpected place, of course, that could mean so much. So our panelists will be able to elaborate on that in so many different ways. I'm really delighted to be with you all and with our panelists today. My name is Marissa Fond. I'm an assistant teaching professor at Georgetown University. And I'm also an active, applied sociolinguist outside of academia. So I draw on my background in the federal government, in social science research nonprofits, and in industry. In my work as a research and strategy consultant. So I consider myself also with you as a career linguist and really excited to be with you today. It's also my honor to introduce Marcus Robinson II, who is going to be monitoring the chat and providing many useful resources for you. So please take a look at the chat throughout our time together and feel free to ask questions in the chat. We also have time near to the end of our panel for discussion and questions for those of you who are comfortable. So panelists, I'm curious, could you tell us a bit about your training in linguistics and the work that you do. So the work that you're going to be talking with us about today. And let's start. I'm going to look at my screen here. Let's start with you, Suzanne. Great. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the writing retreat that I am at at the Sierra foothills. I have only done only interrupting my retreat, by the way, out of the great love for linguists and the desire to help people reach new situations and not have as difficult a path as I did. So my training is from Berkeley, now I'm realizing quite some time ago, 2003, I began my career there thinking that I was going to do cognitive linguistics quickly backed out of that, interested in historical linguistics, back my way into theories of language endangerment and cultural revitalization, and ended up with that really focused on the question of how do some languages that are minority languages end up so grammatically shifted in the direction of a dominant language when a dominant language is grammatically unaffected. So I went to provincial Russia to study a large Turkic language there called Tatar. And the answer I found was there was no way to explain grammatical change without understanding the social context at the individual level, at the interpersonal level, and at the societal level. And that's how I ended up doing linguistic anthropology, which is my specialization. For the last 10 years, I've run my company worthwhile research and consulting, where I apply linguistic anthropology to the real world. I mean, academia is the real world, too, but a world where people will pay me for the insights that I'm giving them. And I focus a lot on workplace culture. OK, thank you, Suzanne. And I appreciate you mentioning the fact that your path was a little bit difficult. So I'm hoping that that's something that we can delve into all of us on the panel today, because I think that that's such a common experience. So thank you for sharing that. And let's go over to Mark. OK, hi. Hello, everybody. I, too, am a product of Berkeley, although a little bit earlier than Suzanne. I finished up PhD in Berkeley in 1977, which is like 100 years ago, it feels like. What I studied there primarily, what I specialized in there primarily was American and Indian languages of the West Coast, like a good Berkeley graduate student did in those days. And the ones I studied the most had zero speakers at the time. There were the languages from the San Francisco Bay Area south a little bit down to Monterey, Carmel, if you know California and inland a little bit. So all of my work was based on documentation, as opposed to elicitation from an actual speaker. Fortunately, for the people whose heritage is that language, what I did is helping them bring the language back. I'm not working on this myself, but there are people working with the stuff that I did, plus a lot of other stuff. It's not on me by any means, just to sort of bring it back. And I actually have a couple of years ago heard it spoken for the very first time I worked on it for years and never heard it until a couple of years ago. So that's what I studied mostly career-wise and went off in a different direction. I taught for a little while at UC Santa Barbara, did some research in these languages at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and then kind of got sidetracked, if that's the right word a little bit, and ended up spending most of my working career doing closed captioning, starting off the very, very beginning before it was actually on the air and sort of inventing it as we went along. I didn't have anything to do with the technology, but in terms of the procedures and everything else. And while doing that, I got sidetracked yet again by fluke and ended up getting involved with movies in a particular way, which is that I was actually hired to do conlining, to do constructed languages. Initially for Star Trek, and the main one that I worked on is Klingon. So that's sort of what I did and continued to do. I'm now retired. I'm not doing anything anymore except for doing things like this. Klingon has never disappeared. I'm still working on that in some other languages for Star Trek and some others for some other stuff, but I'm not doing the caption anymore. Thank you, Mark. In what you have described here, two things just jumped out at me quickly. One is that theme of sidetracking, which you brought up a couple of times, which I think we all experience in some way. The sense of, is there a linear path or what does it mean to be kind of taking opportunities that come that might not be on that path? So that's a really interesting theme that I think that we will discuss. And very different. You mentioned what a good Berkeley grad student does. And I think that that's such a relevant theme for all of us here today, from undergrads to PhD level folks, that sense of, oh, well, what should we be doing with our educational experiences and how can we work within our institutions to kind of carve out paths that might be different from what our advisors are doing or what our cohort is doing. So yeah, very important themes. And those are also topics that you can discuss during office hours as well. So folks who might have glommed onto that, I encourage you to go to those office hours. Thank you, Mark. And Anthony. Good afternoon. So I am the one not Berkeley person, I believe, on the panel, it sounds like. I came from a couple of different places, but my dissertation, our PhD training was at Rice University. There I focused a bit on sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and some corpus techniques to finalize a project on the semantics of the 2016 election with kind of a cognitive linguistic underlay. That was rather interesting time to be working on semantics and political rhetoric and kind of the social situation that came out of that, or that built into what we kind of have seen in the past couple of years. Then once I was done with my dissertation, I was kind of in the job market. I was not too thrilled with the idea of academia for various reasons. So I started putting myself out there in a lot of different places, either some things related directly to linguistics, or even an old job that I had that I really loved. I worked in theater. I applied to a few theaters for some technical roles and positions I was still kind of qualified for. But then suddenly I wound up talking with a colleague who was at Adobe, another Rice graduate. He was in user research and user experience design kind of things. He gave me some interesting keywords and ideas. The next thing you know, I found this idea of taxonomy that we all maybe remember from our intro semantics classes. That's kind of not how we think of doing things anymore. And yet big tech companies, guess what? They need taxonomists to organize catalog and basically keep all their data neat and tidy. Generally speaking, it's mainly library and info sciences people who seem to be trained for and drawn to that role. But with linguistics, if you've got some discourse analysis, some semantic experience and some technical skills, such as SQL and good spreadsheet and database management, you'd be a perfect fit for any kind of company. I work at Indeed. So I love coming to things like this because I can help people get jobs, hopefully. I've had a couple of other linguist colleagues are working at Indeed and one actually just left Indeed to go to one of the Coursera type companies. I forget which one. So there is employment potential out there. So if you're in the academic kind of trying to get into a university job and sometimes maybe feeling there's not so much there in the tech world, there might be a little bit more ground to cover. Thank you, Anthony. I mean, I really picked up on your point about sometimes timing is really important in our career journeys. It's like what happens to appear before you or how certain events align to put you in a certain place at a certain time. And I also noticed the wide variety of skills that are relevant or necessary or buildable in these kinds of roles. And since you already kind of anticipated my next question, if you don't mind, I'm going to start with you on this one, because I wanted to know from our panelists a little bit more detail about how you actually arrived in your current role. So what was that like actually? Yes, since you kind of already started us off, please just continue. Okay, so I basically came right out of grad school. It was not a short process, it did take about a year to kind of land the job. So there was multiple applications to various companies. I had tried Facebook and Google, I think had some things in taxonomy. So I, like I said, I was probably 100 applications different places. I got maybe four or five interviews total, some in tech, some in one was a defense contractor, one was a government contractor. So different places here and there, depending on what skills I was kind of putting to the floor on my resume. So I actually had like two or three different resumes to kind of locations. And it's definitely one of those things where you're going to not hear from any employers, and all of a sudden you're going to get a phone call in the middle of the day out of nowhere where they want to interview you right away. And you kind of have to let that happen. But then I got a, or indeed took interest in me. And then that was the whole process of four or five phone calls and a virtual meeting pre-pandemic. There were still issues with getting travel for me during the holidays. So they were willing to do it on Zoom. And I got the job and I've been there ever since. So process wise, I think is how I would like to answer that question. But if I'm missing anything, let me know. No, I mean, I think that that's really important because, you know, there are so many different ways that people arrive, you know, in their current roles. And it sounds like for you, it really was a matter of looking for jobs, sending out applications, knowing that you're going to get a couple hits out of many applications, and then, you know, taking the time that it takes. And I know that you are somebody who is keen to help folks with the details of that process. So we'll talk a bit later about things like, you know, how to search for those jobs, you know, what to actually put in those search engines. And so thank you for that. Great. And how about Mark? So I progress from thing to thing to thing by serendipity and accident, I think. So when I was, I guess, in chronological order, when I was doing this postdoc at the Smithsonian in Washington, one of the things I was doing besides research was looking for a job at the time of for an academic job. And at that particular year, they were a few and far between, which is not, I guess, all that unusual. Anyway, I was at a party somewhere in Washington, which sounds like a Washington insider political thing, it was not that kind of a party. But anyway, I met somebody there who worked for what was then the Department of Health Education and Welfare, in whichever part of that department dealt with education of deaf people. Then we got to talk, he says, Oh, you're a linguist. Yeah. He says, Well, there's this new technology that's getting going to help deaf people, you know, enjoy television. I said, Oh, what's that? He said, it's called closed captioning. I said, What is that? Because it wasn't, it didn't exist yet. And he told me what it was all about. And he said, They need a linguist. You should get a hold of them. They need a link. So we can come back to later, whether or not they really needed a linguist or not. But that created a thought in my head. I said, Let's pursue this, that they need a linguist. That's what I am. And before I got into infalinguistics back in high school and colleges, stuff like that, I was involved in radio. So it's broadcasting, you know, so it's kind of connected to me. And very, very briefly, I applied for the job and got it. It was a longer story than that, obviously. While I was doing the closed captioning, while I was working there, we developed a way to caption live programming. When I first started, we could only do shows that were on tape or on film, or we could get it ahead of time. We finally figured out a way to do it live while it's on the air, like news and sports. And the first program that we did that we announced to the world that we were going to do was the Oscars in 1982. And in order to do that, they needed someone to coordinate that whole procedure and somehow or other, I was picked to be the one to do that. So I went to Hollywood to work on the Oscars. I got there a week before the Oscars, called up whoever, everyone I'm supposed to call up, and they said, Well, we'll be ready for you on Thursday. This is a Monday. So I had a few days with nothing to do. Got on the phone. We didn't have cell phones or any email or anything. Call up some friends. One friend said, Come by for lunch. You're nearby. Come by for lunch. Well, come by for lunch is where she was, where she was, was Paramount Pictures. And her boss was Harvey Bennett, who was the producer of Star Trek 2, Wrathacon. They were working on that film at the time. And at lunch, I discovered they wanted to hire a linguist from UCLA to work on the film. There was a short little scene. We can get into all of this later. But it was a short little scene. They wanted a linguist from UCLA to work on the film when they were having problems making connections, not intellectual problems, but very boring, logistical kinds of problems. And they said they needed it done right away. I said, What do you mean? She says, Gotta be done by the end of this week. That's exactly how long I was in town. I said, I can do that. My friend said, Yeah, he got he can do that. He's got the same kind of degrees as those people at UCLA do. At that point, the associate producer walked by. They turned to him and said, We just solved the Vulcan problem. It was Vulcan, this is what the language was, just solved the Vulcan problem. He said, Come see me after lunch. And that launched my movie conlining career, which which which ran in parallel with the captioning, but it was just sort of, you know, taking advantage of what popped up unexpectedly is what got me into the two things that I spent most of my time doing. And the Indian stuff never went away either. That's interesting. And, you know, you, you frame these, these steps in terms of serendipity, and kind of taking opportunities as they come. But I also think, you know, what I hear and what you're saying is in part, like, having one role and then meeting people, talking with people about what they're doing, what you're doing, what they need, what you provide potentially. And it seems like that kind of potentially snowballs in a way to kind of create more of those serendipitous moments. So yeah, I know sometimes we all have that feeling of like circumstances kind of taking us in directions. But you know, there's certainly it sounds like some agency there too. But so interesting. Thank you. And we'll get back to that, that question that you brought up, did, did they need a linguist? What was going on there? So thank you for bringing that up. We will hit upon that for sure. And I'd like to ask Suzanne, though, as, as a, as a business owner. So how did you arrive in your current role? So I mentor a lot of young women. I've had interns. I've had people to my interns were just graduating college and frantic. And like, I've got this anthropology degree. What do I do? I don't know what to do. And you're so, your story is so clear. And it's so clear what you're doing. And I'm like, I'm like, let me tell you how it actually went, right? So I think you can have a very coherent elevator speech or very coherent way of self presentation that actually is the retrospective pulling in of threads of things that we're not predictable looking forward. So I can say something like, I apply the science of linguistic anthropology to identify, analyze and address bias in the workplace. When I think about diversity, I think also about linguistic diversity. And I focus on cross cross cultural communication, my biggest clients are tech companies, right? So there's a very nice, encapsulated elevator pitch that I've had to learn how to give. But it did, I mean, it didn't run like that at all. So I graduated college with an English degree in a recession 1990. And you could tell the rich people from the less rich people at my undergrad because you'd say to people, what are you doing? Oh, my aunt owns an antique store in Marseille, so I'm going to hang out with her for a while. I'm like, Oh, I got student loans, right? So I ended up in financial technology, I moved to Boston because I was young and I liked music and I didn't want to own a car. So that's why I ended up there. And then I looked in the newspaper for jobs and I ended up as an assistant and a sales and marketing department for a startup that I was sure would die and it's still around. So congrats to them. And then I really genuinely hated that job. And I was so busy running away from it that I didn't take the time to think about what to run to. I was 21, right? So you haven't thought through those things yet. So I ended up in a technical writer job and another fintech. And then over time, it did not take that much time. I was like, Oh, this is not a good fit. And then also I was like, people don't seem to listen to me. And then I was like men don't seem to listen to me. And then I was like, I have really good ideas. And I feel like Vanna White being like the boys wrote code, you know, and like, I'm like, my brain is too good to just be dismissed, have no one interested in my career. So I went to a career coach and I talked to a very cute guy at a bike messenger party. And he said, I was just a summer institute for linguistics. And I'm like, that sounds interesting. And then I ended up going to the MIT bookstore and talking to MIT professor Stephen Pinker at his bookstore. And I said, I'm his book tour for the language instinct. And I said, can you advise me on who to talk to? I think I want to go to linguistics grad school. And he said, do you have something called electronic mail? And I said, I do because I was a nerd. And so we had lunch and he gave me a lot of good advice. And I ended up at Berkeley, because I was like, if men won't listen to me, I'll get a PhD. And then they'll have to listen to me because I'll be their professor. And then I've already talked you through the various, like different pathways I took, ending up teaching myself linguistic anthropology, because all the linguistic anthropologists at Berkeley were gone or dead, or a combination. And then I ended up getting a postdoc at Northwestern, which was focused on languages of Muslim speakers. So I was like, well, I might as well do that. Right. And then that was a great thing. And then I ended up at University of Maryland, as a research scientist, anyone who deals with imposter syndrome, here's a good tip I wasn't even thinking of. So the job ad was quite long for this research scientist, but it said that you should have a specialization in Turkic languages of Central Asia. But my Turkic language was spoken some in Central Asia as a minority language, but it was spoken more in Europe. So I was like, maybe I shouldn't apply for that job, I thought because really they're looking for someone who works on like Kazakh or Kyrgyz or Uzbek. As it turns out, I was the most qualified person in the country for what they were looking for for that job. So don't self-defeat yourself and stop applying just because a job has some desiderada that you don't match. Right. And despised that work at University of Maryland with a lot of federal clients who were not what I hoped they would be. They were mostly wanting researchers to confirm what they already wanted to know and did not like real research that contradicted what they hoped to find. Got rescued from that job by somebody at UCLA who said, I'm going to be chair now, can you teach my courses for a while? And I said, sure. And so I was there as a visiting professor for four years where it was clear that I thought all people, but it turned out only some people wanted me for the tenure track position they were trying to get the work for. But while I was at UCLA, I was like, I'm very tired of having no money. And I would like to own the place where I live. And also, oh, even more important, my summer funding disappeared for you. I had something lined up and then my summer funding went away. And so I looked on Craigslist and I just looked to see I'd been an editor. I had supplemented my income as a writer and editor through grad school. And I'm like, I don't have to tell people about this. I mean, I'm telling you now. But I was like, I don't have to tell people in my career that I'm a professor, but I have to supplement with summer money. And I found a job for a full-time cultural anthropologist at a startup in LA. And I looked at what they were doing and I wrote to them, such chutzpah, but I guess when you don't care, it's easier to be brave. And I said, you're not looking for a cultural anthropologist. You're looking for a linguistic anthropologist. Let me talk to you. I went in an interview as if it was for a full-time job. They said, do you want to run our entire content department? I said, no, I want to stay teaching, but I'll come work with you for eight, 10 hours a week. I can't believe in retrospect I did this, but whatever. I didn't really care. So it was easy to be brave. And working with them is what led me into when I didn't get the tenure-track job at UCLA, which was partly a shock and partly not. I was already set up. And so I did what's called a bridge job with that company where I worked with them for 30 hours a week. And I didn't have to do extra work and I worked on building up my own firm. And then by the next year, I was subcontracting to USC on a research, big research project on metaphor and then bought a house. And then when that fell through, like minutes after I bought a house, the guaranteed contract was taken away. I transitioned into diversity and inclusion consulting work. I had moved to the Bay Area by then and my partner was in employment law and he kept on coming with horror stories about what was happening in tech. And I was like, well, when I was a woman in tech, I thought it would get better, but it's gotten a lot worse. So for me, I can now weave that very coherent story, but a lot of it was bad luck, moving around from job to job, hating, working for the government, but learning how to write a proposal and what government funders require. Following my nose and putting myself forward in a way that is very much at odds with my personality and very much at odds with, I would say, academic culture of linguistics and many other social sciences, which I believe has a retained a very male waspy culture, where at least when I graduated in 2003, the expectation was you come from an R1 and you are, you're good. And so you must get an R1 tenure track job and I chased that dream for a long time. And a lot of what I had to do was deep, deprogramming myself. And also the idea was, I would just be good and some miraculous old boys network would take care of me. But old boys networks don't take care of tiny, mouthy Jewish women. They push them out. And so I had to do it for myself. So that's why I'm interrupting my writing retreat, literally, I'm doing nothing else. During this writing retreat to get my book jumpstarting off the road. But to do this, because I find that my story is so heartening, I am seeing that the chat I have the chat open, I tell the story because my I see my interns, or young women I mentor, or people get sent to me all the time. And they're like, you're so intimidating, you have it so together. I'm like, eh, let me tell you how I made my opportunities. So, uh, yeah, and now academia is in much more dire straits. And so one reason I'm writing the book is my goal is to expand from being, I am my only full time employee, but my goal is to be five to 10 people by coastal, and having being a home for people to apply social science, linguistics, anthropology, linguistic anthropology to workplace culture and get paid. But I got to figure out how to build a business. So thanks, Suzanne. And I see in the chat, we've got our R1 definition provided. Thanks, folks. Can you, can you just tell us a little bit, just real quick about what your book is about? Sure. I decided yesterday I no longer like the name, which is the inclusive language challenge. Part of my deprogramming is rescaling how much people in academia want to learn. And so it's been very hard for me to make a book that's small enough. Even my articles were too big, like my peer reviewed academic articles. My friends would say, that was two articles, you fool. Like, why did you shove it all in one? Right. So this is a book specifically for business. I've had clients asking for it. And I'm also in the process of creating an online course that will probably eventually be on LinkedIn learning. It's for a spin off of linda.com. And they're both on inclusive language. So it's repurposing a lot of what I used to teach in my intro lenient classes. I specialized in intro classes and repurposing it to help people who don't know the first things about language. I mean, think about all the misconceptions of people who are not on this call have about how many languages do you speak? Oh, you are an archaeologist. Like, no, where do you get archaeology from? Right. So all of the ways of helping people understand that language matters. That language is special. That language is the way we translate our intentions into impact. Laying out, I've spent several years working on what I'm calling the principles of inclusive language to give people a toolkit so they can, because language is so ever continuously changing and so situational. All the engineers are like, give me a list of dos and don'ts. I'm like, nope, that's not how language works. Sorry. And I work with people on the spectrum. I'm like, nope, can't do it. Sorry. So I'm giving them as much of a checklist if I can. And then I'm going to provide sort of like case study examples that people can start to apply in their own lives. So I literally finished the outline yesterday and I'm feeling like I can do this. So look for it early next year. I hope. Okay. Thank you. And I really, you know, I'm struck by how, I mean, as you said, Suzanne, the moment where you really kind of went for it was in a moment where you had decided that you kind of didn't care or you didn't have anything to lose. And we're seeing so much of that, like, so often with our careers, there's no plan. Indeed, we can make it nice and clean and pretty in retrospect. But in the moment, it never is we're sending out a bunch of applications. We're just randomly meeting people or we're kind of just making a decision to go for it. And if it doesn't work out, that's okay. And sometimes it does and we'll never know that until we can look back on it. So yeah, very much appreciated these kinds of diverse but very much intersecting stories of how people are ending up in the roles that they have now. And I'd like to ask you all for a little bit more detail about the work and the day to day. So this intersects with that question about like, Oh, does this organization need a linguist? What is it that they actually need? So I'm going to ask each of our panelists for an example of a project that they have, you know, recently completed. So something that you've done at work that you think is a great example of that kind of work. And how did your training as a linguist help you or hinder you perhaps? But let's start with Mark this time. There it is. So which which which hat am I wearing? Whichever you like. Well, since I've since I brought up that do you need a linguist thing? I'll start with that. I actually asked the question of this guy who I started earlier from a health education welfare. Why did they need a linguist? Because I would have thought that in order to make capture of what you need to be, you know, have good good English skills, spelling and punctuation and probably good typing skills or keyboard skills. But why a linguistic, what made him think of a linguist in particular? What he told me, and I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm just repeating what he said. And this was also it's important to remember about 40 years ago. It's not irrelevant. He said, well, every every what he was telling me is every state has a school for deaf kids in a big state like California or Texas or something has a couple of them from, you know, kindergarten or something all the way through high school. At the time, according to this guy, the average graduate of one of these high schools was reading at a fourth grade reading level. Therefore, there was a whole philosophy about how to do subtitling or captioning for deaf people. Before there was closed captioning, there was captioning on TV a little bit, and there was captioned films. So the innovation with closed captioning was the ability to turn the modern off, not not doing it in the first place. And the philosophy was that because the reading level is so low, on average, obviously there's exceptions, that you have to control the language in the captions. You have to control for grammar so you don't have long complicated sentence people get tangled up in. And then, you know, to remember the captions disappear, you know, if you're reading a newspaper or a book and you get to the end of the sentence and say, what, you can go back and read it again, but the captions gone. So it has to be something that you can grasp when it's up there just for a few seconds and also control for vocabulary. So he said a linguist would understand these sorts of things to understand the way grammar works, but understand ways to untangle a complex sentence and make it simpler and so on and so forth. And I needed a job. So I said, okay. And went to work there. And that was the philosophy that we started with where we had, for vocabulary, we had big lists of words. And if there was there was different lists, depending on what kind of program it was and who the intended audience was, but if a word was not on that list, we had to change it to something else. Unless it was a technical term or a name or something. And for the grammar, we had to have to simplify things in just shorter sentences. And this went on for a while. This is what everybody did. The great innovation with closed captioning as opposed to the caption they've been done before, as I say, is the ability to turn it off. And what that meant is that now families, which had both deaf and hearing people, family members together, could watch the TV program at the same time. It used to be the case that there was one time without captions for the hearing people and another time with captions for the deaf people, they didn't watch at the same time. Generally. Now they could watch together and the deaf people thought this is wonderful. And the hearing people sitting with them would say, that's not what they said. That's not what they said, because the captions were changed so much. So we started getting letters from the deaf community saying, what are you doing? And why are you doing it? We started to explain all this. And they said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We can learn. We know how to use dictionaries. How are we going to learn anything if we're not exposed to it? So the philosophy changed. And it didn't change instantly, but over time it's changed. So now the captioned philosophy is pretty much as close to verbatim as you can get. There's all kinds of technical limitations. Philosophically it's verbatim, which is a very different thing. So now given that, the role of a linguist as opposed to someone with English language skills, if it's English, I'm Spanish language skills if it's Spanish, are not as clear as they were at the beginning. But that certainly was the case. And what I knew about languages from studying linguistics turned out to be useful above and beyond untangling sentences and substituting vocabulary because there are all kinds of discussions about style. I mean, do you put periods of abbreviations and things like that? And some of it is just where you got to do something. And some of it has to do with sociolinguistic stuff. Like if someone says, how do you spell that? You write G-O-N-A, you write G-O-N-G-T-O and Y and so on. So all of that played a role and continues to play a role. But the original thing kind of went away. That's interesting. And as you were just saying, I mean, many of us have probably studied the politics of transcription and how those choices like Ghana, how to transcribe something like that, have importance and consequences. Do you put in a, and so on. And there were some clients, especially when the FCC started mandating quality standards, insisted that every little slip of the tongue be in there if they said it. And then we put it in there. On the other hand, we had clients that say, you know, even if you hear a dirty word, don't put that in there. Which creates all kinds of other issues. Yeah, that is very true. And these are all decisions that have to be made. I mean, I think that one thing that your example seems to illustrate is that it's rare that an employer just says, do this project and then the linguist does the project. There's a lot of kind of negotiating expectations and kind of working through these questions together, you know, people from different perspectives, for sure. I'm wondering if you have any comments on the question that we see here in the chat. I'm curious if about how much the world of closed captioning intersects with the world of subtitling. Yeah, there's a difference. There's definitely there. I was a lot of overlap, of course. There's a difference. And the difference is that closed captioning, even though right now the primary in terms of numbers, audience of closed captioning is probably people in airports and bars. Okay, as opposed to deaf people, it's primarily done for deaf people. Okay. And therefore, the captions have to include audio information above and beyond the words. So, if everyone is sitting around and suddenly turns their head like this, because there's a car crash off screen, for subtitling purposes, you don't have to do anything. But for captioning purposes, you do. So, there's this non-language information that has to be included in there. And so that makes a big difference. Also, we're not, subtitles generally is translation. We're not translating. It's the same language. So, it gets into all these issues about register and different dialects and stuff like that. It's a word in I-N-G or I-N and Y and so on. And the stuff that I tried to talk about when I was working there a lot is that spoken language and written language is not the same thing. So, you have to bear in mind what the written symbols or written choices indicate. Or sometimes, I'm tangling up my own grammar here, but sometimes what you put in writing is, because it's in writing, it's much more prominent that it isn't speaking. And so it makes a kind of an impact that's not intended by the speaker. That's interesting. And what a great example of that distinction there. And, you know, I think one thing that all of us on this call have experienced or will experience is what it's like to become an expert in something. And sometimes when you become such an expert in something, you start to forget that other people might not necessarily not know that. Like that there's a difference between spoken and written language. And so, part of our job as linguists, potentially, especially working outside of academia, is to kind of reflect on that knowledge and make it, you know, explicit or relevant to our audiences. So, I appreciate that example. And let me move to you, Anthony, because many of us might not really deeply know what a taxonomist is. So, I'm very eager for an example of what you do in your work. So, taxonomy is basically building out a hierarchical structure of data. So, in Amazon, I use other companies to make sure I don't fall afoul of the corporate topocracy that we all wind up in every once in a while. If you're searching for something on Amazon like a bed, you have that drop down menu on the side that kind of says home goods, kitchenware, so on. That's kind of probably their taxonomy where basically they have concepts like home goods, audio equipment, and so on. And then you have your search box of your descriptive item. And then on the side panel, you'll have things like size, shape, color. Those are facets. So, basically, your concepts are what the thing is, right? A bed is different from sheets is different from an iPad. Your facets are things that cross-cut all of those, like size, color, shape, so on and so forth. So, people are there going through the job documents, or there's probably also some computational assistance there where new ad comes in. They parse out what it is. They assign it to the category. They try and pull out the dimensions of those facets to then be able to append all of this information to the item itself to give a fuller sense of what it is. And then engineers take that metadata and build up algorithms to help, okay, I'm looking for a bed. If you just type in bed, they'll probably default to human-sized beds. Unless you say dog bed, oh, then they're going to look for the dog bed, the cat bed. So, even though you have this idea of bed in home goods, there might be subcategories, or those might even be categorized in two places where you have beds for humans and beds for animals under the pet supplies. So, that's kind of what taxonomy is. In terms of how you do the job, it's a lot of, you get thousands of documents in front of you, just like our morphological and phonological rules, you do X plus Y plus Z equals this. You tell the computer, this is the qualities I need. This is the type of data it is called. The system runs in the background in the database and says, okay, this bed is human bed or this bed belongs in home goods. That's kind of the day-to-day stuff. In terms of linguistics, what's interesting is kind of parsing out those differences of, okay, is this really a human bed? Or is this a dog bed? Is there something in between? Maybe kind of weird to talk about it in terms of beds, but when you get to things like jobs, project management is across a lot of different industries and fields. So, we're having to figure out, okay, well, it's this one. What keywords can I find in this discourse analysis that can, because we're not moving one document at a time. We're trying to move hundreds if not thousands, right? Because millions of documents come through most of these websites on any given day. If you were to try and do one at a time, you're not really returning on the investment of your labor to your company or to your end users. So, that's been interesting to kind of bring that discourse analysis thing to bear. I would use, early on I tried having my own little concordancer and run things through there and get some actual counts. That didn't work so well because the systems didn't interface. So, just as I learned the job, you start picking up that vocabulary in your own way that can help you get through things a lot faster. And English is morphologically impoverished, as we all know. We don't have all the fun endings and changes to our words and other languages do, but international companies like Indeed, Amazon, etc., they have to account for that. And some of the interesting projects that it kind of took a linguist to help them out with was building a system to make it easier on the analysts to categorize documents without having to write out every masculine, feminine, singular, plural variation on every word in those rules. It was interesting to see they were wanting to throw this dictionary at it. But the linguist in me was like, this is a morphological problem and we can make this much easier by defining a certain morphemes with their alimorphs. And from there, your analysts type a little rule, put the pieces together, and then things come out. So, getting to work with some engineers, computer engineers, computer scientists, and a couple of other analysts in various international markets kind of learning some of their language, not only their language differences, but also the technical hurdles they have with their language, how the computer sometimes have to parse a string. So, German, for example, with all of their compound words, computers start doing what's called tokenizing. They put these little fake hyphens in there that if it has to break, it breaks at certain points. So, they had to account for that on the technical side. I knew about the compound words. I just didn't know that there was a technical hurdle just for computer processing that has been invented to help with that. And that was a stumbling block for these analysts in different systems we use. So, it's been really interesting to kind of bring that linguistic mindset to some of these issues. So, yeah, that's kind of how it works. No, that's very, I mean, I'm picturing being on a website and when that dropdown menu appears, now I know who's responsible for that. And this is a question that I did not prepare. So, forgive me if it is a little hard to follow. But, based on what you've said, it sounds like the stakes are high. The implications are many for taxonomy that isn't going great. Something didn't work quite right. And so, my question is, in your experience, how much room is there typically for experimenting with things that might fail spectacularly? That's going to depend on your corporate culture and the size of your taxonomy and how far along it is. We are allowed to experiment within certain kind of conditions or just even improving. So, we're trying to improve how we categorize some of our occupations because now that we're using some more interesting technological systems, we can maybe save analysts time by reducing the complexity of one of our taxonomies and allowing other things to kind of fill in the gaps. So, they're letting us have some time to play around with can these two systems talk in the way that we can offload some from product A to product B so that we can save time in the aggregate by not having to do A and B to 100 percent of you will. We can do B to like 80 and then the 100 percent on A will allow the full complexity to be there just without as much time and effort being thrown in. So, it just involves drafting up and having the idea, the interesting idea, seeing the connecting points. So, part of the reason this is being allowed to happen is, again, the linguist came in and said, oh, part of the issues we're having is that job descriptions and resumes are different genres and they're structured differently. They have different outcomes and different style, everything going on. This is why we're having issues in this one workflow is because we can't do it because the resume genre is very vastly distinct from the occupations. So, I was able to build up a use case along with some other people who were having different ideas along the same line. So, now we're a little working group and we're again being offered the opportunity to kind of stake it out over probably the next month or so. We've got to try and have a firmer proposal together with some data and then if they like it, it gets passed on and eventually, if they, if the powers that be say, yes, this is great, let's do it. If they don't, we don't. Part of that problem is at a big company, your products are being used by a lot of other people. If we start tinkering too much with it, a lot of people who are used to doing things in certain ways start having problems with their technology. So, there's a lot of kind of corporate infrastructure on top that sometimes allows for, but then might say no to some kind of creative potential. Interesting. Yeah, and I mean, even that point that you mentioned briefly about the difference in genres that you're having to deal with, I mean, so many challenges that kind of crop up as you're doing the work, I'm sure. Yeah, okay, so interesting. And just to give you all a little bit of a preview, of course, going to ask this question of Suzanne, the kind of example of a project recently completed. And then we'll get into a little bit more about like, how do you find jobs? How do you take a next step? And please also bank your questions so that we can have some time for that as well. So, Suzanne, an example of work you've recently done. I was sitting here and thinking about which one I should do. And I've decided that I want to go more with projects that demonstrate skillset and tools that I acquired through academia, so you can see how those are applied rather than linguistic specifically. So, I just completed for two different clients. No, let me backtrack. I run my own business because I got tired of depending on other people to develop or facilitate my career or approve it. And so I founded my own company. I'm like, I grant myself tenure, like done, right? That's a pro. A con is that I'm not plugged into an infrastructure and I have to create my own infrastructure, which means I have to figure out what will people pay me for? And I was, I don't want to say delusional per se, but I had this idea that because I was somewhat popular professor, there's a lot of mean things written about me on the internet. I think I had a lot of them removed because I specialized in introductory classes and I also was hard. And so that made a lot of people very angry. But I had this idea like, well, if I was popular and there are people at UCLA who took every single one of my classes, therefore I should be able to get people to buy my courses, right? But there's a difference between people who have to take a certain number of courses for a major versus people who are very happy to not spend any money on training at all, right? So it's taken me a long time to find, like I throw it up and see if it'll stick, put a description on a website, put it in the catalog, mention it to people, listen very hard to what people want, and then try to see if I can deliver it. So what I've been seeing is that a lot of people, especially late people will say, since George Floyd in my field, we will say, we'll call it since the Great Awakening. So I thought my work was going to disappear in the pandemic. It started to disappear because I was making people sit in small rooms together for long amounts of time and share air. And so in April of 2020, I'm like, oh, what am I going to do for money the rest of the year? And then May and June and onward happened. Suddenly a lot of companies are like, should we do something? We're getting pressure. We feel pressure. What should we do? So a lot of the companies that reached out weren't sincere and decided that pretty much any money was too much money to spend on diversity, equity, inclusion work. But some others were more sincere and they kept on. And what I found was there were a lot of people who know that they want to do work, but they don't know what the work should be. So I'm like, oh, I'll go through a scientific assessment for you and I'll do it. So I have something that I call a DEI audit, diversity, equity, inclusion audit, which can have different components. So I did one for one company and I plugged in after somebody else's audit for another, but it was the same end result, which was I give people a prioritized action plan, which I need to rename because I can't abbreviate it as PAP. So I find that a lot of men are anti vaginal interminology. So I got to find a new I'm in the process of renaming a lot of things. But anyway, no vaginal indexicality when it comes to naming your products, I will give you that clue. So I ended with a prioritized action plan. And so what I do is now I'm going to tell you the applications of academic skills. So I review materials. And I have a critical eye. And then I write up how they need to be made better. I believe everyone on the skull can do that. I for something I'll do a culture audit where I mean, I interview people using a proprietary interview protocol that I developed based on years of research on bias in the workplace. So you can't just hop in and do that. But I interview people. This is why I recommend for a lot of linguists hop into UX UI, user experience, user interface, because there are so many transferable skills that you can make a convincing story about. So I'm sort of foreshadowing some of my advice, right? There are transferable skills where you can say I have a lot of experience eliciting data from people analyzing it and coming up with very precise analyses that let you move forward to conclusions, right? I review materials. And then I write a very long report with big margins. I'm like my students, big margins and a big font says can read it and I put a little executive summary because they don't want to read more than two pages, but I'll give them a hundred page report. And I'll be like, here are all the problems with your company. And then I run a strategy session. So this is what went especially well. In the last two times I did it where I had groups of people who I didn't really know. And then I firmly and professorially guided their discussion like a seminar towards goals that I knew and conclusions I knew they should reach, but I let them think for themselves while also creating a shoot for them. And I guided them to a place where I was like, here's your three phase prioritized action plan that they came up with, but I guided them through with interjections along the way. So it was like running a seminar and looking for speech readiness, which is harder to do on Zoom. But like with the persons talking a lot, if they run the company, you let them. And if they don't, you gently make them a little more quiet and you will listen more stuff. And then I wrote up a final report and I said to them, here are the conclusions of our time together. And here are your next steps. And by the way, here's the stuff where you can plug me in and here's a price list. So I've just been learning to do this. And this is the first year that is gone, the way that I thought it would in my head. But I was going to tell you about more linguistically stuff that I've been doing, like this book and courses that I was asked to write. But I want to give people hopes because and again, I'm foreshadding what I'm about to say, but there is a strong disconnect between academia and its expectations for how much you need to control as a skill set and what it's labeled and how much you're paid for it. So within academia, I learned two languages from my dissertation. I lived in Russia for a year and changed. I did project management. I did all of these things, but none of it was described in a granular way that matches up with what is out there in the world. And it's taken me about 10 years from professoring. And I'm still thinking about and reworking what are the skills? What are my offering? What's the translation terminology so people in the working world can get it? But the other thing is that maybe it's different now, but certainly there's a lot of snobbery in academia and the idea that if you're very intelligent, you will end up with a graduate degree. And I want to make sure that on the one hand, you unbundle your skill sets so you can apply them and explain them to people, but I want you to remove any idea of condescension from anything you're going to do because there are people who are just as smart as you and get... So I have a colleague that I co-present with. We've created a series called More Than Words. We'll come in and we'll run a workshop explaining things like diving into talking about race or disability or intent versus impact. And she said to me wistfully, you know, I talked to you and I wish I had a PhD and I'm like, you've got like a PhD in consulting. Like the things that she says, her 25 years of experience, her analytical frameworks are just as good as mine. They just don't have the years of theory behind them, but they're just as applicable and just as if not more useful to clients. So the foreshadowing is unbundle, work on translation and don't condescend because there are a lot of people, there's a shit ton, pardon me, but there's a shit ton of gatekeeping in academia, right? At every level to the point where they run studies to see if you put different names for different genders and ethnicities on an email and you write to professors to ask for advice, everybody writes back to the person who sounds like a white guy more. And the further you are from white and male, the less professors will even write back to you about the possibility of applying to their grad school. So just because somebody was shunted aside by systemic bias does not mean that they are not as intelligent and perceptive as you are. Thanks, Suzanne. And one point that you mentioned that I just want to highlight is that, yeah, you don't one day start a business and just everything falls into place and you know exactly what every component looks like and how it's going to go. There's a lot of kind of, you know, trying things out and developing your products and services and learning new skills along the way in that process. And so, you know, in terms of what some of our kind of next steps might be or could be, let's talk a little bit about, you know, what those might look like. So on this I'm going to start with Anthony. What advice do you have for people who might be interested in getting involved in work like yours or similar work? So what keywords do you use when you're searching? What would you do as like a next step if someone were to work on this right after this panel today? So some basic keywords that are useful for taxonomy are taxonomy, ontology, knowledge management, information architecture, knowledge curation, basically anything with knowledge in front of it. And tech companies generally will hit you in the taxonomy ontology world. In terms of what to start working on, if you're interested in kind of a more tech oriented experience, definitely learn some good spreadsheet skills like array formulas, like not just, oh, I can do some basic things. No, if you can put a hurtin on a spreadsheet, that has helped me up in a couple of people's eyes at my work just because I'm like, oh, I can make this fancy spreadsheet that does all these things. Database skills, whether SQL or there's various flavors of that. If you're looking specifically into taxonomy, there's RDF and OWL are other types of database management languages that would have you step up on some of the competition, if you will. To go back to Suzanne's comments a little bit, it was in there. The translation, the idea of how to translate your work experience from academia into business parlance. I think that's what helped me a lot. My resume was all about project management, short, medium, long term, deliverables, high quality, formal presentations, and all it really was was different ways of talking about term papers, publishable and or working papers, and my dissertation. That was my long term project with a demanding client or something. I mean, or a white glove client or something like that. I don't think I went that crazy. Go to some of these business websites and start looking for the keywords, the buzzwords that they're using and just figure out, good semanticist, how to map it to what you're doing. In terms of an abstract linguistic skill, we're really good at abstracting over noise to get to concepts. Definitely hone that skill, because a lot of taxonomy is finding that sweet spot of abstraction where you can gather all and only the right pieces underneath it. Also related to the idea of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, what could be interesting on a taxonomic world is how we get to define, the taxonomists get to define how the systems work. Which of the buttons do you put down? How many of the pronouns? That's a taxonomist usually saying, oh, we need these sets of buttons, or oh, we need to make sure that they all look like this across multiple systems, because we need that point where we can merge data tables to get from one type of data to another to another. That's where a lot of sociolinguistic and critical discourse analysis could come into play in a way that helps people from a diversity, inclusion, belonging perspective as well. Yeah, it's so true that even when we think of fields like tech or specifically AI, as we're all learning more and more, I mean, everything is social and political in so many ways. So you think like, well, someone's making these decisions. Who is it? Yes. And one other point that that you brought up that I think is so important is that, you know, if you are interested in a particular organization or role, as Anthony said, it is so important and pragmatic to look at their website, look at their materials, how do they talk? How do they frame their organization and their work and work with that? You know, don't just bring yourself in, like meet them where they are. And that advice is, you know, oh, Anthony, yeah. In part, if you kind of mirror some of their language on the job description, that can help you get through the applicant tracking system, FYI. Yes. Yes, you've often, you might have heard advice, for example, on applying to federal jobs where, you know, the advice will often be don't be creative with your resume to mind. Like, if they ask for this skill in the job ad, tell them that you have that skill and that will help you with the technological component of the application process, for sure. Yeah, mirroring is important. Okay, thank you so much. Let's go to Mark. Advice for folks looking to start out in this. Well, I've been out of the job market for so long. I'm not sure how things work these days. People talk about, you know, applying online and things like that, which is just beyond me. Anyway, what I say is, first of all, be open to what's out there. Don't define yourself so narrowly. Things do fall together and click together in various ways. And in terms of presenting yourself, see, you know, if you find something out there where there's an opportunity, see what they're doing and think about what you would do, even if you don't know the business real well, do some research about it. But think how would I approach it? So when you do talk to them, assuming you can get into the door or onto the Zoom or whatever happens these days, that you can show them that you have thought about it and that you have some ideas to bring to it. And they could be not directly related. And then because whatever I think of in terms of captioning, for example, is now that the recasting and the substituting vocabulary and all that is pretty much gone by the wayside. What makes a really good captioner is sort of general knowledge and you can't know everything, but you can know how to find out stuff. So showing the research goes, linguistics is really good for that. Because it's amazing how well, maybe if you watch closed captions, you know, somebody says something, a caption says something totally different. And that's because the captioner just never heard of whatever it is, which is bad. And didn't realize they never heard of whatever it is, which is worse. So showing that you know how to find out stuff is an important thing. But the other thing is, if someone says, well, we have this, does that fit for you? Don't automatically say no. It might work. Yes, you have to be a bit of a chameleon when it comes to your background and experience. That is for sure. There's a question for you in the chat regarding, do you think there's still a lot of agency involved in closed captioning, some titling? Or have many of these choices been standardized? And this speaks to these questions about the intersection of AI that were coming up earlier in the chat and these processes. So what do you think about that? There's less now than there used to be. And I've been adamant for a while, so I'm not quite sure what the status of anything is. But there's for live captioning, which is what I know the most about, there's three ways, I guess that's fair, of doing it. One of them is speech recognition all on its own. In other words, let Siri do the captioning. There's very little of that going on, but there used to be zero. The other two ways do have human intervention. One way involves speech recognition, but you don't just stick the microphone up to the TV and let it go. The way it's done is somebody listens to the audio and repeats everything they hear, talking at a sort of a stilted, trained pace and so on. And editing a little bit as they go along, knowing what's going to work and what's not going to work and stuff like that. And the original way of doing the live captioning is with court reporters, like those people you see in a courtroom, where they're transcribing things on a little machine and the reason they can go fast is from a linguist's point of view, what they're doing is absolutely fascinating. Their input is based on the sounds, for the most part, rather than spelling of words. But they're also editing as they're going along. In two senses, one is leaving stuff out if they're not sure what it said, but also leaving stuff out for a technical reason. They know that if they put it in, the computer's not going to understand that and it's going to come out, gobble the glue, or come out something wrong and make some of those decisions as you go through. So there is human stuff to do with the captioning. It's not all automatic yet. And the stuff that I've seen that is all automatic, leaves a little bit to be not a little bit. It leaves quite a bit to be desired because the machines still don't understand everything. Yeah, it's such a complex landscape, for sure. And I see there's a question for you in the chat. I want to go over to Suzanne for some additional advice. And I know that my panelists, I think I had told you that we are done at 1.15 Eastern. I think on the calendar it says 1.30. If you've got to go, I understand. But for those of us who can stay, please do for a little extra time here. But before we move to this question in the chat, let's go to you, Suzanne. A piece of advice that you'd give for people looking to get into this kind of work. I told you in our email that I still am very professorial and that I like to be completist, right? So I was just like, I'm going to try to keep my answer short. I've been taking notes while other people were while I tried active listening. So I'm just going to read through my little notes. I work with clients to advise them on how to be better about inclusive hiring and more diverse hiring. You all on this call are going to be unusual candidates. And so I want to advise you to think from the employer's perspective about how to minimize risk. So a lot of hiring is fear based. And oh my God, it's too for tenure track lines too, right? Like the more that people can feel reassured that they're getting the person they need and no one's going to get mad at them for making the hire, the easier it is for them to hire you. So we want to think about risk minimization and the work you can do to create yourself as a candidate that is swageous fears. And as you've connected the dots for them. Okay, groom your internet presence, create a website. So you control how people find you and then Google yourself or Bing yourself. But you know, find yourself, create a little thing. Just describe your stuff and start when you find the terminology, start to describe the stuff. So like my applied work, my academic work, the academic work, people going to be like, Oh, really knows their stuff, the applied work, oh, can do the work for me, right? Get on LinkedIn. If you're not already, network like a mofo, get a good picture that makes you look moderately professional on the American corporate sense. I don't care what color your hair is, but look like you can fit in an office, right? Ask friends to help you with your translation project. So talk to them. I used to do this back in the day for in particular women, helping them with their CVs and resumes, and I would talk to people and there would be like two ones on a resume, I'm like, tell me about this thing you founded. And then it would turn out to be almost half a page of a CV, because they had done so many things and they were so self deprecating about it. So just sometimes talking to somebody else who's in the working world, a friend, a family member, say, can you help me like here's stuff that I've done and just have them talk it through and then write down how to talk about the work that you've done. I love the idea of a long term deliverable for a demanding client is your dissertation, like absolutely. Treat this like a linguistic analysis project, you know how to do those and go find what the words are and start incorporating them. Okay, network, network, network, network. This includes informational interviews. I've already had someone email me via my website, good, good work you person. Attend meetups if they start again, because part of the way and we learned this for people who go out and do fieldwork, you learn that people who come back gain trust bus just by showing up a second and a third time. The more you show up for meetings and are there as a presence, the more people will start to think of you as part of a community and will start to network on your behalf and guide you to things. Don't just be a rando on the internet, become find communities if you don't like them, go. Meetups in person, they start again. Don't self reject, right. Remember I almost didn't apply for the job and I was the most qualified person in the country for that job. I learned after I started it, don't do what I almost did, just apply for the job. Worst case scenario they offer it to you and you're like, yeah, I don't think so, like that's not a bad scenario. And don't self deprecate. I used to have to yell at my students, I used to run a discourse lab at UCLA where people would present work in progress and I would started to give a sheet to my students to be like, my number one thing is don't begin your talk with an apology, right. Academia is endlessly focused on some making something perfect that's an amber and it's out there forever. No, this is not how the world works and people would apologize. Well, you know, thank you for looking at my stuff, they would have very apologetic body language, they would say, you know, there's work in progress, I know there's so much wrong, there's so much that needs to be fixed. Ask people to help you identify how you self deprecate and shut it down. Because what goes over well in an academic culture that will look like modesty and actually honestly, I don't think it goes over that well. So, but you might be encouraged to be doing it will not go over well. And I think my last thing I'm going to say is not Anthony in the chat was like I never thought I'd be working in a tech company. Even for people who don't present as male, I'm still going to say I am going to recommend tech because I think it is at least with my clients, a lot of them pride themselves on having a growth mindset, look up growth mindset and start applying it to yourself and do your descriptions. They talk about they look for people who are inquisitive, who are willing to learn, who are willing to acquire new skills. It is in some respects, not good home for people, but if you're looking for a place where people will see your PhD as a plus, rather than something you have to apologize for or start from scratch, I do think tech is a good place and I think that UX UI is a very clear fit. I also think that the kinds of taxonomic and ontological work that Anthony is talking about is also a good fit. Don't think you have to have specialized with the semantics dissertation to do taxonomy work. You know enough. Did you take two classes? You're ahead of most of the PBI Anthony's nodding. Did you take two classes? Apply for the job because you have already okay, here's a bad story about me, but I was learning sociolinguistics also from Robin Lekoff as per Laurel. At the same time that I was TAing, it was my second year of grad school. I came in with one linguistics class before I went to linguistics grad school, so I had to write a lot of explanations in my application, how why an English lit person should go to linguistics grad school. And I was talking to a student after class and I was learning material the same time she was and then I was TAing it. I would do a little extra work. The internet wasn't that big those days. It was 1996, so you couldn't actually find very much. So I had to do a little research in books and then I would teach the section like the next day and she said to me, I sparkly, she's like, I was explaining something right after class where I just learned something. She was like, you know so much about sociolinguistics and I said in my head, well, compared to you, right? But to her, I just said thank you so much because I was already learning to stop self deprecating because I had learned how to learn. And that was the skill that was important, not coming in with the knowledge, but coming in with the knowledge and the frameworks to acquire the knowledge. So you can do it. You just have a project in front of you, but you know how to do projects, so go for it. Okay, thank you, Suzanne. And thank you for all the activity in the chat, folks. I want to open it up to you. If anyone wants to actually raise their virtual hand and ask a question live of our panelists, please feel free to do so. Even if you have put it in the chat, if you'd like to ask it live, please feel free. Charlotte? Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for everything you talked about. It was really interesting. I took a lot of notes. So I asked my question in the chat, but I wanted to ask you in person. I was wondering if there are a lot of opportunities to train on the job in the fields that you work in, or rather than coming in with skills that you have acquired doing the PhD or in preparation for the job market. I wanted to hear your thoughts about that. Thank you. Such a great question. Panelists, any thoughts? Well, for captioning, there's definitely on the job training. There's no question about that because the specifics of the job are so specific to captioning. So you come in with something and then build on that. But yes, you'll learn a lot of stuff just by doing it. You once even hired someone who didn't know how to type and became an excellent typist. Anyway, yeah, there's opportunities for that. For the other stuff I've done for the conlanging stuff, that you should do ahead of time, I think. You'll learn a lot by doing it for the film with the TV show, but they won't teach you how to do it. You do that on your own. Thanks, Mark. Anthony? Suzanne? Any thoughts on that question of what's that balance look like bringing skills with you versus learning skills on the job? A lot of the spreadsheet stuff I had before, but I've only improved since I've been at this job, as I've had to deal with much more massive sets of data. There are plenty of people in my department who have not learned these skills. So clearly there is time built in. We actually have a two hours professional development a week. We're allowed to set aside. A lot of mine gets filled up with I've had to learn some Python, something I had hoped to do in grad school, but did not. So if you have the time now, get a little bit of Python or some other programming language, it will help. I did have some SQL database stuff, but that's only improved. So I would say if you have a beginner, maybe undergraduate level understanding of a programming language or something like this. So again, a class worth, if you have a class worth of this kind of content under your belt, even if it's just a Python book for dummies or the like, as long as you can speak a little bit to that particular skill, that gives you the jumping board that when you're in the job, you can take advantage of the business needs that allow you to find ways to get training on the job. Also in a tech company, they're going to have proprietary systems that are going to work in their own way. So they kind of have to let you learn on the job, because each system is going to behave differently based on what they've built out for their specific use case. Great. Great advice. And I think that this is, that, you know, this is so important. It goes back to that point about always applying. You know, really go for it. I mean, one example I'll give you real quick is like a lot of jobs will, for example, right in their, in their job postings, like the quantitative skills required. And you might interpret that as having kind of advanced, you know, statistical, you know, technical skills. But in fact, they just want you to be able to kind of compare the number of respondents in a focus group or something like that. So, you know, always go for it for sure. That's just so important. Oh, and we have a question from Joseline. Hello, I'm Joseline. I have my, Joseline is fine. My question was in the chat and it's for Mark, but I know it may apply to the other panelists as well. I recently was hired as coach and in a linguist on set. And I do have a film background, which is really good. But I have had a lot of problems on set because no one knows what to do with a linguist. So I kind of have to establish my own workflow. And I just wanted Mark's perspective, you know, have you ever faced this problem? And how have you gone about it? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Movie making is a whole world unto itself. What I found is when it came to the language that everyone would defer to me, come to me with questions and things like that. On the other hand, and what I'm doing is different from what you're doing. It sounds like you're coaching not in a conlang, right? Not a conlang. I specifically work with Spanish. Some of the actors, this is for Better Call Saul and it's for Spanish. So some of them are Spanish. What's that? A friend of mine acts in Better Call Saul. Anyway, yeah. So that's a little different because people understand what Spanish is. People didn't understand what Klingon is initially. So they would defer to me. On the other hand, what they're up to is a higher priority than what you're up to. So if the actor made a mistake, you have to make a quick judgment about whether to make a fuss about that or not. Because the movie making people have different priorities than what you might. So you have to learn how that works. Which is not to say they'll ignore you, they're absolutely not. That was when I hired you in the first place. But you have to have to have to learn what's important to them and what's not important to them. And then sometimes that takes a little bit of time. Thank you. Thanks, Jocelyn, for repeating your question live after putting it in the chat. That's great. And such interesting work. I mean, so many interesting people on this call today, right? And I see that we are out of time. So I want to thank our panelists again very much. I want to thank Marcus for being here and doing such great work on this Zoom call. And I want to thank all of you for bringing your energy and your talent to our field and to the work that you'll do. So I want to provide a link in the chat. Hopefully this is the correct link to a forum to provide us with some feedback. And please enjoy all the other sessions. Reach out to folks to talk further one on one. Everyone's so eager to help. So thank you all again. Enjoy the rest of your day. And we'll see you soon.