 And welcome to the Linguistics Career Launch. This is one of our career management sessions. And today we're going to be talking about informational interviewing and relationship building and hint. This is going to be all about networking. My name is Alexandra Johnston. I'm the director of the MA in Language and Communication Program at Georgetown University's Department of Linguistics. And I've also been a consultant teaching presentation skills and networking skills, relationship management skills to corporate clients for the past decade. And I'm very happy to welcome my co-presenter today, Caitlin Tagarelli. And Caitlin, I'd love to let you introduce yourself, please. Sure. I just tried switching my gear up, but... Hi, I'm Caitlin Tagarelli. I am currently the head of research at Mangle Languages, which, if you haven't heard of it, is a language learning app. And I got my PhD in linguistics at Georgetown in 2014. Yeah, and like my co-presenter, Caitlin, I also got my PhD at Georgetown. I'm a sociolinguist, and I'm also one of your organizers of this linguistics career launch, part of the team. And when we were putting this program together, we really wanted to provide you with the tools that you need to develop a professional network that you can use to take the next steps in your career journey to finding jobs outside of academia in business, government, nonprofit, and tech organizations. And one of these key skill-building areas is networking. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. I'm going to start sharing my screen so we can get started. I'd love for Caitlin to just jump in as part of the conversation. Whenever you feel like a Caitlin, when you have a point to make, because some of your expertise here as a linguist working outside of academia in applied research in an industry setting is so important to highlight the, why we need to learn how to network and why we kind of need to get really comfortable with it, maybe even like it. And so when you have relevant points, just feel free to jump in. I may not be able to see the chat as we're going through. It depends how many things I wanna have open. But Marcus, if you wanna highlight any questions that come across that we should address in the moment, please feel free, just break in. Okay, informational interviewing and relationship management. This is also a big topic. So I want to reassure those of you who are here today that we will have a break in this long session. So at about a quarter till the hour, we'll break and we'll come back. Takeaways for today, what's our goal? First of all, I want to reframe networking for you. I want to provide five tools for effective networking and relationship building. And one of these really key tools is informational interviewing. And I will have a resource, a handout that we'll present later that will give you a guide to informational interviewing and we'll hit some of the highlights of that guide so that you know how this genre typically works. And so you can start practicing it and practice it now. This entire month of the Linguistics Career Launch is one long exercise in relationship building and in getting to know the people in our community as well as outside of it. So during the 19 days of our launch, you'll be building relationships with people, you'll be reaching out to people and you'll be putting into practice the skills that we'll be talking about today. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt you, but do you want it? I'm only seeing, do you want to be presenting this as a slideshow? Oh, it's showing it as a slideshow right now. We're seeing it in preview mode. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me stop share and try that again. Thanks for letting me know, Caitlin and Nancy. And again, some of the skills that we're going to be talking about, you can actually start putting into place in our mixer, which is going to be tomorrow and we'll have the times for that coming up. So with a full month, with four mixers, it's going to be a great chance to apply and develop these skills. So we went through our takeaways and frankly, my goal is to make this fun because networking is our key to building out our professional relationships, our key to researching the job market and finding opportunities that may be of interest to us. So this is one of the ways that we can find a good fit. That's one thing that we're always thinking about is what kind of job would be a good fit for me? The key to that is informational interviewing and networking. So we have to try and make it fun since we'll be doing a lot of it. But too often I get this reaction. A lot of people don't like networking. Can I see some reactions from some of you? The thumbs up for if you like it and not thumbs up. Leave your reactions blank. Oh, yes, exactly. There's some things Nancy, Nancy appreciates it, but there's some surprised and worried faces. But don't worry, we're going to try and change all that. Line network, it's kind of a big deal. As I was saying, it's the key to finding that fit and to learning what's out there. During our launch this month, we're going to be telling you a lot about what's out there and introducing you to a lot of people. But until you actually interact with people and talk about what you want to do and talk about what you can offer in terms of your skills and abilities and the accomplishments that you have, you won't necessarily be, learn about all the opportunities and the types of fit that are out there. So first of all, let's reframe. If you approach networking with kind of a pit in your stomach or you feel uneasy about it, let's reframe the whole idea of what it is. And reframing is a tool in itself. And we understand that it's a tool from using this in linguistics and discourse analysis. It's a way that we can change our perspective. And if we rename and change our perspective, we can have some new and different thoughts and develop new associations with what networking is and can be. And with those new thoughts, hopefully we can develop some new actions, some new habits. And with time, with practice, become accustomed to those new habits and incorporate them into our identity as professionals. So the first rule of networking may be don't call it networking. You don't have to call it networking. In your mind, let's think of other things that can be for you. Let's think of ways that it hooks into something you already know how to do and maybe that you already love. So for example, what could networking be to me? A lot of things. This is one of my favorite pictures of some of the people you'll actually be meeting in this career program. We'll see Greg Bennett on the left, one of our conversational designers and he plays a role in a story I'll tell you later. Do you like connecting? Do you like connecting with people? If you like to meet people, if you're an introvert who does like to reach out and get to know people, that can be considered networking. You may have relationships already with people who you may wanna have a career conversation with. Maybe you've never talked about career before, but you have a trusted friend or colleague or advisor who you might wanna start that conversation with and let them know what you wanna do. And so from your current network and your current connections, you can start to change the topic of what you discuss and again, start to learn more about what's out there for you. A lot of us love to do research. As linguists, we have to do a lot of research during our training and hopefully we enjoy that process. So you can think about networking as a way to research. Research people, research organizations, research the job market and learn about what people do in different positions. Think about networking as a way to research your own career path and apply those skills to moving ahead on your career journey. Networking can also be a chance to advocate for other people or for causes that are very important to you. So as an example, I do tend to think of myself as an introvert and I used to be very uncomfortable with networking. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. But as a teacher now, I am very motivated to help my students. I'm very motivated to connect my students with people who might be interesting for them to get to know and who may have opportunities for them. So I push myself to meet as many people as possible who might have something to offer my students, something they can learn from. And I feel when I'm networking in that way, I'm advocating for my students, which is one of my core values. So that could be a way to put the focus off of yourself and think about other people and other missions and other values that are important to you. Serving the cause of others. Networking is also just that next step, just taking one more step. When you feel like, I don't know where to go next. I don't know where I'm gonna find a job announcement. I feel like I'm at a dead end. The next step is just to talk with people and do that in a targeted way. And we can give you some ideas about how to target people and how to create really fulfilling career conversations and informational interviews that can then spark the next step and the next step after that. Networking is also a way to invest in your future luck. I have so many people tell me I was sitting on an airplane and the person sitting next to me just happened to be a conversation designer who worked at Salesforce. And we were just, I told them what I do as a linguist and they said, well, you know, connect with me, let's talk. We have some opportunities or this is what a conversation designer does. It sounds like you might be a good fit for this. So often that type of serendipitous occasion is framed as luck. And I tend to think there's no such thing as luck. It's a choice to talk to somebody. It's a choice to open your mouth and let people know who you are and what you want to do and what your dream is. And it's also a choice to send that email or to send a LinkedIn connection. And that's how you make your own luck in that sense. So if that person on that airplane had never opened their mouth to talk about their work or what they love to do, and we love to talk about linguistics in many different ways, they never would have made that type of a connection. So networking fundamentally is just interacting and it can be in any type of situation. It is definitely not limited to something formally labeled as networking or formally labeled as a mixer. It's just talking, interacting with the people around you, whether it's in person or in your digital world. One thing I'd like to also reframe is the idea that networking is transactional or one way. In its best form, I think that networking is very mutually beneficial. And in fact, in fact, thinking of other people, which is one of the strengths of many introverts, takes the focus off yourself, which can also help many introverts. It can help to reduce anxiety if you perhaps take that focus off yourself and get to know somebody else and get to know their motivators and what is of interest to them. So in an interaction, this is sort of a corporate term, the with them, think about what's in it for them. What are other people's interests and dreams and what are they looking for? And think about what you can offer, in fact. And if you think that you don't have anything to offer, even just listening to people, taking some time in a conversation to listen to others is something that you can offer. Even just having that engaged listenership or thinking about your connection to other people and resources that you can offer. So at its core, networking should be something that is mutually beneficial if you want to make this long-term, if you want to start building a relationship that will last. If it's only transactional and one-sided, if you only talk to people when you need something from them and that's it, it might, that relationship might start to wither. So investing in a relationship and thinking about what you bring to it, what you can bring to it is a way to sustain initial connections. And Caitlin, feel free to jump in if you have some points that you'd like to bring up. Yeah, I mean, so far I just, I would totally agree with everything you've said so far. To go back a little bit, I really like the idea of reframing networking. I think for me, that's something that really worked. I have always been a very shy person. I was definitely one of those people that said, I don't like networking. At conferences, I would felt more comfortable just being with my friends than trying to talk to other people. But if you think about it less as like this goal that you have to talk to all, like the big names to the people that are important in your field, it's just meeting people and getting to know them and talking and sometimes it's just a casual conversation, being, you know, putting yourself within someone's radar and having coffee or lunch together. And really it's so much about learning or researching, as you said, and learning what's out there. I mean, I think for me, having connected with a lot of people, I know so much more about the different opportunities that exist that I wouldn't if I hadn't made those connections. Yeah, I'm so glad you bring that up, Caitlin, especially when you talk about that feeling of being at a conference and wanting to approach someone who is kind of a big name in our field or you're in a corporate conference and you, you know, there are people who are high up in their companies in those C-sweets. That may not always be the best place to start. Really, anybody can be somebody good to get to know. Anybody can have something to offer. Anybody has some kind of resource or information or knowledge that you don't. And just to get to know people of all different levels in organizations is incredibly useful because I always believe that we need to follow people and follow people over time and not their position. The job, the economy is volatile. Organizations are fluid and changeable. People shift positions all the time and following people is really important. And you'll see the importance of that later when I talk about, I bring up Grape Bennett again. Yeah, and I don't know if you're going to get into this later, but I think part of networking or thinking about reframing it is also like staying in touch. So, you know, I think for me, a lot of the really valuable relationships I've had are ones like with people who were grad students with me that I still connect with and keep up with or previous bosses that we can still work together and do some really great things together because we maintain those relationships as well. So it's not always that the more intimidating side of like trying to meet somebody who seems very important. Also everybody's a person, everybody's a human. So even if they seem a little bit scary, they're probably not. Yeah, I really appreciate how you bring up the variety of types of relationships. If you're currently an undergraduate student, it may seem really hard to project forward five, 10, yes, 20 or 30 years, but people you know who are your colleagues now, your peers now, you will know many of them for a long time. If you're in graduate school, that graduate school cohort, as Caitlin says, will stick with you for a long time. You never know where people will go, but staying in touch and maintaining relationships over time is one of the most rewarding parts of having a broad and deep network. So we will talk more about that and how to maintain relationships. I've hinted at one of those things before is that try not to reach out to people only when you need something. Try to make sure you're offering something as well. And ideally it should be mutually beneficial over time so it kind of balances out. Yeah, and then, sorry, I'll just speak to the mutually beneficial thing. I think that's also really true, even if it's just that both people are getting to expand their network, but whoever you're reaching out to is also able to now learn more about some other little facet of things. And I've had people reach out to me recently and then we found through that a wonderful employee for Mango who filled a gap that we didn't even have at the time. So it's just, and that's great for us. We were the people that were reached out to. So yeah, it's definitely, and even if it's just getting to know someone or having that on your radar, it can be. Good for both parties for sure. Exactly, thank you. And then, you know, there are these times where you head into a networking situation that is sort of formally set up that way. So we have four mixers coming up. We have office hours every week during this month of the Linguistics Career Launch. So if you know that you're heading into this type of a situation, like any type of conference, you may want to engage in some type of preparation. And I recommend doing just a bit of that because that's also linked with lowering your anxiety just a bit. I mean, perhaps we're never without some level of anxiety when we're in a room full of new people, but preparing in advance can really help with that feeling. So one thing you might wanna do before you head into an office hours, for example, in this conference is to decide your purpose before you go. Who would you like to check in with in that office hours? You can look at the roster, see who's gonna be there, look them up. This is part of researching people. Look up their organization, see where they're working. Look up their LinkedIn, find out where they trained, what their specializations are, their volunteer activities. That's a perfectly fine thing to do before you head into a formal networking situation. And when I say formal, I just mean unnamed type of situation where the idea is that you talk with people, you get to know people and expand your professional network. You may wanna think too, if you have limited time with people, what would be your top couple of questions? What would you want to take away from that interaction so that the time isn't spent all on some small talk? Small talk is really important. Don't get me wrong. We'll talk a bit about small talk as well. And in fact, if I could throw out a plug for Lingthusiasm, one of their best podcasts in a series of amazing podcasts is their episode on small talk which was called Small Talk Big Deal. That's episode 51. I wanna point that out as a resource because that's something that's gonna reframe small talk for you. And if you don't already appreciate it as part of building relationships and surfacing the hidden frames that people have for their questions of you, that's gonna really reveal a lot. So again, if you're heading into an office hours here, a mixer or a conference anywhere, try to figure out your goal, your top couple of questions and look up those people's specializations. And in return, make sure that your online profile is updated, your LinkedIn, your website, your Twitter. Make sure that those are all up to date because people will be looking you up as well. So that's something to expect and you can spend some time polishing up your LinkedIn profile and making sure that it's something that reflects who you are now and possibly some of the goals that you have for the next step in your career journey. Really quickly about elevator pitches and the small talk needed for that situation. You know, there's never just one elevator pitch. It really depends on context and audience. So you're always gonna try to wanna tailor that pitch. If you have a project or you have a career goal that is really top of mind and you want to let people know about it so that they can actually help you, you'll need to tweak that slightly depending on who your audience is. And we can talk more about that later, but I'm just bringing up that idea now of how there's never really one pitch that you memorize and employ in every situation. Alex, are you gonna talk separately about informational interviews or is this kind of the preparation section? Informational interviews will lead into as part of the second half, but if you wanna foreshadow and talk about something great with informational interviews, this is also a good time. Yeah, I just have some thoughts on preparation. I do a lot of informational interviews. I really enjoy them. At this point, it's mostly people reaching up to me, but I can certainly foresee the other way around and I used to do a lot on the other side. But one thing I notice, it makes a big difference if you prepare for those informational interviews. Like make sure you know, if you ask someone to do one, then you should know what you wanna ask and kind of your goals for the conversation there. It can be really awkward if you kind of get there and expect the other person to take over because they might not necessarily know what you wanna be talking about. And I also, I think someone asked actually a question about that, like the biggest mistakes with those. I think, yeah, updating your online profiles, I would second that. I find often, I'll go look and see what I can find out about somebody and there's a much different impression when you can actually find out more about them versus not. Although I'll admit, I'm not always as good as I should be about that. Yeah, so those are just a couple of things. I'll just sort of second that if I don't want to. Great, and we'll flesh that out even more when we share out the resource on informational interviewing. I don't wanna do that just now. Yeah, sure. But we'll share it before the break that we're gonna have and then we'll also share it at the end in case we have people coming in and out according to their schedule. So as far as tailoring to your audience, this is something that you always wanna think about whenever you are in an interactional situation, it's something that you may do naturally already, but be deliberate about it. Be deliberate about doing that in-person interviewing as well as in in-person interactions as well as digital interactions. And think about tailoring also when it comes to your documents, your resumes. So that's something we'll get into tomorrow when we start to talk about how to create a resume and then leading into how to tailor your resume. So we're always thinking about audience. This is part of our strength as linguists and as people who intensively studied social linguistics have an audience focus and think about who they are, what they know and what they may want to know about you. So it's gonna change whether you're at an academic conference, whether you're here at the LCL or some other professional organization or if you're in an actual elevator and you have to make that really fast introduction. Think about the goal in that moment for that context with that particular audience. If you run into somebody within this meeting today that you recognize their name and you'd like to connect with them, you can send them a direct message through our chat. You can look them up on LinkedIn and send a message to connect and use the fact that we're at this shared experience together throughout the month as a way to make that first step to connecting with someone. When you're in a conversation too, you should be trying to think about ways that you can move the conversation forward in an effective way and in a way that you might be able to take an action afterwards in the way that your interlocutor might be able to take an action. So what I have in the back of my mind here is that, for example, if you're in a situation where you're talking to someone new at a conference and they say, how's your job search going? And you say potentially, oh my gosh, I have so much anxiety. The market is really tough right now. That can present some of your topmost feelings that are absolutely authentic and that's part of networking is being authentic. But think too about how you could shape that message in a way that could allow your interlocutor to help you. So if you say that, you know, the talk about your emotions aside, if you can add in something that is related to your goal, like, you know, I'm really, I've been doing a lot of informational interviewing. I'm getting some, I'm interested in conversation design. I feel like my experience as a sociolinguist in doing semi-structured interviews and taking discourse analysis classes might give me an edge in conversation design. I just don't know where to go. Those are some keywords that can give your conversation partner a way forward. Conversation design, interviewing, that could prime them to think of all different kinds of resources that they could connect you with. So if someone said that to me, I would immediately think of who I know in conversation design, ways that you can talk about interviewing and discourse analysis that would be relevant in a conversation design job, so I could give some tips. And I would most likely offer to put somebody in touch with someone in conversation design, like Brielle Nikolov at our career launch this month. So providing some actionable information in the time that you have can be useful in making the most of a situation where you may not have a lot of time. I was talking about authenticity because I have a feeling that some people, this is based on my research and work with a lot of people who are uncomfortable with networking is that there's a concern with identity and with how to be authentic in a networking situation. Because again, some people approach networking thinking, that's not me, I'm not the type of person to reveal myself, I'm not the type of person who's comfortable with this and I sort of dislike this process. This is where the reframing can really help and this is where you can feel kind of a comfort in being who you are. So that's something that can help you in a networking situation. Don't feel like you have to be somebody that you're not. It's key to be exactly who you are. Try to be positive though, for the most part. If sometimes revealing the hard truth right away may not be the best way forward in a one-off conversation or in a first conversation, you'll get a feel for your audience but if you try to retain some positivity, it can help with keeping the conversation going. As well as showing that openness to other people and reframing this whole idea of small talk as I touched on earlier. There's a lot of negative frames associated with small talk and part of that is just with the name itself that it's something inconsequential and that couldn't be further from the truth. This is a way to start building a relationship with people and a way to start getting to know other people. So small talks again suffers from a naming problem and we need to translate that into something different as our way forward into a relationship. You could also try to be your own conversational designer. You could practice some of these responses you might have to very typical questions that you might get in a first-time meeting with somebody. So in an interaction like you'll find in office hours or in the mixers that are coming up, some people might say, how's the job search coming or where do you come from? Think about how you can frame answers to those questions to be relevant to the situation and to give somebody something to work with to keep the conversation going. I was gonna move forward to talk a bit about some tools that you can use to further your exploration of networking and building skills but I'm gonna stop sharing here because we have a few minutes before we're gonna start our break and I'd like to get back to our chat and have more of a conversation with you all. So feel free to unmute and I'm also gonna scan the chat and look back at some of the questions. Who has something that they'd like to ask about what we've been talking about so far? Could I ask a question? Please. This is Katie in Madison, Wisconsin. I am curious to know what recommendations you would have as a subject matter expert. I'm in a position where I'm looking to network and gain some advice from people like the team leaders with this conference. And so to your point of not making it one-sided, how can someone like me help bring value to you where I'm more the person who's looking for the guidance? What kinds of things might come to mind for you in terms of how it can be reciprocal? I'm so glad you asked that, Katie, because I really need to clarify what I mean by help and the types of help and the types of mutual benefit that is available in these situations. I mean, just first and foremost, the organizers of this LCL and our career linguists who are joining us, we're here because we really want to help you and provide guidance and actionable strategies for you in your career journey outside of academia. And just the fact of doing that really makes me feel good. That's part of it, is that a lot of people really like to help others. And so when you come to office hours, the career linguists who are there, they're there because they wanna help you. That's the benefit they get, sharing their experience so somebody else has an easier time or that somebody else makes a great connection or that somebody else gets a job. Yay. Yay, and that's when I hope comes out of this conference. If we come out of this month, knowing that we had like hundreds of career conversations with all of you attendees, that will make us feel good. And if we hear back from you, that's something we said got you a job or took you just a couple steps forward, that will make us feel good. That's our payoff, that's what makes us happy. I swear to you, it's why we're pouring all these hours into this and I feel that way with my students. When I hear that a student of mine has gotten a job or has met somebody who's sparked their interest in a new field or a new area of academia or in the corporate world, I get that thrill of using my own experience to help others and seeing it pay off. So that is the benefit there for most of us. Absolutely. Oh, sorry. Thank you very much for everything that you're doing to help us. No, it's our pleasure. I mean, so many of us had to muddle our way through and learn by trial and error and we didn't have people to explicitly tell us what's important, especially when it comes to career paths outside of academia. And so to be able to pay it back and make somebody else's way just a bit easier, that's all the payoff that we really need in that moment. And so rest assured, people love to use their experience to help others. And so when you reach out to somebody in your network and in the next portion of this presentation we'll show you how, when you do that people accept and they talk with you because they wanna talk about themselves and they wanna talk about how they got there and they wanna give you tips and strategies for how you could do that too. People like to be mentors. People like to give advice. They like to talk about themselves. So leverage that, that's what I'm saying. And I guess that we can reciprocate by also paying it for Wednesday once we make it. So think of it that way too. And also, please also don't think that I'm currently in a student position at some level in a program. I don't have something to offer somebody who is in a different position, who's older than I am or who seems senior. That's not true. As I learned the most from my students I learned the most from people who are just entering different jobs and different career paths. That's a source of excitement and pleasure for me is getting to learn about other people and what they're doing. So you have so much to offer. Can I share a story here, Alex? Is that acceptable? Of course. Yeah, so I had a student from the department that I graduated from who was a senior in a linguistics department. Somebody in the department had given her my name as a person who might be working in a field that she was interested in. So she reached out to me. She asked if she could come meet me for coffee. So we met up across the street from my office and that was really important. She made it easy for me to help her. And so that I had so much appreciated that. And she came with a list of questions that she had about, she actually had a list of questions in front of her. Asking me about my job and how I had found it and what I did and all of those sorts of things. And she was not asking me for anything other than those questions that she had. But she had been, I appreciated the initiative that she took to reach out to come to where I was to bring those questions and to show how much she was thinking things through. And so when somebody in another unit at my company asked me if I knew any linguists who might want to apply for an open position, I said, yeah, here's one. She's about to graduate, you should talk to her. So that's another way, part of it is paying it forward for sure and helping others. But this is also the power of network is that when somebody else asks you for something you've had these conversations and you might be able to suggest a person to them too. So it's paying it forward and backwards and side to side and up and down to try to connect everybody together. Yeah, exactly, Emily. And think about the alternative to, Emily wanted to help someone who is in the department that she's a graduate of, right? That person reached out, they set up that appointment. Now imagine that person shows up, they're not prepared. They don't have prioritized questions. They don't seem to have a purpose. Maybe they just don't know the genre of and the etiquette of the informational interview, which we will talk about, we will give you steps. If they had shown up with that, how likely would Emily have been to recommend to her team when they were looking for a linguist? In that sense too, the preparation that you bring is part of your benefit, part of your value, part of the way that other people will appreciate you and want to recommend you. So again, I can't emphasize enough how everybody has something to offer and how no matter what stage or age you are, you have something to offer, your preparation, your interactional skills, the knowledge you have that the other person doesn't, everybody brings different knowledge and experience to an interaction. So be confident that you're bringing that too. And exactly, as Emily says, it's more about the structure, this person prepared, they were ready and it's not so much the content. That is showing that you have a skill that is transferable to that work environment. And that makes somebody like Emily, a hiring manager, more willing and eager to recommend you because Emily knows that's a very transferable skill that will help her organization. I think I resonate very strongly with everything you both said. I said earlier, Emily, I had a really similar experience this year with hiring where we hired someone based on an informational interview that I had had. But so there are those kind of more tangible benefits but even sometimes it's nice enough to just make a connection or to have an interesting conversation with somebody. These are small things, but sometimes that's really enough of a benefit as well. Exactly. So I wanna get a sense. How about taking a break right now? We've been sitting for quite a while. So let's take 12 minutes to the hour. Could we come back at five minutes after the hour? And we'll resume. And before everybody leaves, Marcus, if you don't mind sharing the resource that I sent you, this is gonna be your guide to informational interviewing. And you can have it with you during the break and we will go over it, touch on some highlights when we come back. So thanks for your attention and we'll see you back here soon. Five minutes after the hour. Welcome back from your break. Thanks for coming back. It's good to see you. We're gonna resume with talking about stories of successful networking, how you can connect and maintain a relationship over time. I know that is a question that came across during the chat is, okay, once you reach out, how or what should you do going forward? What's possible? What's permissible? What's the right thing to do? And there are different paths forward, but I'd love to give you just a quick story about how brief initial connections can blossom over the years. So I'm gonna share. Has this looked to you, Nancy? Okay. When I unmute, it's fine. I know, great. So I just wanna ease us back into talking about this with a tale of networking. And this will give us all this positive, warm, happy feeling. Oh, the year was 2018. Does anybody remember back before the pandemic? Yeah, it was long ago. And I started a new job at Georgetown University and my mentor from my grad program at Georgetown, Deborah Tannen said, Alex, in your new role, when you're getting to know people, you're gonna need to know a lot of linguists who work outside of academia. One of those people that you need to get in touch with is my former student, Greg Bennett, who I foreshadowed and who you'll get a chance to meet at some point during the months. At that time, Greg Bennett was identified as a linguist and a UX researcher and he was at Salesforce. And you can see Greg is pretty prolific on LinkedIn. He had over 500 connections and we did become connections thanks to my mentor's recommendation. I reached out to him and you can see I was the first connection but we didn't have anybody in common at the time because my network was conversational designer and UX researcher poor. And I knew that was an area I needed to develop because that's an area of growth. That's where my students were training to go. So Greg and I go along and we get to know each other. He gives a talk at Georgetown and helps us out a lot and we interact over LinkedIn, we keep that going. And then this actually is a different slide. I wanted to show you that over time, this was a snapshot I took today. Now Greg Bennett has advanced to be conversation design principal at Salesforce. And now he and I have 92 mutual connections including our very own Nancy Frishberg. And that's an example of how in three short years you can build out a network through getting to know colleagues of colleagues, friends of friends and adding them on LinkedIn. And of those many mutual connections is a person that Greg thought I really needed to know. So it was March, 2019 and Greg tagged me on LinkedIn which is such a great feature to try and introduce people to one another. And he tagged me because there was a talk going on that same day and it was a talk about how linguists are poised perfectly positioned to be conversation designers in industry. And he said, and he didn't have to say anything. He just tagged me that this talk is happening and it was being given by a woman named Brielle Nikolov. And this is Brielle's LinkedIn profile from March, 2019. At that point, product lead at Whitlingo which is a DC area startup devoted to Voice UX, Voice User Interface and a Voice First Outlook. So I decided to reach out to Brielle. Her talk sounded fascinating and I thought if she's giving that kind of talk somewhere out there in the DC area I want her to come to Georgetown and talk to my students. And so that's an example of how I'm motivated by advocating for my students. So right away I leaped on it, I reached out to Brielle and this is my message to her. So here's an example of a short-ish message you can send out. Hi, Brielle, Greg Bennett, let me know about your talk tonight. I'd love to connect you with some of my linguistics grad students at Georgetown who would like to find career opportunities at the intersection of language and tech. Could you come to a career mixer on April 3rd on campus to talk to them? There I was like right away with the ask. I was being very forward but I had some time pressure there and I really wanted to find a conversation designer to come to our career mixer and talk to my students. And I thought, well, maybe if Brielle is giving talks around the area it's something she likes to do. Maybe that would be a benefit to her to talk at Georgetown University and get to know more linguistics students. Right away, Brielle is now a connection and she wrote back to me. Hi, Alexandra, thanks for reaching out. I believe April 3rd could work for me. What time is the mixer? Beyond that, I've been looking for opportunities to speak to linguistic students about this space. Mainly people who reach out are human and computer interaction, tech developers. And I really wanna connect with some linguistic students because that's how it all started for me. I'm a guest speaker at the University of Maryland. I do a talk each semester in one of their HCI classes to give an overview of my background and touch on the different career opportunities that are arising now with conversational technology. If you think there may be a graduate level linguistics class, why yes I do, that may be open to having me come in once a semester for something like this it would be great to discuss that further. So here's everything I need to know. Yes, she is looking for these types of opportunities. It does have benefit to her. She's open to coming and we're gonna get a chance to interact in real life. This is Brielle now. And you can see that she's moved on. She's a co-founder and head of product at Botmock. You can see that she's updated her profile and her banner. And now Brielle and I have 74 mutual connections including our very own Nancy Frischberg because Nancy is the key to everything. So this is an example of how over time in these past couple of years, Brielle and I, thanks to the connection with Greg, thanks to the connection with Deborah Tannen have gotten to know one another and then involved in several amazing projects together which included Brielle developing the curriculum that she's debuting here at the conference in the conversation design for linguists course. And that's something that she's going to also keep iterating on a different platform later. So in this sense, we've, from a very brief tag on LinkedIn, I got to know a person who aligns in so many ways with my background and with my goals and we could work together on some amazing projects. And you'll get to hear from Brielle and get to know her later this month. So LinkedIn guidance to get real return on investment. I just want to throw this out right away because so many people ask me, like how much time do I, should I spend on LinkedIn? Try to spend an hour a week as you get used to this platform that that's something new to you because you can use it for research. It's not only about connections and interacting with people. It's also about research, about using salient keywords to search for people and search for organizations and search for shared connections. So use it as a research tool. This platform does far more than only networking. It is several things to several people and the way that you use it will depend on the stage you are in your career search. So in the beginning, if you're just getting started, I recommend that you start with building out your profile and we can talk about ways to do that. I recommend that you start adding to your network with people you meet here. And I recommend that you use the search function to search for people, organizations and groups. Use keywords like linguistics and language and linguist and conversation and see the types of people and organizations you pull up. The people are very important because you'll see people who label themselves as linguist, as conversation designer, as consultant. When you see their profiles, you can work back from their most recent position and see where they started. You can see that people who trained as they may have had an undergraduate major in history and now they're in conversation design. You might see that they have an undergraduate major in linguistics and they're now working in educational technology. Looking at those career paths is very, very instructive. Once you get a sense of some of those pathways, you can see some people who might be connected to you in some way through a university or other organization and that can be a guide to figuring out who to both connect with and who you might want to tap for an informational interview, which we'll get to. And again, as you can see, try to spend a bit more time as you get to learn the platform and see what it can do for you and figure out who you can reach out to for informational interviews. As Annemarie Truster says, if you do one a week, that's 50 in a year, you may want to do even more than one a week. There are so many chances during the month here for you to talk with any one of us and any one of the people in attending here. So try to fit in a lot of those informational interviews or career conversations. Nancy, please. I'm also thinking, as somebody said in the discussion, what are other examples of networking events? And of course, in before times, I used to challenge myself to go to two networking events a month that were not my usual as when I was, especially when I was job searching, but sometimes even when I wasn't. And when I had a small child, one of my events would always be the Bake High meeting. And I've invited all of you to come to the Bake High meeting this month, if you can spare the time and if it doesn't conflict with your real life schedules. But that has been my networking home and my professional life home for the past 30 plus years. Or I guess only 30 because Bake High's only been existence for 31 years. So, and I got in before I moved there. So anyway, this is the Bay Area Human-Computer Interaction Professional Association, which is part, yes, there is a link to it in the events schedule. And you don't have to pre-register, except that you have to pre-register to get the Zoom link, but there's no cost involved. And how do you network at such an event? You can do it through the chat. You can listen to who is asking questions or making announcements or providing provocative statements and note their name and connect with them later and say on LinkedIn or however you get ahold of them. I heard you asked that great question at Bake High the other night and I've had a similar question. Do you feel like that when the answer you got was satisfying? How else would you go about finding another answer to that question? Or anything? I was at the Bake High, do you come here often? And come to the dinner ahead if you can, which is also free and unfortunately you have to bring your own dinner this time, starts at 5.30. So it's after the end of these events, 5.30 West Coast time, Pacific, California time, right? Anyway, there are lots of those professional meetups. And there are countless virtual meetups. One place to start with is your university. So when we're all back in session, a lot of these meetups will remain virtual but your university is a rich source of chances to interact with other people. There are lots of events that are put on by university career centers and check to see how many you have at your university at Georgetown we have about five different career centers which we can all tap into. It doesn't matter that one of them is an undergrad focused career center and one is a grad focused or one is focused on the school reform service. These are events that are open to everyone at the university. So check to see where is your university's career center and what they offer. And you can also do searches online for all kinds of meetups and look for language focused ones, see where they meet both in person and online and start to get involved. Look at professional organizations that have virtual meetings. I have one student who was interested in constructed languages which you may have heard about yesterday with Mark Oprind, one of our linguists who works in unexpected places. And there is a society, a professional society for conlangers, people who create constructed languages or for media, for all types of media. And that professional society has regular meetings online where they get together and talk about focus topics and just the type of ordinary interaction that we saw in the middle of our break catching up with one another, talking about what's new, talking about shared connections and maybe some opportunities for work in that area. And by entering in as a newcomer and listening, you will start to pick up on valuable terms that are used in that field. And bit by bit, you'll be able to start using those terms and realize what's happening here in this field. So feel free to join these as a newcomer, meetups and most public professional associations have free options and have public options for people who want to join and get to know other people with that same interest. Now, I think it would be good so that we can keep closely to time to turn to informational interviewing and just really go into that in a bit more depth. So you have now this PDF resource that is your one-step guide to doing informational interviewing. There may be too much information in that, but it runs through the format of this genre and it's a really powerful genre to start practicing. And really the first thing to know and Caitlin can jump in at any point but just know that this is an accepted and expected part of professional life. People know what this is and it's not gonna be strange if you reach out to someone and ask for a few minutes of their time to talk with them and you can label it an informational interview or not but professionals expect that people will contact them and want to ask them about what they do or ask them about aspects of their organization. The key point here being not publicly available information that you can find anywhere online. The value of talking to somebody who works in an organization is that they have insight or knowledge that it's not publicly available. And they have that personal experience with that organization that you can ask them about and really get to know if there's a future for you with that organization, with that career path or with any of the resources that that person might introduce you to. The etiquette as we alluded to before is you're not looking for a job. You're not saying, I need a job, what's open here. That's not the point. It's really to ask people about their career path and to find out these types of things that you can only learn from someone with day-to-day experience with an organization. And as Caitlin says, this is something that she continues to do as a fully employed professional because it's your key to just keep learning about what's new in the space and meeting more people. And people also reach out to Caitlin to ask her for these types of meanings, right? So please, jump in with your experience and your knowledge of the genre, Caitlin, if you feel like it. Sure, we'll do. I don't have much to add at this point, but I will. Yeah, and so ways to do that. A lot of people ask about what should be my first reach out, what should that be like? A really low bar way to do this, a really easy way to do this is over LinkedIn and to connect through LinkedIn and send a message. And again, people expect this. And if you also look up people on LinkedIn to try and get to know them, get to know the content that they push out on LinkedIn, that's not stalking. It's very different from other types of social media platforms like Facebook. If you still use Facebook, it has nothing to do with looking up somebody on Facebook and finding out what they've been up to. Professionals who use LinkedIn expect that everything they put out there is public and that people will reach out, will read up about them, research them and connect with them. I think there's a bit of a line to toe there as well. Like I think I expect and not surprised when people have looked up quite a bit about me in an interview, but sometimes a lot comes out like that it almost sounds a bit surprising. Like, oh yeah, I know that you did X and 2008 or something. So I would, it's good to kind of be prepared and know about people, but you don't necessarily need to like drop facts about there about what you've learned about them during the interview. So I mean it doesn't, I feel like whenever that happens to me, it like takes me off guard a little bit but catches me off guard a little bit and it doesn't bother me because I know that that's part of the information or interview process that you can kind of pull back on like dropping that solution. That's a great point, Caitlin. I'd really like to open it up to make sure that I get to questions that you might have about informational interviewing based on a quick scan that you might be doing of the document based on your personal experience or burning questions that you have about how to navigate this genre. So feel free to unmute or keep posting in the chat. Something that I've noticed a lot of students ask me is, how soon is too soon to kind of make that ask? So for example, a lot of people, and I think this came up in the chat, a lot of people now during this month are making connections with others, LinkedIn invitations flying here and there and being accepted here and there. And for that first reach out, that first connection, it's really just, it's enough. It's enough to connect. It's enough to say, you know, I saw you at LCL. I look forward to getting to know you or that question you asked in the session was really interesting. I had the same question. I'm so glad you asked. You can keep it really low bar, really low key. And then you can work up to it over time. If you feel like you really do want to find out something about that person's particular career path or something about the organization and the day-to-day life in the organization that they work in, you can have some interaction before you ask them for that, you know, 20 minutes of their time to have a video chat or if that's too much, you could ask if somebody is willing to answer just a couple questions over LinkedIn or through an email. So working up to asking somebody for their time might be a way to go, especially if you feel like it's somebody you don't have a long history with. Yeah, I find that it's nice when people send, like if it's the first time they reach out, if they send an introductory email kind of explaining their background and why they want to connect and maybe have a chat. Doesn't have to be long, but a little bit of, you know, why this would be a good connection to me. Exactly, that's part of thinking about your audience and what's in it for them, showing that there's some connection already and why you want to know what you want to know. I actually have a couple of slides that I brought with me as an example of what not to do. People like to clamor to see those examples. Maybe not, if I see something. Oh, Emily Pace wants to see it, that's enough for me. Okay, so I'm gonna quickly share and feel free to unmute while I share, if anybody has a question you wanna. I just wanted to point out the value of networking. While we've been in the session, I got contacted by a deaf friend who said, you'll know somebody who's good for this job. I don't know anybody. So I'm now posting it in various places, including on our general list, our general Slack, although we may wanna put a job posting thing in the Slack channels. Anyway, I'll add that. And anybody who's got a sign language or deafness background and I saw there were four or five people like that may wanna actually seriously consider this job. I think we wanna tap Janice for that. Cool. You can talk to me about that. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk. And I'm happy to advise somebody on how to present themselves for this one. And there's somebody I'm thinking of, I met in office hours, you have to talk to. Excellent. This is how it's done, my friends. I wanna give you your last, one of your last tools for today is your followup. Develop your followup, keep your word. Don't put too much pressure on yourself to say things in person. If you forget in the heat of the moment or because of anxiety, that's not a problem. You can always follow up with that person later to ask your question or plan a future action. And again, as we were saying before, reach out on LinkedIn, perhaps email if you got to it. Just always keep your word. If you're promising that you're going to connect and tell, like I'm gonna tell Nancy about this person right here in our conference who might be just right for that job, I need to do that with Nancy. I don't wanna let that hang. So if you're promising a resource or a connection to somebody, hone your skills at following up. Following up, you say. Well, I have an example of an email that I received directly from a person after I gave a presentation about my dissertation research. And it was a small presentation. I was presenting results and analysis and talking about my plans for future research when I would recapitulate the study. And I knew most of the people there, but after the talk that I gave, I got an email from one person that I didn't know at all. And this is what it read. Hi, Alex. Could you send me a copy of your dissertation? I didn't realize that the materials you presented yesterday were part of a dissertation. Okay, this clues me right away. He wasn't listening to what I was saying. And also that he's making an ask right off the bat. He wants me to do work for him in the very first sentence. I'm gonna keep that in mind. Would be curious too about what the bigger picture is for you now. Why are you revisiting these materials and for what ultimate purpose? Again, that's a cue to me. This person wasn't really listening during the presentation and that he wants something from me. Again, he wants to know my motivations and I have no idea why. As Caitlyn was saying, he didn't provide any type of link to me or why we might have a shared goal or a shared interest. So signed best research fellow in the US government. There's a cue for me there that somebody in the US government might be interested in my dissertation because I worked in the citizenship and immigration services district office in Virginia and I recorded green card interviews. The last step before somebody is approved or denied for a green card. So, okay, he's in the US government. He's a research fellow. I have that to go on and not much more. However, this is something that didn't make it easy for me to help him. As Emily was saying in the chat, you wanna make it easy for somebody to help you as easy as possible. First of all, don't ask them to do a lot of work right off the bat, especially if it's work you could do on your own and especially if it shows that you may not have paid attention or been alert or done some work to figure out what that talk was about before you reached out. So I suggest a different way to follow up. This is what would have been nice to hear after I finished putting my mind back together. Hi, Dr. Johnston or Alex, hey, that's fine. He's kind of, we both have doctorates. It would have been nice to be addressed this way by somebody I had no relationship with, but Alex is fine. I enjoyed your presentation yesterday. Even if it's not true, just throw me a bone here. I looked up your dissertation to look more about how you gained access to your department of justice field site. Oh, they did something, they did work. As a research fellow in federal agency, I'd like to see if we could apply some of your findings to citizenship and immigration service officer training. Oh, there's a purpose here. And actually, I would love that. That aligns with my goals. Do you have about 20 minutes to meet and talk about application? There's something I can get behind. There's something that makes me feel really good about reaching back out and doing whatever I can to interact with that person. So I present that as an example of a theoretical response that would have shown that somebody did their research just a bit, who didn't ask for too much right away and who created that kind of link to let me know why they were reaching out and where we might align. If you do that, you really change the feeling of the person who's reading that email and you really change the future steps that might be taken there. That turned out to be a person that I didn't connect with well at all. But had we gotten off on a better foot, I think it could have been a productive relationship. What questions might you have? Please, Megan. Yeah, so I'm wondering, because I've been doing a lot of reaching out and things like that. And there have been times where I've connected with someone and then they didn't get back to me after talking to them for a little bit. And so then I reached out once more with a little bit of a little bit of a little bit or with a little bit of time in between and they still didn't get back. And I'm wondering how you deal with, I hate the word rejection, but in a way it's a sort of rejection. And how many times is too many times to reach back out if somebody seems like they're unresponsive? Thank you for asking that. I have a response and then I'll turn it to Caitlin for her idea about this. But typically it's not something to take personally. People are busy. And sometimes people's inboxes get completely overwhelmed and inbox management is a hot topic, isn't it? So yeah, if you don't get a response right away, absolutely follow up and check in with that gentle reminder. And then if you don't hear again, you might wanna weigh your response in the future. It could be that that person is just simply very busy and can't get back to you. I would hesitate about reaching out a third time right then or I might find a different channel. For example, if this is an email, you might get a very different response on LinkedIn. I have often found that. I might get an immediate response on LinkedIn if I send a quick message there because sometimes we tend to be, and I'm not saying you did this, Megan, but sometimes with emails, we tend to be a bit more verbose. Like even those emails I presented there, those were long-ish. On LinkedIn, you're restricted to your message to make it really short. So it can be very directed. That will work with some people, not with all people, but that's something else to try as a different channel of communication. Don't take it personally, but you will face people who don't respond. And in my experience and in the experience of so many people I've worked with, that is really the minority of non-responses. That's a minority of response, really, because most people will follow up somehow. But again, it's not about you. It's about their situations. Caitlin, would you have something to add to that? I would definitely agree not to take it personally. I mean, I know from my own experience, things get lost in my email or I might not check LinkedIn frequently. And so it's almost, this is my own organizational problem, but hard to predict which platform's gonna be the best way to get in touch with me. And people are busy working and family obligations and stuff. Yeah, and I would say like, I would agree like you could follow up to change the platform. I mean, I've had situations where I'm reaching out to somebody and they don't respond for a while. I'm like, all right, let me try again, but maybe this email is not working. I have their other email. I try that one and then we end up talking. So yeah, I mean, you can't really, I guess keep pestering them, not pestering, but keep, at some point, I guess you have to give up, but yeah, I would agree with that. Thank you, Bob. Well, what other questions are out there? I see one in the chat. How would this kind of networking differ from reaching out to a recruiter, hiring manager about a specific job? Yeah, it's a bit different. And I think Emily Pace, if she's still here, can also jump in about personal experience as a hiring manager. But in this case, recruiters and hiring managers are there to respond to these types of requests about positions in the case of hiring managers. It sort of depends where you are in the process. So when you say hiring manager, it might be that you're already applying for a job and you may have submitted an application and you don't hear back. In those cases, I would reach out to a hiring manager after about a week or so. Sometimes it depends on the industry. Don't do that with academics. The academic job search process is, of course, very different, takes a long time. And also in federal hiring, that is also a very long drawn out process. But when I think about industry and larger organizations, and in addition to some small nonprofits, it's fine to reach out to a hiring manager to check in about the status of an application. I also think it's important to make the distinction between when you're reaching out for an informational interview versus when you're reaching out for a job. I think in many cases it is acceptable to email people and say, you know, I'm looking for a job. I think this might be interesting. Like a good fit for me. Here's my resume kind of thing. I think that's in many contexts perfectly accessible. It may or may not be successful, but sometimes it is. It's actually been successful for me very often. But you need to make that clear. So if you are asking for an informational interview, this is not the time to be asking for a job. So kind of two different things. I have a question that I think is kind of related to what Caitlin just said. So in the early phase of, I guess, career research when we're doing informational interviews and trying to figure out what path we might want to take, what kind of companies we might be interested in. Once we do decide, you know, here's a position that I'm interested in that I want to apply for. And I talked to someone previously who works in that company. Do you think it's appropriate to reach out to that person and say, I'm applying for this position and, you know, here's my resume or if it, you know, if that person hasn't said, reach out to me if you decide to apply. Do you think it's still appropriate to reach out to them again, just to let them know? That's going to depend on the organization. Sometimes you'll get those cues during the hiring process or from the person that you talk to in the organization as part of an informational interview. So there's some organizations in which I'm thinking of a nonprofit that I know specifically that will like not allow any of their employees, their staff to talk with anybody who is currently in the hiring process. However, there are other organizations where if there is a connection between an employee and a person going through the hiring process, you have a place to indicate that on your application. And if, and the, there's a benefit to the employee because they can get a bonus for actually referring someone. It's a referral bonus. So that could work out very well for them. So again, it really depends on the organization and that could be something too that if you have a bit of time that you could bring up in an informational interview, like if I ever, if there's ever an opening here and I, and I choose to apply, if it's a good fit, is it all right to reach back out to you? Is that how is that looked upon by your organization? So you can try to head that off in advance because you thought to ask this question and now that's in your head about organizations differ that way. So in some cases it's very positive and somebody will help you along. And in other cases, there's more of a hands off. Nope, we don't get involved in the hiring process once you're, once you're in it. But those situations where somebody is there to facilitate your hiring by surfacing your resume, making it rise to the top. Right. Exactly. Those are great situations. And often, you know, since people who are in those positions know that often future applicants may not know that they'll flag it for you and say, be sure to reach out if you decide to apply. I'll make sure the hiring manager sees your application. And I may get a hiring vote. I may get a referral bonus. Some people are transparent. Others aren't Nancy. And in that following up exactly on what you said, I've had the privilege of having somebody on the inside review my resume in advance and offer some tweaks before I actually submitted it. And then she was willing to put it forward with the employee referral in hopes of getting a referral bonus. That's great. That's a wonderful point. Realize that you can do that, Samantha, in many cases that I hope that's part of our, our document, our guidance to informational interviewing is to ask somebody you are engaging in an interview with. Do you mind just glancing at my resume and see if I'm using the words that make sense? The terms that you use. See where I tweak this. Try to do that with people. A lot of people will give a resume a really quick glance and say, oh, you need to talk about. Sociolinguistic interviews as. Semi-structured interviews or you need to talk about group interviews as focus groups or you need to, they might suggest some really great language tweets. That will reassure the hiring manager who reads it. Like, you know what you're talking about when it comes to this job. Produce actionable results. Then say what that means, right? That kind of thing. We are going to do that in our resume sessions. And Marcus, since we're getting close, we, a couple of minutes over the end of our time, Marcus, please circulate the feedback form. If you would in the chat. And of course, I'm going to stay. For those of you who need to leave right at this time, I so appreciate that you came today. I hope you found something useful and. Please feel free to talk to me over the course of the month, follow up with anything we talked about here. Hope to connect with you on LinkedIn and continue these conversations. I want to thank my co-presenter, Caitlin. I can stick around for a little bit. I actually have an informational interview. Like 15 minutes. I'm going to look for that, but. Great. Thank you so much. I'll stop the recording and we can just. Keep on going.