 So welcome everyone to the panel entitled, Not Always 9 to 5, Contracting and Consulting as a Career Path. I'm Laurel Sutton. I'm your moderator for today. Our support person is Rachel. You can see her there under Linguistics Career Launch. So the description for this panel says, industry doesn't always mean a full-time job with one employer. Many linguists find themselves moving from in-house work to consulting to contract work and back again. And in this session, our three career linguists will speak about their experiences as consultants and contractors and the challenges and rewards that come with this kind of work. Our three panelists today are Mackenzie Price, Dan Parvaz, Audrey Farber, and Sarah Nicholas. I'm sorry, there are four. Usually we have three, but we've got four today, which is even more exciting, the more the merrier. So I am going to fire a few questions off to our panelists and then we will let the conversation sort of flow and then, as I said, we'll be taking questions at the end as well. In these panels that we've been doing, the question or the story that people really want to hear is, what was your journey? So how did you leave academia? What caused you to leave academia? And then what got you to the place where you are today in terms of having a consulting and contracting job? So I would love it if the panelists could one by one maybe tell a short version of their story, just starting with my screen up there. Dan, why don't you give us a version of what you've been doing and how you got there? I got into linguistics, I think, like a lot of folks that I know, because it was just what I was a nerd about, right? I was interested in language. My education was I was looking at being a phonologist of sign languages. And absolutely nothing I've done in my professional career has anything to do with that. And I also grew up being a different kind of nerd, the kind that mucked around with computers. It was when people started getting personal computers on their own and back in the day, you know, if you wanted to do anything, you had to code. So everybody did. And my career path as I was envisioning it was I was going to get my PhD, move into academia and make more little linguists who in turn get PhDs and become faculty members and sort of perpetuate that particular stream of the job. And two things happened. One, the circumstances in my life changed to the point where I needed to start making money fairly quickly. And the other thing was that I sort of discovered computational linguistics. And it was like a revelation where they'll pay me real money for doing this. Really? Okay. And so I switched in graduate school to start taking more computer science classes in addition to my linguistics courses. Not every university has a decent computational linguistics program. But it's it's not that hard to roll your own, if you know who to talk to in the CS department in the engineering department. And then come in computational linguistics programs in other universities. So that's what I started doing. And I sort of ran into my first job while I was still in graduate school. And my first like permanent job, I found on the linguist list. And once you once you're out there once you meet people once you know who to talk to, it starts jobs start coming your way, I find. Yeah, networking is is the most important thing. I think we've discovered that and talked about that through this whole LCL. Absolutely. And I've sometimes I've been contact so independent contractor. And sometimes I've been an employee right now I'm an employee. Because I decided I wanted someone else to pay for my benefits for a change. Sure. Got a little tired of the constant hustle. So what's good about being contractor is you get to make your own hours, you get to pick your own work, but you have to hustle. And as you see one job ending, you need to have your eye on what you're going to do next. Yep. So just to backtrack a little bit, what do you do as as your actual job right now? Do you have a job title that you give yourself? Or is it more broader? Is it broader than that? In in the job that I'm in right now, I'm a language engineer. Okay. And what does that mean? Okay, so in in Amazon, which is where I work, people who work on the Alexa project fall into two different categories. There's what they call research scientists. They're the people who largely build sort of statistical and neural net based language models. And there are language engineers who mostly work on language at a more sort of granular level in addition to working on sort of finite state grammars and things like that. So that's where I'm working right now. And I'm working on the Alexa project. So when new features come up, they say we need to teach Alexa new tricks. And so you're writing production code that gets pushed out so that, you know, in a few months, users around the globe can use it. And you find out very quickly if things break. Be careful about what you're doing in advance. It's still research and development, but there's a production aspect to it. And is that what you do as a consultant also prior to this? Was it basically the same kind of work? As a consultant, I worked on sort of writing sort of grammars or things. I also did work in things like sentiment analysis for languages other than English. And also worked in developing metrics for machine translation. Okay. Interesting. That's quite a variety. Cool. Okay. So I'd like to move to Sarah, who's next on my screen up there. Please share your journey with us. So my journey is a little bit nontraditional in that I started off with a degree in sign language interpretation, American sign language. Yeah. And then after that, somebody was like, you know, I think you should go for linguistics. I think you would really enjoy that. So I decided to go and get my MA, did that, and then, you know, kind of like Dan was saying, I was, you know, kind of looking at the PhD route, you know, trying to decide if it was for me, did a job that was sort of in academia and that it was tutoring. And then a while, a long while after that, I found my first contracting, you know, linguist-based job. And from there, I've just done a ton of different things and a ton of different jobs and tasks and kind of haven't looked back. Can you maybe tick off some of those dozens of different jobs that you've had? I think everybody would love to hear a list. So currently, I am a linguistic consultant for Grammarly, and I'm also a contractor at Appen. But I've worked at multiple places. I've worked on a lot of data annotation and data creation and things like that, different types of quality control and quality analysis in multiple roles. So similar types of things in, you know, at multiple places basically. And would you give yourself a title? I mean, Dan was describing himself as an engineer, a language engineer. What would you call yourself? Besides just linguist. I was going to say linguist. Right now, the majority of my time is going into the linguistic consultant position. So that would probably be what I would say besides linguist. Okay, cool. That's awesome. Have you worked in-house as a linguist since you sort of started this part of your career? Or has it just been contracting work? It basically has been contracting and consulting for a while now. Okay, interesting. Okay, so I'm going to move to our next panelist, Mackenzie Price. So Mackenzie, can you share your story with the group? Sure, I'd be happy to. Hi, everyone. My name is Mackenzie Price. I'm in Washington, DC, and I am a messaging consultant. And I, in that capacity, I advise both foundations and businesses, foundations and businesses on content strategy or creating language for campaigns, or in also solving sometimes kind of PR problems and coming up with language and messaging to kind of smooth that over. And something that I started doing more recently in that work is really having, in addition to kind of doing a lot of communications research and research translation, but also having a specialty in talking about race and diversity and inclusion. As a linguist, I'm a linguist. I am an interactional sociolinguist who used to be a variationist back in the day and then kind of switched. I left academia really in small, small steps. I think the kind of pivotal thing that started leaving the ivory tower is I got a job as a research assistant actually working for Anna Truster, who's on this call at Georgetown. And she hired me to work on a research team that had a basically a job doing a research project for and advising another department at Georgetown. And that kind of was revelatory in saying like, oh, you can do research and people will pay you to do that, like not just not just working on, you know, a specific like project as part of my assistantship, but like someone will pay me to like tell them things and then they want my advice based on what I saw. What? And that really started, started my opening my eyes to things outside of academia and also, you know, throughout my time, so throughout my time as a graduate student, I had, you know, I needed money. So I had different jobs. Some of them were some of them were like research assistantships that functioned as like freelance contract or at will contract work. Later on in my, it took me some time to finish my PhD. And in that time, I got a job, you know, as a, as an employee. And I learned more about contracting because that organization actually used a lot of contractors to do different tasks. And so all of that is to say that now, as I have stepped more and more into being a consultant and in the process of, I shouldn't say in the process I am, like actively building my own consulting practice, being very familiar with working on having kind of at will relationships with organizations and working under different types of agreements is something that I am like doing right now in this moment and also becoming more familiar. Awesome. That's great. Same question as I asked to Sarah, since you started doing consulting, have you ever gone in house anywhere? Or has it been straight consulting for you? Yes, I have gone in house in, yes, I have had consulting jobs turned into not consulting jobs. But that is, but there are, it is a different relationship, I think, that seeing the change and like having it happen to you. Yeah, definitely. I want to talk about that in a little bit. I just realized saying in house, not everybody might know what that means. It's a very business speak type of term. So typically in industry, if you are an employee of a company, it means you work in house, you work for them. And typically you get benefits and you have a salary sometimes rather than working on an hourly rate and you have different job expectations that you're expected to fulfill, as opposed to not being an in-house employee. When you're a contractor or a consultant, those are slightly different things, but it means you're not an employee. So you work typically on a project by project basis or perhaps a length of time. You might have a contract that's for six months or something like that. You typically get paid on an hourly basis, although sometimes it's project based. You don't get benefits. You typically don't work on premises. I know that's all changed with COVID. Sometimes you do, you might get a little cubicle somewhere, but that's the main difference. So in-house means going in as an employee to work there. I just realized that we've been doing so much business speak in some of these industry things that I didn't want people to think we were. Yeah, I was going to ask what that meant. Of course, yes, I know. Why would they know? You wouldn't know. Okay, moving on to the next person, Audrey. Can you also tell us about your journey? Yeah. Hi. First of all, Mackenzie's job sounds awesome, and I would like to have it. So my job plan right now is a product strategist, actually. So I've gone in a pretty far direction from just focusing on linguistics. I went to grad school fairly late. So I had an entire life basically between college and grad school. I have an MA in linguistics. They focused on computational. And the first job I had an industry was as a contract worker at Facebook. So my experience has all really been in this contractual middle ground where I actually am a full-time and benefited employee of a company, but that company is contracted through some arrangement to the host company. So in the example of Facebook, my direct employer was actually a different company, and Facebook contracted with them to staff a team of linguists. And that model is super, super common. It doesn't exist really at Facebook anymore for linguists, but Google does it for sure. I think Amazon does it to a lesser extent, or maybe not for certain teams. So you can find this model happening at a lot of different places. So sort of in between the truly a consultant and truly an FTE. After Facebook, I went to an FTE role at a smaller company that is a data vendor. So basically, similar to App-In, but a lot smaller. So we would label and manage data for clients that are building voice assistants, which is what we were building at Facebook. So that's my primary experience. And then currently, the role that I'm in, I work for actually what they call themselves the creative technology company. It's really a design consultancy, a marketing agency. And so we work on basically technology projects for clients as well. So again, sort of the contract relationship is between my employer and the tech companies rather than between me and them, but just another way to think about contracting in the space. Thank you for bringing it up. It's super important for people to understand all the different ways that you can be a contractor or a consultant, that there are different levels. One of the questions here was, if you work full time, like 40 hours a week on a contract, is that an in-house job? No, not usually. And unless you're doing that kind of subcontracting thing that Audrey was talking about, you're still not. You can work a lot of hours for an employer, not an employer for a company as a contractor and a consultant, but still not be an employee. And this is sort of the changing face of industry as well. There's a lot of legal stuff that's been going on around it, because many companies would prefer to have contractors rather than employees. It's much cheaper to employ contractors. You don't have to pay their benefits for one thing. You don't have to extend a lot of niceties to them. You can fire them at will basically whenever you want to. So what has happened over the last, I don't know, correct me on this, like maybe five years or so, is that many companies let go their employees, but then hired them back as contractors, because it was cheaper to do that. Now in California, they've made some stricter laws about being able to do that, because it's really unfair. That's an unfair labor practice to fire someone and hire them back, just because it's cheaper to do that. So there are a lot of legal restrictions around how many hours a person can work. If you fire them and then hire them back to do the same job with the same number of hours, just minus the benefits. That's actually illegal. And it varies from state to state. I'm only familiar with what happens in California, but it's still the case that many companies would prefer to have contractors rather than employees, because employees are expensive and companies don't like that. That said, there are companies that will start you as a contractor and then take you on as an employee, as we were just talking about a minute ago. So let's talk about that a little bit, like the difference between what happens as a contractor and how you're treated as an employee. Mackenzie, you were talking about that a little bit. Could you elaborate on that? What did it feel like in that transition from contractor to in-house? Well, it's difficult to answer that question without being primed by the rage that's roiling inside of me thinking about oppressive labor practices. One of the things that is different about that change is that the expectations for your kind of time and availability, which is not to say that as at will employee, you don't also face that same feeling. But at least for me, feeling the change of, well, now you're here and just every piece of your energy time self is a resource for this organization. Like feeling that change was something that I think was, yeah, something that I've definitely been frustrated by, paid attention to and don't like. And I think that I haven't, but I will also say that in my experience, transitioning from one type of labor relationship to another has also coincided with changing projects. And so I haven't had the experience of doing the same kind of work, but just in a different kind of labor relationship. Yep. That totally makes sense. There's a question here, which I think is completely relevant. Given the hustle aspect mentioned and the lack of benefits, what makes you want to contribute as an individual contractor as opposed to being a company employee? I think you were just mentioning that a little bit. Were there other aspects of it that made you decide, you know what, I really want to be a contractor or consultant in your case? Yeah. So I mean, in the most recent iteration of this, so going from being a full time salary, full time employee to not really coincided with needing to make, I think I alluded to this a little bit. I was talking about the same period of time in a different panel discussion, but made a transition because of my negative experience in that workplace. And so I needed to end the relationship as it was, but I still needed to work because I had bills to pay. And so in that scenario, doing work under a contract was a way to facilitate a larger career change and transition that I, at that time, I knew that I needed to make. Yep. Dan, let's go back to you for a minute. So you're in house right now. What's your take on this, the difference between contracting or consulting and being an in-house person? Have you really felt a difference and what would impel you to go back to contracting or consulting? What I liked about contracting work was the variety that you got. You notice that I don't stick to just one thing. And that actually interests me. I want to be able to sort of pursue my interests in addition to being able to do useful work. Sometimes when you work in house, you get in a rut. You get your position, does the thing that it's going to do. And there's also an expectation in house work that you sort of move up the management ladder. So you find yourself doing less linguistics farther down into your career than you were when you were doing. And if that's what interests you, rather than being a project manager, then contracting is definitely the way to go. But you also have to balance that out with job safety and job security. Usually if you're an employee, you get a bundle of benefits that you don't have to worry about anymore. With Amazon, you get nice stock options as a salaried employee. So it's not bad. I really wish you was the answer, but it depends on what you want to do. No, I think that's absolutely right. Here's a question from one of our attendees. Can you take on several contracts at once? And I think the answer is yes, but need to be more committed if you're an employee. So that's an interesting word committed right there. Well, as an employee, they have you at least for 40 hours a week. You can do several contracting jobs at once. I wouldn't. Simply because when folks hire you on, it's usually with an expectation that you handle their work on a more or less full-time basis. And you can only juggle so many of those before you stop sleeping and get things mixed up. I prefer one job at a time. Yeah. And also, there are usually agreements saying that while you're working for them, you shouldn't be working in similar work on another company. And that's usually part of your contract. You may not be able to cross that out, but you'll have to negotiate it. And if you negotiate it, then you have to start talking about it. Yeah. So more business lingo. Typically when you're contracting, you have to sign what's called an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, which says that you will keep all the information secret that you learned from them. Those are everywhere you have to sign them just about all the time. There's also a thing called a non-compete agreement, which is what Dan was just talking about. And that typically is in your contract. And it says you won't do the same work for a similar client at the same time. Non-competes can be very draconian in some cases where they'll try to say, you can't work for a company in the same field for five years after you stop working from us. Those are typically not legal, but they will try to do it anyway. So this is by saying, I'm speaking from my experience and you guys probably have it too, when you are offered a contract to do contracting work or consulting work, you have to read it. You have to read it carefully. You have to go over every word of that thing and make sure that you are prepared to commit to what's in there. If you know somebody who's a lawyer, have them read it over just to make sure that it's actually legal, that they're not trapping you into something or then presuming ownership over the work that you do. This is something that I've run into myself with the work that I do because I'm a consultant as well. When you're developing creative work, slightly different from what you guys are doing except maybe Mackenzie, sometimes clients will put a contract, a clause in the contract that says any work that you develop while you're working for this client, they own, no matter what it is. Any idea that you have, any word that you write down, any copy that you develop belongs to them 100%. Sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn't depending on the kind of work that you're developing for them. In my case, when I'm developing names, the client gets a name out of it. They don't get to keep all 1000 names that we developed during the course of that, the work that we do with them. That's something that I personally have to watch out for. I want to go back to Sarah for a minute because we've got amazing questions coming in. Thank you guys for all these great questions. Sarah, here's a great question. Is the money you earn enough to have a good life? That is a loaded question. I guess kind of what I'll just say to that is I have had to work at multiple places at the same time. As Dan was talking about, that can get really, really tricky in keeping things straight and doing that and keeping everything organized for sure. I have had to work at multiple places at the same time. I have done things outside of linguistics as well. You may have to end up doing a variety of things to to make things work. Then the following question is, is there flexibility of location so you can live in a place with a lower cost of living to make this work? For me, I think, in fact, all of them, I think of my roles have been done remotely. That is, at least for me, I look at that as a definite skill set. Working remotely is definitely something that I look at as like, oh, this is something that I can, if I go to this other place, especially now, I have a lot of experience working remotely. That's something that I look at as a positive. Go ahead. So I'm going to second that. I live in Florida where, for example, there's no state income tax. Mm-hmm. And you can buy a house quite reasonably here. Whereas, I mean, my office, my office, my real physical office for Amazon is in Boston in Cambridge. You can't even sneeze at a house without a half a million dollars. Yeah. And so living down here works out just fine. Mm-hmm. Let's see. I wanted to address this question that was specifically to Mackenzie from Dr. Lanehart. So you had said that you were starting a company. How's that different from what you're already doing? So I think that would be a good question for everybody. You know, there are different levels of contracting. You can do it as an individual. You can be a subcontractor like Audrey was talking about, but you can also have your own company. So Mackenzie, if you could address that, that'd be great. Yeah. So the shortest answer is I'm figuring that out. What does that mean? But yeah, it's not that different, I guess. I think that, yeah, it's not that different. So some of what is the same is having to seek out the projects, figuring out how to balance multiple and in terms of like time, figuring out something that's more complicated is figuring out projects that I can do, figuring out what my resources actually are in terms of time and capacity. Are there things that I need to engage other people in? And like have I planned for that? Is that possible in the agreement that I have with whoever the client is? So there are definitely more things to consider. But I think at the baseline, the baseline activities are the same. Like the only person directing this is like me. So I have to like find the work, I got to do the work, and I got to get paid. Which is often the most difficult part chasing people down for money. The follow-up question here I think is probably what we could spend a whole hour talking about, which is that are you self-employed or do you have an LLC? And that's sort of the difference in taxes just whether you have a company or you're a single person entity or you want to incorporate and some people do that even when it's just them. There are tax issues no matter which way you go so you just have to decide what's best for you. And if eventually you're going to have other people working with you like McKenzie was saying because you have to pay them and then you have to figure out how are we paying them. Are they contracting to me? Are they consulting to me? Am I just paying them for an hours worth of time? It gets kind of complicated. So I think there's a level of education that you have to do when you go out as a contractor or a consultant to make sure that you're not going to run afoul of tax laws and that you're paying the correct amount of tax. Audrey I wanted to come back to you on this. So are you doing it so you're subcontracting and have you always been doing it as a single entity or have you done like your own entity company for your employment? In my life I've been self-employed but not as a linguist. What were you doing? I used to do some PR work so I just like 1099 for an agency that I worked with. Some direct with clients. Used to do some data analysis on 1099. Just random stuff really. Cool. Here's a good question and you could answer it. Are contract jobs a good stepping stone to full-time positions? And if you have applied to various jobs how do employers view or value your contract work experience? This is a great question and I could go in for hours about this. So when you're hired, this is going to be full of cautionary tales, when you're hired as a contingent worker, a contract worker, right Google's like the TBC whatever it is, the recruiter will often try to tell you that this is contract to hire but all of these companies explicitly say that they actually don't do that. So if this is something like if you want to work as a subcontractor which can be good because you are a W2 employee, you're not handling a lot of your own payroll or getting paid thing. It's not necessarily a good path to direct employment at the same client company. It can however be a really good foot in the door and you get that stuff like those names and the experience on your resume and that gives you those first two years of experience or credibility. Depending on the terms of your subcontracting or contract you may be time limited in the role. So at Facebook we were limited to two years and then we would have had to leave and then actually the rule is like you have to be gone for I think like 18 months or something before you can come back in the same role which is like nobody's going to like take a year and a half off just to come back to the same job. That's nonsense. So it really does push people out if that you know ends up being kind of where you end up. What I would generally tell people who like want to use contingent work or contract work is like a path to becoming an FDE is like don't commit your life to it. It's a way to like learn skills and then go find probably a smaller company that's more likely to hire somebody with maybe less experience or something non-traditional and I think as far as like being a linguist in these roles these companies that are building like artificial intelligence systems they know and for a long time have known that they need the linguistic skill set but there's often been I think a reticence to recognize that the skill set is valuable whether it's like conscious or unconscious right like a lot of these companies are super engineering driven and super technical driven and they have a really hard time seeing value add and people that have skill sets that are outside like I'm really good at coding python or whatever the thing is so something that like I've done with with peers in the past is like worked on like helping other linguists learn how to advocate for themselves within the workplace and get the like rest of the teams that they work with even on a casual level to understand the value that we bring to that space with our specific perspective and that's something that like you know you can just do like in your workplace right like you need a linguist because we drew a whole flow chart about it once at work and then you know there are companies out there that that are really linguist centric and linguist driven and those are great ones because they're already like more primed to accept us as like valuable contributors to this space and oftentimes those are the smaller companies so I don't know if that answers the question yeah that that was that was really great have you had experience working for smaller companies as a linguist um those last company worked for was a smaller company they didn't have linguist roles specifically but because we were a data vendor so we did like data labeling and structuring a lot of people were linguists that were working in sort of like really every role so I was like a project manager but you know we had to understand like why do you need this data what structure does it have to be and what can we recommend to clients how are we going to have the annotators label it what's the right way to like assess quality how do we implement that process so all of that are like linguistic and computational linguistic skill sets and most of the people I worked with were linguists in practice if not in job title okay interesting I want to ask our other panelists the same question go back to you Dan have you worked for as a contractor for both big and small companies he's nodding his head here I have worked for small startups um and I've also worked for larger more established companies do you think there's a difference I mean does it feel different do you prefer one over the other so with the smaller companies you usually get more input which is nice um and it's they're usually working on things that are no one interesting and sort of cutting edge but you're also sort of flying without a net um larger companies are more established you if there's more job security there's um all of that going on but also you are more there's more pressure for you to conform to the way they do things so no um it depends on what you want at that time right Sarah what about you have you done big and small companies um so the majority of places I've been um I would consider larger companies um I've been more recent experience um now with them like for a medium-sized company and I would basically just everything that that Dan was saying you know larger companies are more established they have things kind of set up which is really good when you come in and it's like okay things are you know more systematic so it's easier to learn but you know at smaller companies that aren't more established it is more like you know things are more open and you know you might be able to contribute a little bit more in that way but really mostly for me it has been larger companies and Mackenzie what about you um I've never worked at uh like like a like a google or an or a amazon or an apple sized um organization but I have worked for a like a corporation before um just a smaller one um and and but the majority of my experience has been with kind of um I guess well I guess what legally counts as a small business is still pretty big but with small businesses okay um so many good questions I'm sorry I'm not getting to them all but it's it's great to see you guys asking there was a question about retainer which um Mackenzie answered uh again business speak so a retainer is when it's a more um long-term relationship perhaps with a client and they will pay you perhaps a fixed amount of money per month for a number of hours that you give them or um they might give you a big chunk of money and say bill against it which is track your hours until we've used up this amount of money that you have retainer relationships are really nice because it's sort of guaranteed employment for a while but it also means you have to have really good record keeping to make sure that you're managing that money so there's more responsibility on you uh to track those things you're not just punching a clock or submitting a time sheet every week um the the million dollar question which I would love for you all to answer is do you feel like there were skills that you learned as a linguist that particularly helped you be a consultant so here I'm thinking not just your linguistic skills but you know time management and project management and doing research on the parts of consulting and contracting that are different than going in-house um I would love to know for each of you whether you think it helped or whether it would have been the same for you no matter what your background might have been anybody can start um when I started taking classes in graduate school for computer science one of the ones I took was called software engineering um and when you went to the class they said we assume you know how to code but do you know how to give presentations get requirements work with the customer and of course a lot of the computer scientists that were with me were like if we wanted to work with people we wouldn't be computer scientists but I've been in the linguistics department for several years at that point where you do nothing but work with people and write papers and give presentations and so I found that the humanity side of being a linguist was extremely useful in working with people both in though both of the things like that computer that software engineering class but in the business world as well interesting that's really insightful um Sarah what about you so I think I would approach this question perhaps really broadly so hopefully this is kind of what you're looking for but I think especially for me for linguistics like okay when you have the linguistics training you're basically really good at doing things like finding patterns and data um and I find that a lot of linguists you know love asking questions and love asking the right questions and things like that like finding patterns and data and asking questions those are hugely applicable skills to apply to things that you do the other thing I would say from my background is that I was fortunate enough to actually be able to do experimental work and I think that that experimental background in my education kind of helped because that was something that people were looking at you know it's like oh you've done this thing so you know can you talk about that and what you did and the different skills you gained doing that more um practical based work a lot of it seems to get back to project management I think we've talked about that in so many of these panels that no matter what you're doing no matter whether you're doing um speech recognition or UX design or other kinds of consulting you're managing projects and you get some of that training as a linguist when you're running experiments and things and it directly transfers over to managing projects Mackenzie what about you what do you think I definitely think it has been uh it's been very being a linguist is a big part of my professional identity even though I don't directly call myself a linguist all the time but that's because I am in spaces most often where people don't know like they come to care and think it's cool but they like don't know what that means and so but related I would say that being able to make the case for why this kind of attention to language matters is a skill that I developed because I am a linguist and linguists have to talk about that a lot and I think that's like a part of the the culture of this field is talking about that and also I think that something that helps me be able to do this is so I'm I'm is taking courses I'm not saying that I'm an expert in this but like in my training as a linguist I took courses that taught you how to manage different kinds of data so like Python or R and I don't use those programs like ever but it did help me be able to talk to other social scientists and talk to people with other backgrounds and just kind of be able to think about okay here's a tool that that exists out in the world and I have to think about like how to get my interest into that tool and take what that tool can do and apply them to my interests like in my silo and so being able to narrate that process to other people and just have to talk about it just to like get stuff done in the workday and then also to like do the hustle like talk to me it has been helpful that's great and Audrey what do you think um yeah this is a tough question um I think linguistics definitely got me my first industry job because that was the one that was really as a linguist um and then I think a lot of the skill sets that other people have mentioned you know just like communicating and being able to talk to people um advocate and convince and influence um and then on a sort of functional level um I do basically product management now which is the project management um but a lot of that is really being able to you know go between levels and perspectives and translating between stakeholders and um you know identifying ambiguity and seeking out details and these are all also things that linguists are also very good at um and so I think for me linguistics probably just gave a framework for skills I maybe like already would have had or developed and then allowed me to like find the entry point to a path that's now led me where I am um yeah I think that's really true as you were talking I was thinking one of the things that I most used besides the phonetics and morphology stuff for naming is social linguistics which really helps me communicate better because I'm able to as you say recognize patterns like I can see how other people are communicating and I can find a way in to be able to talk to them on their level or with words that they can understand and that totally comes out of all the social linguistics work that I did when I was in graduate school um here is another question that we've had in other panels as well what were the most important classes that you took to prepare you not just for the kind of work that you do but for maybe for life as a contractor we've touched on that a little bit but the parallel to that is was there stuff that you wish you'd done in graduate school to prepare you for your career now maybe Audrey you can speak to that too. Sure um there is no academic class that's going to prepare you for the workplace especially for finding your own work um is my opinion but in terms of like skill sets and again I might have different advice than other people but I am so I made the choice very consciously to not really pursue the computational side of computational linguistics I know how to code I can do it it's not something I get that much joy out of so I figured I'll leave that to the people that are really into it and I'm going to go deal with the more like people focused in coordination side of the world and so I'm sort of answering the question in reverse like don't take classes just to prepare for a skill that you think you should have take classes to prepare for a skill that you want to develop and you think is like core of the way you can offer to the business that you're working for and I think that's true for whether you're contracting or full-time or whatever right um software engineers yes you make a lot of money but they're kind of a dime a dozen and like our value add is that we have this other perspective that we're linguists and we're trained in this social science um and I I advocate leaning into that personally um yep that's great um Sarah what about you anything that you did take or wish you had taken um yeah this is this is interesting because I kind of wish that I had done a little bit more of computational type things and encoding things um that I'm doing now but I didn't didn't do in grad school the one thing that I did do that I kind of already mentioned um was I did experimental work and I think doing that really was something that helped me like you know like Audrey was saying no class in and of itself is just going to prepare you for you know going out and and finding work in that way but it really did you know get me thinking about data analysis and and looking at you know how do you manage doing a project and things like that so for me I think it's a little bit different because I would say you know any broad skill that you think you can add to your skill set I think that's going to help you at the end of the day um you know at least that's that's just my perspective but so for me any any skill set that I think I can add and it's something I can do you know I try to work on you know just adding more to my skill set very very broadly yeah uh Dan what about you between the time I left graduate school and I'd say maybe five ten years ago computational linguistics has undergone a really big shift right it's gone from where it was more about working with language on uh on on a sort of on a more conventional level to what uh or is now deep learning and the neural networks and things like that and so the skills that I had that that I had acquired just like the in in my computational linguistics learning in in graduate school um a lot of that is dated at this point what I found most useful were the fundamentals and so what I would say is don't skip on the math right um if you're going to be going into this field make sure that you get a good grounding in linear algebra multivariate calculus a good solid grounding in statistics and probability because no matter what comes up you'll be able to apply those basic skills to what uh to the technical challenges but if you just learned tools in language x that becomes yesterday's news very quickly that makes sense and mckenzie what about you um well I I mean don't get me wrong I I said a few minutes ago that being a linguist is a big part of my professional identity um and that I did like build skills but I agree with what Audrey said is that there isn't like a class that kind of gets you in those like ready for this and I think that um something that I that I wish I had had and I don't know what vehicle would have brought this to me but something that I think would have been important is um like or something that I really struggled with in leaving academia and coming into other fields is is like how to not only how to go through different types of interview processes but like how to talk to like how to talk to and work with people who weren't academics and and I like you may there are probably some places in the world where like I still don't really know how to do that right but it is that's I think that's what I really struggled with and like I like I I I know a lot of things and if I don't know I know how to find out like I think that's like we all have that skill um but there yeah I definitely had like a transition to a world of work that like I was not I wasn't I wasn't ready to I didn't know what was going on that world of work and um and that and there it was a bumpy bumpy time kind of learning that and and um so yeah I I it's hard to answer a question about preparation in kind of a smooth way because like yeah I know a lot of stuff I was prepared for stuff but also like I wasn't prepared for yeah um I want to ask this question of the panelists as well because it comes up when you're talking about going in house versus being a contractor for me when I think about the time that I spend doing the work versus the time that I spend managing my career it's like 50 50 sometimes and that gets really wearing so when I say managing my career it's like looking for new work managing the clients that I have chasing people down for money updating a website um you know maybe sending out information going to conferences not like this but more business oriented things I'm doing interviews like writing pieces for people to promote my business it's a lot so at times in my career it's been 50 50 which is not something I ever expected to be doing like I just didn't think it was going to take that much work to manage being a contractor and a consultant other times it's been more like 90 10 when things are going well but because you're a contractor and a consultant it's never the same it's sort of peaks and valleys because sometimes you'll have a lot of work and you don't have time to spend on promoting yourself and other times you don't have a lot of work so then you rev up a little bit to to do outreach and try to make connections so I'd love the panelists to weigh in on that like how do you feel your balances between work work and managing work um maybe Audrey I could start with you well I have an easy answer because I don't really manage my own work so I have very little time doing that um I will say though that looking for jobs is exhausting which is kind of the same as managing work yeah I think we've heard that from a number of folks who are in the process of looking for jobs and it's something where you have to present yourself enthusiastically every time right like you can't get to your 10th job interview and go like I'm so sick of this just hire me it doesn't it kind of doesn't cut it to do that although that's how you feel inside um Sarah what about you how's your time spent I would definitely agree that it like ebbs and flows depending on what you're doing in terms of of work but I have had times where you know you're you're doing work for people and you're job searching at the same time and you're doing interviews and and it can be really hard to keep everything straight and I guess the one thing that that I would say I mean just to you know I agree with Audrey is job searching is really really tough and really difficult and I guess one of the things that I've learned over time is one thing that I don't want to just entirely push to the side is uh networking so even if I'm you know whether I'm just doing work or I'm doing work and I'm job searching you know no matter what you're doing just at least for me try to always be networking with people networking with people with different experiences and things like that so that's one thing that I've kind of learned that like that's important for me to prioritize as much as I can yeah someone in the job searching itself is a full-time job yes um Dan what about your consulting how do you feel your time is spent or has been spent um consulting I have to agree with you there's an awful lot of sort of meta work that just has to get done um you have to update your website you have to um reach out to your LinkedIn contacts you've got to who so talk to your friends you you got to do all this other stuff to sort of maintain your consulting gig at the same time as that you're supposed to be dedicating yourself to this consulting job and you're right it takes up an awful it takes up an awful lot of your what you thought of as your free time um but in the corporate world when you when you're interviewing for a job it seems everyone has hoops for you to jump through in the interview process um in computational linguistics um a bunch of the time they say here do this arbitrary coding exercise life while we watch every single mistake you make while you're coding that'll be fun um one person made me take an IQ test I was like can we stipulate now that I'm not a genius I will I will refer you or refer you to my children and my ex-wife will tell you I am no genius okay do I have to do this um or and so there there there are every and every company has its own sort of set of gates that they expect you to go through and you have to approach them with a good attitude and a smile on your face at the time and then you can do primal screen therapy once you're done um but even even when you're working for a company you have to think about your career you have to think about what do I do to get the next raise to move into the next category and some companies lay that out very clearly and in others you need to go find yourself a mentor but there's some of that going on anyway but at least when you're working at a company as an employee it's more 90 10 than 50 50 right exactly um I wanted to bring it back around to Mackenzie and I should have said this right at the beginning uh full disclosure I paid her to do work for me and it was great and um I really appreciated your specificity so this is something I wanted to bring up in terms of how you function as a consultant which is that uh you need to be really specific in your expectations how much time you plan to spend on something hourly rates I know we were talking about that in the chat um and when we agree that a project is over so with Mackenzie I came to her with a very specific ask could you help me with this thing that I'm working on we had a good conversation on zoom and she said yep I can help you let me send you an outline of what I can do for you and how many hours I think that will take and I read it and it looked good and I said this is excellent and we did a couple of rounds at back and forth and then she said this is how much time I've spent that's what we agreed on um you know we can keep going or whatever like I'll send you an invoice we can do it and that was great and the clear communication about where we were in the process what the expectations were where we were budget wise was super super important um as a consultant you really have to be on top of that stuff and there are so many horror stories I've heard where you if you don't have a written contract in place or even an email trail if you agree to do work for someone that's like a disaster you can't do that you have to have everything in writing there's a whole website called clients from hell that talks a lot about that and even if you're doing work for a friend or someone that you know professionally sort of you've got to write it down you can't just say sure I'll do that and maybe it'll take me a couple of hours because you will absolutely get into trouble down the line so respect for contracts respect for clear written communication is really really primo for doing consulting work that's something that I learned over time um so Mackenzie uh given that you're such a wonderful consultant how much time do you spend on like looking for new work and managing stuff as opposed to actually doing the work uh a lot of time oh like yeah it takes a it takes a lot of time manage managing work and like looking for looking for more um I'm on the I suppose related point like of communication about the work that you're doing I learned to do so one I'm glad you think I'm a clear communicator thank you um and two like I learned to do that in two ways so one um earlier in my like career I had a job I was a I was a um uh like I guess I was a contractor on an organization's contract for the federal government and um and and so that was like one exposure to a really specific kind of reporting stand like reporting standard and the kinds of things that you had to document and be able to share if anybody asked um and then another experience that I think really helped solidify like what my style and processes for doing that kind of keeping track um of things was working as a um full-time employee and having project management responsibilities and uh and you know needing to kind of at the end of projects write up that narrative about what happened when did it happen how long did it take who did you talk to and so um I suppose that kind of record like that kind of record keeping I think is a skill that I definitely developed on different jobs that I had and it takes a lot of time it takes a ton of time um and the chasing clients for payment part is a whole other area um you think that people would just pay you but they don't for various reasons you gotta you gotta find so we're coming up to the end of our time here there's another panel just after us so we're going to have to wrap up around 1215 inch so I wanted to take the last part of this to see if there were any other questions that people had that wanted to pop in either um on camera or in the chat and to ask our panelists if there were any final thoughts that you had that you'd like to impart to the attendees it's been great so far you guys have been so helpful providing this this great perspective I think it's something that um linguists don't hear about very often like what it's actually like to be out there as a consultant in the world as opposed to the in-house job um I something I've been thinking about just as a maybe this is my last thought but something I've been thinking about is you know throughout this panel that we've been talking about some of the um like questionable and labor practices and and different kind of horror stories in that respect um and we've also been talking about um uh the kind of hustle and looking for opportunities and and you know what comes next and and and that and something that connects like both of those things is that you see those exact same patterns like you have to advocate for yourself and like really hard even when you think that you should be valued and understood you still have to advocate for yourself and that you know some of the ways that people in power will treat you are bad like you see that in industry and in academia like all of the labor practices that we've talked about those things are happening right now in universities and having to um say like you know you mistreated me you can't do this the rules say this you told me that or I wanted like I want to be there I want to do that work I can do it you have to do that as a student too um and so I think that even though uh industry and academia are different um like different institutions different spaces but a lot of the struggles that we're talking about are happening in both places and I felt like I needed to say that and I did so thank you yeah could not agree more it when it's in academia it feels worse in some ways because you're paying for it right you're paying a lot of money to go someplace and have somebody abuse you whereas when you're working they're paying you and then you have to I think always is the question like how much of this do I endure for the fact that I'm getting a good paycheck from this particular place and that's a very personal question that people have to always answer for themselves because of their circumstances not everybody can afford to just fire a client or quit a job it's not that way for everyone so you know we should all be striving to make workplaces and academia better for everyone not just for ourselves um Sarah any final thoughts before we go um you know I guess just Mackenzie you're talking about having to to advocate for yourself uh in different environments um so and I I did mention this before but when you're doing that whether you're you know your job searching or you know you you have to look through contracts there's there's so many things you have to do and so I guess the thing that I would stress is just again build a really huge network of people most of the linguists that I have talked to have been extremely supportive and extremely kind and helpful and you know as long as you approach people respectfully and everything you know it's people will network with you and I guess that would be my final thought is just to keep networking definitely Audrey what about you um yeah I agree with everything everyone's saying absolutely if you want to hear me rail for multiple hours about um problematic and exploitative labor practices in the technology industry I'm happy to do that I'll say that for later um I also totally agree with what Sarah just said and I will make a shameless plug if that's okay um I run a or I co-run um a networking group for linguists in tech it's called linguists in tech you can find us on LinkedIn and request to join and I will add you um it's a really good resource for all the networking that Sarah is talking about um yeah yeah it's a great group um I'm in that group so yeah I would say join that group as well yeah people doing all kinds of different things different levels of career in academia um really the common thread is linguists and technology so um that can be uh a good place I yeah I can send a link yeah awesome support groups we have to support each other very very important um and Dan anything from you there it is I've just found this like really rewarding um you've been able to worry if if I'm a nerd that's why I like working on interesting problems with smart people and you get all of that in this um yeah you also have um like like Mackenzie said there's also the possibility of horizontal violence and mean people uh wherever you go but by and large I've run into smart people who try to solve problems and if you can fall in love with a problem enough to work on it um and and you get a solution it's enormously satisfying um and if that's the way you are wired this is the way to go I would say yeah yeah I I agree completing a project successfully feels so good it really does it validates your your work and your training and and when you solve a problem it's great you've done a thing yeah I mean I I I do miss um being in the university environment and working young minds I do miss that um but I really like this doing a thing and having some some tangible end to what you're doing and you solved a problem yeah same definitely so I'm gonna wrap this up now thanks everybody for attending and thank you to the four panelists who were so enlightening this was fantastic