 Okay, can you hear me all right? So just for curiosity who's what's the breakdown here? How many seniors do we have in the room? Okay. Yeah, so you're kind of steering this down in the face. It's it's crunch time How many of you have a good idea of what you want to be when you grow up? Excellent. All right. That's one. Hey, that's good, too. Maybe. All right. That's great. Yeah Michelle. Yeah Yeah, well the reason the reason I asked this is because I came to Fairfield in the midst of career change and I really thought I thought for a while I knew what I wanted to be and then I realized that I didn't really think now that wasn't gonna work I was gonna do something else and And so the opportunities that I had here. I think were really Really shaped me in in in significant ways Today when I was getting ready I work at in a digital humanities lab at Yale University It's an experimental sort of thing we're trying to do something for Research in the humanities that's done a lot in the sciences and it means that I spend my days Asking questions in the humanities using and answering those questions using computers in some way And so I was asking around the room and one of the advantages is I get to work with a ton of talented amazing people and So I said I was coming here this evening and I was speaking and I and I said, you know How many how many languages do we know they're about five of us right now two postdocs in the lab and and We have a designer user experience person and and so we started going through the list and I write this down I'm I wrote it down just so that I wouldn't forget We have working in the lab Hebrew people there are people who know Hebrew French Swedish Finnish Norwegian Italian German Chinese Mandarin's and I don't know the difference like how that works, but they were keen to point that out and Spanish and also Portuguese and so that already not to mention then C++ Ruby on Rails all the artificial right all the programming languages, which I thought was really interesting that there was this compatibility right between people that have That are accustomed to learning human languages how easily they take that also to Programming languages programming languages actually are are pretty much a cinch because computers are really stupid So it's not it's not nearly as difficult as learning a human language the other thing that struck me though was study abroad I asked my colleagues and Three of us were Rotary exchange students in high school one of one of The students was an Erasmus fellow. That's the European equivalent And then there was another one who had done she did study abroad in Japan Oh, that's right. I didn't put Japanese in there that she did study abroad in Japan While she was in college So it's just to give you an idea that this is not we're not talking about a part of a university that is focused necessarily on foreign languages and in fact We have we bring to bear though all of that knowledge That we've all brought with ourselves On our own work, and I think it's I think it's really I think it's really important I know that that was important for us when we were hiring Our most recent developer we were hiring someone we needed someone who knew how to speak to humans and to machines And so one of the one of the criteria that we established was well He's got to know at least a couple languages because otherwise it'd be kind of embarrassing for him too, right? and and and that was and that was really it wasn't just about the knowledge of the language It was also the idea of a worldview This is the field that I'm working in right now is sort of an experimental field my PhDs in Italian Language and literature, but I'm now working in a field that is really has yet to be defined and so I Like to think that we're kind of making it up as we go along But by the same token you also need a very high tolerance for being able to communicate clearly being able to tolerate a Certain amount of risk, you know take a little bit of risk in your work being able to tolerate a certain amount of Ambiguity and these are all things that I think have come along with me as a result of both my language learning and my time spent abroad I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that the Support that I received from my Language professors and then colleagues here at Fairfield Was absolutely transformative for me It it really gave me sort of the idea that you know, this is something that I can do That there this is this is something that I can reach for and I think that That's something that is established within a language classroom many times You see your language instructors far more often. You're forced to embarrass yourself far more often in front of your language Professors they come to know you As you start out speaking like a two-year-old Spanish actually no two-year-old Spanish children speak better than you were speaking But still you you start to learn and and you you're in a space where you're allowed to grow and stretch yourself in In really significant ways and I think that that too also when it comes time and and your instructors may not May not like this or not, but when it comes time for a letter of recommendation I would definitely hit up a language instructor because I think that they can speak to your Cross-cultural competence they can speak to your communicative skills and they can speak to your hard-working ethos Because you know after having gone through your language Require that your requirements for the major or for the minor that you definitely have a certain level of Hard-working Initiative within yourself, so I'll stop at that if you'd like to ask questions afterwards I'd be more than happy to answer them both on digital humanities and on changing careers I think that many of you may find yourselves 10 years 15 years down the line in a similar position But for now, I'll see it to my ex-classmate James