 Again, to the linguists garden path, getting from here to there with a linguistics PhD. I'm Laurel Sutton. I'm gonna be the host very briefly and the support person is Rachel, who you can see on the screen right now. So in this session, we will examine these questions. How can a linguistics department support students whose career goals may not include an academic position? This workshop describes systematic changes in the linguistics department at the University of Arizona meant to broaden the graduate student's career possibilities on a shoestring budget. And our two presenters today are Diana Arkangeli, who's a professor at University of Arizona and Kerry McCullough, who is ABD at University of Arizona. So I am going to mute myself and turn it over to our two actual hosts. Thank you, Laurel. And thank you for inviting us to be part of this event. In a true academic fashion, I will start with a screen share of a PowerPoint that Kerry and I have put together for this. The presentation as Laurel has said is about some of the efforts we've made at the University of Arizona to help our students understand that there are careers outside of academia for people with linguistics PhDs to understand the nature of those types of careers and how to apply for them and so on. So we have a variety of strategies that we've undertaken. It's been an effort over several years for getting there. Most of these are relatively shoestring. There are a couple that were fairly expensive. So the first thing that we've, well, not temporarily first, but in this presentation, the first thing is that we are overtly proud of what our alumni are doing. We have in a hallway a poster that shows photos of our alumni and it gives information about their degrees and what their current employment is for all of the graduate alumni that we have data on from all of our programs, regardless of their career choice, academic or other. This is really when it's up, it got taken down during a paint job that the Dean's office did and then COVID hit. So it didn't get put back up, but normally it's displayed prominently. And one thing that we were careful of was to have a little list in a not organized by profession or by what the person is doing, but rather, I think ours is alphabetized, but it might be by years, it could be done randomly, but the basic idea is to not make it look like any group is considered secondary or tertiary in this poster. Another thing that we do is we have a similar listing of information on our website about the alumni. This one though includes dissertation titles, which the poster does not just because of space. It also includes percentages of the different career types that our students have gone into to show that people who are in non-academic careers are not a slim minority. Another thing that we do is we invite our alums as colloquium speakers. Part of this is of course, a standard linguistic department academic presentation, but we also have the Garden Path series, which we'll be speaking about more momentarily. The goals of showing our pride in our alumni are to show our current students what the range of futures is that's available to them because what our students are doing is a much broader view than what the faculty are doing. The faculty are fairly limited, we're all academics. But it also gives a way for current students to connect with past students by identifying someone that's maybe doing something they're intrigued by and they can look them up and get in touch with them. And it also serves as a reminder to the faculty that our goal is to help students develop into really happy people doing something they love doing, rather than feeling inadequate if they fail to end up in an academic job. And you'll see this reminder to faculty as a recurrent theme because it took a while to start changing faculty perspectives on this. Another thing that we do is we have identified various university services that help us track our alumni. Most of this comes through our grad college. There's a unit called the Grad Center within it. And these services allow us to get deeper information into the different routes that our alumni take post-degree. And also what they found useful in their training and what they would like more of for the types of career routes they are considering. One of the advantages of this course was that the Grad Center then knew that we were interested in this and included us in a national survey that the U of A was invited to participate in. And that checks on alumni trajectories on a regular basis and then they pass the information back to us. And we use the results of this information to adjust the content of our courses and their curriculum to better satisfy what students are perceiving as their needs. And then the Grad Center helped develop, funded the development of our GPS series, the Garden Pass Speaker Series, which we'll be talking about shortly. Our goals with this is to learn how well the education that we offer is serving students after they graduate from our programs and then to be able to use that, as I said already, in improving what we do. And then also it helps us stay very aware of what the university offers to graduate students as they are seeking alternatives to an academic career. The Graduate College recently introduced a component that is specifically geared towards helping students find non-academic careers. And we've had speakers from that program in our Garden Pass series as well, which has been very interesting and useful information. Kerry, can you talk about the professionals and courses you've gone through it recently? Yes, I can. All right, so one of the degree requirements for linguistics PhD from the University of Arizona is the completion of the professional course. Professionalism is a one-unit course usually taken during a student's third year in the program. And it actually pairs quite well with the linguistics colloquium series offered by our department and it's focused on academic etiquette. While the course does feature some discussion of non-academic careers, the main emphasis is on preparing students for academic careers typically in tenure track roles. Assignments normally involve academic job searches and developing CVs. There can be and normally is an exercise in adapting academic career materials into industry ones. So turning that CV into a resume or writing industry-directed cover letters, but the content of the course is still highly dependent on the instructor and academic at the time. The main goal of this course is to prepare students for academic careers, again, typically tenure track positions. However, having this course presents a clear opportunity to discuss alternate careers, to perhaps broaden the definition of what a successful or appropriate linguistics career can look like and to equip students with the tools to identify those for themselves in the future. And that is what I had on the professional symposium. And that's, I think one of the, just adding to this and my point about educating faculty, one of the effects of the Garden Pass series is that more faculty are becoming much more aware of the variety of things available to our graduates and so are better equipped to actually think about if they aren't able, if they're teaching this course and they're not able to present materials themselves finding who on campus can do it and bringing those people in to provide the information for our students. So this is one area that we see as Carrie said, it has a lot of potential. Okay, so the high ticket items that we've done is, well, modifying curriculum is not a high ticket item. Adding new degree tracks is, and we've been able to add faculty in order to have the new career tracks. But just, so I'll talk first about those, the new degrees that we have and these, I call them new, but they are, each one is several years old. Now, this is something we started doing way back. One of the degree tracks that we've developed is the Human Language Technology Master's degree, which is a computational linguistics master's degree. We have just added an all online HLT degree as well. And these prepare students to enter the tech industry. One of the key elements in this program is an internship and a number of professional connections come out of that. What happened as the HLT degree program got introduced was then we started having graduate level courses in computational linguistics and we've added a computational specialization at the PhD level making use of those courses. The second degree program that we have is the Native American Master's degree which is geared towards people who are looking for some kind of language program role with a tribe or other community that is trying to document or revitalize, preserve an indigenous language. And this has led to a documentation and vitalization specialization at the PhD level. Both of these, as I said, both of these programs have enabled us to attract new faculty in the last three years. I think we've hired a new person in each of these areas. One of the things that is really advantageous for this is now we, both of these programs feed into our PhD program. So people are coming into the PhD program who entered linguistics with a non-academic future as they're in their mindset. And this I think helps the students as they help students who come in just from an undergraduate linguistics degree who had no idea if there being anything else but being like their professor. It helps them see and understand because their friends are doing something different that this is actually a future thing that they might consider themselves. Another thing is that each of these programs does involve the students taking some of our quote unquote traditional linguistics courses. And because of that, then we get questions from HLT students or MAMA students that are more pertinent to their professional interests which is helping integrate aspects of non-academic futures into our traditional linguistics courses. One piece that really is important, I think, is that we have a lot of our NAMA students now who are moving into the PhD program. And this has made it really clear to us that the it is not that we need to think of who these students are because they are not the traditional linguistics undergrad that love languages and love linguistics and is coming on for PhD. These are people of very different career interests and very different interests in linguistics. And so by having the NAMA program and then integrating these students into our PhD program, we are becoming much better in our service to BIPOC students, in particular, the students from indigenous communities. We're by far, by a long shot, not perfect but we are doing better than we used to do. And then another thing that's been very interesting is the number of the students who enter the degree, the linguistics degree program in the traditional way who then encounter both HLT and NAMA as options and elect to get one of these masters on their way to their linguistics PhD, seeing this as giving them more opportunities when they graduate with their PhD and they're looking at the job market. So the part of this that is low cost is what we do in the traditional linguistics courses. The part of it that was high cost was getting the additional faculty to enable us to have both the HLT degree and the NAMA degree. So with our goals with this then is we did approach these two degrees specifically with the idea that these would be students who would be looking at something, looking at non-academic careers, at least not in a higher education domain. But another thing that we are trying to do is make the non-academic career goal a normal goal for students in our PhD programs so that either academic or non-academic is what those are both normal trajectories for students to take. I went, when I was a grad student, we at the University of Texas there was a lot of talk about the hyphenates where people like socio hyphen linguists and psycho hyphen linguists and so on. They weren't real linguists. And one of the things that we are very aware of is that this kind of culture can develop and we do not want it to develop in our department. We want to keep a view on the part of faculty and students that there's not multiple classes to prevent, there's not the real linguist and the other guy, but anyone getting a degree is doing something that is worth doing regardless of their career. Okay, so let's get down to the nitty-gritty about what the Garden Paths Keeper Series is. The Garden Paths Keeper Series or GPS, if I use those letters, invites alumni with U of S PhDs who are working in non-academic jobs to share their experiences with students and faculty at the University of Arizona. Diana mentioned that the series started out as a small professional development opportunity that was actually funded by the grad center at the University of Arizona. And the series survived and perhaps even thrived during the pandemic. And we expect to start up the series again, a new fall. So let's take a little, let's take a closer look at what goes on in a GPS event. So who are we inviting? We typically invite alumni with linguistics PhDs that they earned at the University of Arizona to come and speak at the GPS series. We have seen people come in and talk about their careers in tech, speech pathology, UX, native nations, teaching and government roles. There are a lot of different career backgrounds that these folks have and something that I forgot to mention and kind of going off the loop here is that our faculty supervisor actually has a list of these alumni who have graduated from our program. For newer graduate students like myself who aren't familiar with folks who've graduated from the University of Arizona, this could be a difficult part of this kind of program to navigate. So really lucky that we have them and not eventually leading that kind of charge. However, GPS doesn't just feature UA alumni. We have also invited UA personnel with relevant specializations to come and speak at this series. This includes the Graduate Center Career Counselor and even some of our own instructors who are taking the absence to explore opportunities in industry. Like I said, normally this event takes place or you take place solely in person with a super fun social event afterwards, move to Zoom with pandemic restrictions and we expect to use both methods moving forward on the ball with pros and cons of each. On the date of, we typically ask that our speakers arrive about 30 minutes before their presentation starts and they meet with the smaller planning organization committee beforehand. It's really fun to see the room whether it's virtual or in person open up about 10 minutes before the main event and you get people coming in and being like, oh, hey, I haven't seen you in so long. What are you doing with your kids doing? It's just super fun to see people act like humans. And then we start things off with a presentation normally prepared by the speaker themselves. It lasts about 10 minutes and typically gets at what the speaker studied at the University of Arizona and how they navigated the career search journey to what they're doing now. I have some more information on the following slide but we'll get there in a hot second. This presentation is followed by the nitty gritty, the fun part of the GPS series which is a student-led interview normally lasts about 20 minutes and the last 20-ish minutes depending on the availability of our guests is saved for general Q&A and then a more specific student Q&A at the end. So as I was saying, the presentation, we ask that our speaker prepare a presentation normally about 10 minutes long that will guide the rest of the interview in our speaker series. This varies from speaker to speaker and like I said, typically it provides a how I got where I am story. However, it's very important that the comfort of the guest is a top priority. So we have had speakers choose to not do a Q&A, not do an interview and just actually make their whole GPS experience a presentation that they could control. All right, and now my favorite part of the GPS series, the student-led interview. We have compiled over the last two years a master list of questions that we typically pose to our speakers. Our speakers normally ask for these in advance and we're like, we're emailing with them well in advance of this 30-minute pre-meeting or pre-event meeting. And we're actually constantly adding to this list. So this is the Google Doc that we share with our planning committee. And even as we invite new speakers, we encourage students to come up with speaker-specific questions as well. But there are three general larger categories that we've got our questions under. General, Throb application and opinions. The general questions get at more of what the speaker is currently doing in their role, how they got there, the resources that they have to track down in order to be successful and where they're at. The job application questions, a variety of them, asks the speaker to reflect on the journey they took to get where they are, what resources they used, how they marketed their skills as a linguist, and then asks if they have any advice for someone, whether they're a first year or a distributor, how they would navigate a similar path. And lastly, the opinions section is a little more personal and asks our guests why they chose to leave academia and how they have those conversations with those closest to them. I love this part of GPS. I like to pretend I'm a talk show host. And so I have a few tips and tricks if you're interested in hearing them. But the main idea is that you treat the interview with the conversation. It might mean improvising a little bit, which is exactly what I'm doing right now because I have a screen with you, jumping around on the questions page and thinking ahead, but it's good practice for somebody who wants to be a talk show host. Plus it's more fun, seems more natural, and it puts our guests to use. The last thing I want to really focus on is the student-only Q&A session that follows our more general Q&A session that is left with the last 10 minutes of our timeframe. We wanted to provide a more personal experience and a chance for our students to ask specific questions to the guests. Some of that, specifically away from the pressure presented by attending faculty. Some of these conversations and topics can be sensitive and a little difficult to have with folks in the room who are perhaps a little more influential. This is also a great opportunity to network and to get just more nitty-gritty with the details of what our guest does with their linguistics PhD. Lastly, the goals that we wanted to meet by hosting this series. Primarily involve inspiring students. It's really hard to know what you can do with linguistics PhD, and this series literally brings people in with the answers. It's a great resource, provides fantastic networking opportunities. I've gone to go friend, to go connect with some of our speakers on LinkedIn and found that some of my peers beat me to it. It's just absolutely great. Equally important is the opportunity to educate faculty. Again, they're academics, they've been academics for a long time. And this, the GPS series provides an opportunity to not only get information about careers and resources outside of the academy, but opportunities to brainstorm about ways you can meet student needs. If I can interject there, Kari. It also, for the faculty, it's also pretty clear that these people love what they do and they are pretty clear about the linguistics degree having been a big part of them being able to do what they do. And so it really makes it clear in listening to a few of these talks that if we try to shutter our students out of non-academic careers, we're doing a huge disservice to them. And so I've found this to be not just inspiring students, but also inspiring to faculty. So just quick summary of what we've talked about. To this point, one was showing pride in alumni achievements. Another is figuring out what your university has to offer and making use of it. Developing a curriculum that addresses students' needs and interests, particularly making it possible, particularly students who have non-academic career goals. And then the Garden Path Speaker Series that Kari just talked about, that sort of in some ways wraps all of this together. So before we move on to the next phase of this workshop, I wonder if anyone would like to pose a question to us. Diane has a question in the chat. Susan asks, does the Wall of Fame include people completing a master's degree and not continuing to a PhD? Yes. Sweet. One of the things that I wanted to mention also is with the Garden Path Speakers, as Kari mentioned, I've been pretty involved in the organization of that. And it's been a lot of fun to talk with different alumni and then having them get so excited about, yes, coming and talking and what they can talk about. So we've done two years now of this one in person and one by Zoom and we're starting our third year. And I've been getting people saying that, and this goes back to the she's string budget. It's no problem for me to fly myself to Tucson. I'd love to come back and see people, which is one reaction. But another one, which is to me even more interesting is here are things I can talk about besides the standard that you do. For example, one of our recent alums has been assigned the job of mentor to the new PhDs coming into the company. And he wants to talk to our students, that's Adam, Ken, and Kari. He wants to talk to the students about what it is he talks to people about who are first year out of PhD starting in a company. So it's just been very educational for me and I see Emily's question, how do you convince other departments to do this? How do you convince your own department to do it and to value alts academic careers? And that's where we want to go next in our presentation. But before we do that, are there other questions that people would like to come up with? If someone is, Jordan, this is your question about of course modifications and new specializations are made. Do recent graduates have access to them? If someone has already graduated, the only way they can get access is to come back. We do have one PhD student who has come back for an HLT master's, but that's not a very common thing to do. Yeah, Nancy. Let me ask you a question. I love the story you're telling. I want you to tell it to all the linguistics departments in North America at least. And I wanna hear, have there been any ideas that you thought would be successful that you have rejected after two years or after one year? Ah, unfortunately, you are asking a person who has not been in the department consecutively for the last 10 years. I was gone for four years. And then since I came back in 2017, I was out on sabbatical for one. So there may be things that came up. Where did this program, how long is this program going on? Did I miss that? Two years. Well, GPS started in 2017, was it, 2018? The NAMA and HLT degree programs have been in place for a very long time. Yeah, not those though, but it's the other things. But the other things, the wall of fame, that was there when I came back from Hong Kong in 2017. It wasn't there when I went in 2013, so. Can I admit something? I don't know where this is. It used to be in the, okay, Sue will understand this, and Carrie will when she hears it, but the linguistics department used to be in the Douglas building. And the dean's office moved into the Douglas building. And it started expanding and expanding. And they decided to take over all of the front space in the department and kept pushing linguistics into the back halls. And we kept insisting that that poster stay in the front. So they decided to paint the halls and they took it down and then COVID hit. So it's not gone back up. And that's why Carrie hasn't seen it because she came in about the time the paint job is going on. I don't know whether anybody briefed you on this, but we had a speaker last week who made many of the suggestions that you've implemented about what we should advise departments to do. And so because I've followed her for a while on Twitter and she keeps making the suggestions, and then I heard this coherent presentation last week, I, of course, I'm at the ready with ideas for you because of her, not because of me, but any good idea should have many mothers. Yeah, so go ahead, Sue. Yeah, so what are they, Nancy? Well, I mean, you've done the thing of make a good alliance with the career center, which I think is really important. You've done the thing of the wall of fame and that's excellent. And you've created this speaker series and that's great. And I don't even think she thought about, well, because she's mostly talking to other kinds of humanities departments, she may not have thought about specialized master's program. The professionalization course I've heard about also recommended by anthropology departments and they do a version, some of them are doing a version of that now. And I would just hope that the proportion, here's my general attitude. I think there's enough room in the world for twice the number of linguists that there are already, but not all of them can stay in academia. And so there's plenty of room in the world. And if we double the amount of everything, knowledge about and sharing of information about we're gonna get there and linguists will be more influential in government, nonprofits and industry. So what is an idea that you hadn't thought of that Anne had suggested? I'd have to go back and look at our posters. We actually have available to you and when you have doors again, you may wanna borrow her posters and talk about it. And maybe somebody else has got the poster pulled up and can access it faster than me. I'll put the link to the poster in the chat, but I think one of the ideas, and I'm not sure if you mentioned this that Anne says is to have a session at the beginning of every semester with students and faculty, acknowledging that some students won't want or won't be able to get academic jobs so that everybody's hearing the same thing at the same time and this discourse of, you know, talking about the reality of the situation for academic hiring is just out there from the beginning. So I think that's one that's on the posters that I'm not sure was mentioned for GPS. What else goes into that session? I mean, what else goes into this beginning of semester session that says, okay, not everybody's gonna get an academic job and not everybody wants one? It's part of welcome to the department. We're really glad to see you. You may have heard that most people get academic jobs at the end of their degree program. That's not necessarily true anymore and we want to acknowledge that and we're going to help you prepare for non-academic jobs. So part of the orientation type thing. Yeah, for nuclear, so that it's important to everybody at the same time. Yes. And so make people declare a track right away. Yes. Thank you, Emily, for that remembrance. And then I think another one, which I'm not sure was on the posters, but was, she definitely talked about in her session, was making sure that students are tracked by entering cohort rather than leaving cohort and that those outcomes by entering cohort are made clear to people in the department, both so they can sort of see the trajectory that people take and so that the department can acknowledge that people leave without a degree and sometimes that happens and that's okay. And those people can find perfectly dignified and satisfying career paths outside of the academy and they aren't failures for having done that. So that's another suggestion that she had as well. I think, one of them I heard from you, but I'd love to hear it more well-developed or maybe I'm thinking down the line a couple of academic years and that is making an effort to put projects into courses that give everybody a little hint of what an industry interpretation or a nonprofit interpretation of this assignment would be. Right? Yeah. Yeah, I can, in my own course, what I've taught so far, since I came back from Hong Kong has been graduate phonology courses, seminars and so on. And in the, but also the introductory phonology course for our grad students. And I've focused more because of my own interests and abilities, I've focused more on the students who have an interest in indigenous languages by switching all of my examples to languages from the Americas rather than from all over the world. Which, if you look at textbooks, the vast minority of examples is from languages of the Americas. So, but that was the, that was sort of an effort to make it clear that what we were doing in the class does pertain to languages that the students in the revitalization documentation set our tracks, the language documentation tracks. And you might wanna think about, here's a problem that hasn't been solved and it would be great if somebody in phonology worked on it. And we were trying to figure out how to incorporate it into our conversation design class. And that is speech synthesizers need to be taught what the phonological set is for indigenous languages. And there may actually be some Canadian money to help to create that the hardware upgrade or whatever the firmware upgrade for those speech synthesizers. I mean, if you've got people who are visually impaired and wanna communicate in their home language, which is an indigenous language, there's no way to do it right now, right? And so that's really interesting, not very hard problem, but and it solves a problem for a small community, but it also means if you've got that, then you're gonna get transcription into those languages, which makes it all the more translatable text to text instead of text to speech. Anyway, there are ideas that come up like this, which answer a low incidence problem for an indigenous language and some technology solution potentially. So I have a couple of questions. Do you think the whole faculty is on board with this program? No. No, did you say no or yes? I said no, that we're still working on educating. I think people are paying lip service. I think everyone is at least saying, yes, it's a good thing, but the number of people who are taking the next step is still, I would say, at least half the faculty is definitely taking steps. One of, just as an example, Kerry mentioned the faculty member who's going to Apple for the year, this person has definitely taken the steps. She has gone out and actually gotten herself a year in industry to get the experience and she's not someone coming from the HLT, the computational linguistics track. She's in psycho-linguistics type stuff, Masha, because it's at Chiquina. So it's kind of a, there's the whole spectrum as one might expect. I think we are, I think we have moved, I certainly hope we have moved from the stage we were at some years back, I think back when you were still on the faculty here, Sue, when there were certain faculty members who were known for refusing to write letters of recommendation unless you were applying for an academic job. And I don't think anyone is in that category now. You have small steps, small steps, but I think people are becoming far more aware. And part of it is like, when you're a senior person and you've worked for 50 years doing this and then you have this student that you think is absolutely one of the best students you've ever had and they go into industry and they're ecstatic and they still communicate with you and they come back and say, yeah, this is really cool stuff that I'm doing and you look at it and you go, yeah, that's really cool stuff. That starts to change the person. So it's, to the extent that students are doing it and giving feedback to the faculty, it's really helpful. But if the students go off and they're kind of ignored by the faculty member, then it's not gonna happen. And so what do you think? I mean, so what happens to your students, to the Arizona students? Where do they go? I mean, so you've been doing this program not for very long, but do you have any sense of whether it's providing a kind of, bridge or, well, Karen, this is a question for you, actually. What do you got? Yeah, I actually have. So two people come to mind immediately. Shannon Gropondo and Rachel Brown, who both recent graduates who were actually very engaged with this series, who, Shannon was our leadoff speaker last year, he gave an absolute, he did. He was so involved in this series. He was so excited to come back. He was more than happy to spend like, an extra two hours with students, just like looping around Gather Town, just because he was so happy to engage with us. And Rachel Brown is one of, she's working, Shannon is working in Washington, DC for the Foreign Language Institute, I believe. And he actually got the job because another one of our graduates like vouched for him or she was already there. Rachel Brown is working for User Zoom in Austin, Texas. She loves UX. She is constantly sending me resources about workshops, people to connect with on LinkedIn, all of this stuff, I'm a little interested in UX myself, but she's at the top of our list for the coming years as well. Yeah. A number of people are going into tech industry jobs, even people who do not have any computational background. And that was impressive to me that they convince, they are impressive enough when they start meeting with people. One person was talked about how she kept, she found the perfect job for her. She did work in semantics and this was a search engine trying to do semantic field type of connections. And she thought it was a perfect job and she was a perfect fit. She had the excellent background for it and they were actually looking for someone except her experience was one of learning how these hires go. And she kept getting a yes, yes, we'll get back to you kind of message. And so then she found the name of the person who was doing, who was actually making the decision, went on LinkedIn, saw that that person was connected to someone that also got their PhD from linguistics, asked here that she knew, asked that person to contact the hire and the next day she had a job. And this was something that does not get taught in our professionalism course or did not until now. But now that we've heard starting to understand how these things work out of the academic industry, I guess we can call ourselves an academic industry. It was quite eye-opening. A lot of the questions, well, I'll ask as a moderator or that come from our audience, involve like what resources did you use to find this job? What did you have to learn quickly? Where do I go to learn this skill? So there is a bit of a learning curve, I think, but we're fairly, you know, have a leg up in some regards. Well, Sue made the comment that there's a number of students here and I would really like to hear, I just see Christina's put a comment in. She'd really wish there was more information on how the network, especially outside of conferences. And I'd be interested in hearing from others of you who are students about things that you see in your departments that are either helpful or not helpful and or things that you notice are gaps that you wish that faculty were filling or helping you see how to fill. Speak up, students. Well, give them some wait time. People are composing themselves. I can share a story from when I was a student, although I am no longer a student, which is that a faculty member, I was interested in working in tech and a faculty member encouraged me to go to local meetups. This was before the, this was many years ago, so this was before the pandemic. So I went to the DC NLP meetup, which was, you know, like a meetup.com group. And that's how I networked with somebody who led me to my first job. And there are, there are meetups like that. There's a big one in the Bay Area for NLP. I'm sure there's others for NLP and other parts of the country, but that was a great way to start working on a network outside of my department. And because of COVID, now many of those meetups, you know, it doesn't matter where you are, you can just join into a meetup that you know happens to be a large or an interesting conversation. I mean, I attended a, we had a, somebody named Ginny Reddish come and talk to us here. And I was reminded of the scope of what she knows because I attended the New Hampshire meeting where she was appearing last winter, you know. Who cares? I can go to New Hampshire for an hour on Zoom, right? In winter. In winter, right. And I don't even have to put on my big boots. Here, so there's some comments in the chat. Janice, you want to say that out loud? Yeah. Okay. Provide a little local color, you know. Yeah, okay. So my department actually just started last school year, so I'm in the like inaugural class, so there isn't too much going on yet. But I have been connected with a few of the former students from COGSI who were, who did their PhD. So that was really nice. But yeah, I'm looking forward to having more students to kind of talk to, because right now there's like 12 of us in the master's and PhD. So there's not too many things to talk about yet. Janice, are the students in COGSI are these people who are working in academia or out of academia? So two of the people I got connected with graduated already and they're in industry. One is working for Amazon in Canada. That's where I am. And I think the other one was working in another tech field. I can't remember the name of the company, but doing the conversational design. And then one is in her last year. So she's planning to leave, but she hasn't finished her dissertation yet. Thank you. Janice, can I ask, when you say you've connected with former students, does that mean connecting with them on LinkedIn or have you had like informational interviews with them? What kind of connection? Yeah, it's been informational interviews over Zoom, just getting a chance to talk to them and then connecting on LinkedIn afterwards. Sweet. Yeah, this, Alex, just a sec, but what you just talked about of the connections on LinkedIn and then possibly following up where it's an informational interview, that's one thing that we heard a lot of of recommendations to look for people who are doing things that you're interested in on LinkedIn and contact them and say, hey, do you wanna talk? Or would you mind talking to me about what your job entails and what your company's like? And it's a different type of reaching out than I think we do as academics. And it may take a little bit of screwing up one's courage, but the students that have told me they did it have all been ecstatic with having done stuff. Alex, you looked like you were gonna say something. Yeah, hi. I'm non-technical in faculty at Georgetown Department of Linguistics and I've directed a program that is a applied socio-linguistic program focused on finding careers outside of academia and business government and nonprofit and beyond. And one thing that I think faculty can do to encourage students is to show some connections between what faculty do to network and what is networking and how it's done outside of academia. So it's not that different and in the sense that when faculty congregate in conferences, we go to conferences because it's not so much to hear the latest research, it's to connect with people, talk with people, find out what's going on to really make sure that we know who's in the network and who we can add to our network. And it's the same outside of academia, you just do it in different venues, primarily through LinkedIn and meetups that have been suggested. And these types of career management skills can be built up through university career centers which provide these free resources. So faculty can encourage students to make use of the career center from the very beginning of their program. But that is when you start, you take advantage of the free LinkedIn makeover program that's workshop that's offered by the library or by the media center on campus. You take advantage of any career center that's offering a program on networking and how to do it or anything that's on, that's their specialty and they can do that really, really well. And yes, we can add in our specialization as linguists and how we can talk specifically about linguistic skills in order to connect with various audiences. But there's so much already there on campus that if faculty just encourage students from the beginning to make use of it, it would go a long way to building habits that would then be, you know, it would provide a huge return on investment by the time they're ready to search for jobs. And one thing that I'm not, this will probably reveal a whole lot about myself because we always imagine other people are rather like we are, but I personally have a great deal of difficulty telling a student, oh, go talk to those people in that office because it seems to me like if it's important enough that students go talk to those people, it's important enough to bring those people in to talk to the department. And so my strategy has been to try to get these people from these offices in the university to come and give a presentation to our students and faculty if they'll come about what the office offers so that there's sort of sort of a bigger sanction than just, oh, go to talk to those people, they can help you, but rather we think it's, we think, I think this is important enough that we should be spending our time, the department time talking about it. Yeah, exactly. That's a wonderful bridge. And especially with someone with departmental power like a DGS, when they do that carries a lot of weight. DGS's and chairs have to send this message. The message has to come from the top and beyond that the deans because it's not up to the individual faculty members to try and rectify the situation. It really needs to be like top down to support all of this. So I'm really glad that you are supporting this in the way that you are because your role carries a lot of weight to give that in premature. Other comments or suggestions from students or questions? Well, I was just typing, so I just read it out instead. So one of my classes last year, the professor had the career services come in three times throughout the semester and we have small assignments after that. So one was like just thinking of what we wanted to do, be doing in the next 10 years and we had to come up with like two different options that's everyone saying professor. And then I think another one was just talking about something we've done that can be applied outside of academia and that was worth 10% of our grades. So I think that was a good way to incorporate it. That's a very interesting exercise. That actually connects kind of to one thing. One of our students told me that he had, as a student, he had put together a little app for Tucson. Kara, you may, and I don't know if it was bigger than Tucson, this was Adam King, do you know about his beer app? Now he likes beer. Okay, so he had this app where you could put in like what kind of beer you like and where you live and it would give you the places to go closest to you for getting that kind of beer. Apparently this was fairly significant in his job applications or his interviews that people wanted to see something that he had created and he could put this thing out on his phone and say, well, what kind of beer do you like? Okay, this is the best place to go in Tucson for it. And just the fact of creating some little something and having it there to, I mean, it's like when I hear about it, it's like, well, you just ask your friends and you go big deal and who cares about that much about beer you can just do and you wanna hang with your friends is the real point of it. But he had a different view and he created something that would made it look like he was inventive and thought about things and whatever. So anyway, apparently it did go over quite well in the interviews and his recommendation was that if you're going for a tech job, we should have this little thing that you created and kind of your comments, Janice, about something you've done that could sell outside of academia. This was his thing, his little find your favorite beer app was his sell outside of academia. Diana, I'm gonna make a suggestion and that is when you're saying tech jobs, I think you mean jobs as a developer or some kind you mean a certain range of tech jobs because UX is definitely in the tech jobs and you do not have to know how to program. However, the suggestion was I did this thing can I turn this description of it into something that will sound more like UX and absolutely we think that that's a great idea because what she did was here's the industry way of saying it, she created an onboarding document and process for new volunteers and did it by collecting the information from the subject matter experts who are on hand and then testing it by following new people to see could they use it and then having to reorganize before you put it out. Perfect UX project, right? Yeah. And it will sell her into a tech job, I expect if she wants it. If she wants it. Yes, and I totally agree with you that you do not need to program to be in a very satisfying tech job. We have students in that category. Right, and when I heard Kerry talking about UX that gave me a license to talk. I will say like of the like job descriptions not just UX but UX included a lot of them look for like projects, portfolios and things like that. So these meetups where you can build something, learn about a specific software just so you can say that, hey, I know how to use this. I think encouraging students to go to that is huge. And like Alex was saying that's a meetups are a great place to also network. I actually stumbled upon a linguist working for Figma which is a pretty, or she works with Figma pretty regularly she hosted a Figma workshop at UX at UA last week. And I messaged her on LinkedIn. I was like, I loved your workshop, I'd love to connect. I'm a linguistics PhD student interested in learning more about the industry. And she's like, I'm also a linguist, oh my gosh. And so I think I have some messages from her in my inbox on LinkedIn but it was just kind of a funny little small world that you kind of created for yourself by just putting yourself out there and getting involved, trying to make something that you can use later. We've just, that is the SIG, Linguistics Beyond Academia has been accepted to the Winter LSA meeting coming up to talk about this and other stuff. So I would urge you to tell your parallels in other departments, you know that we'll be talking about some of these ideas and welcome your faculty to testify as adopters of some of these ideas that it's okay, so put positive peer pressure on the rest of the LSA is what I would invite you to join us in doing. It does the, in the sort of structure that you're creating is it purely in the linguistics department or does it connect with psychology and cognitive science? Not so much with psychology which is now in the college of science. With CogScience, since most of the like Mary Peterson is in the site, so she's in science there's more of a disconnect. So we still have a number of students who are getting CogScience liners but the connection is not as strong as it once was. I see, okay. Tangent, very short. I was actually included in a focus group that was spearheaded by or set up by the Graduate Center of the University of Arizona specifically asking questions about professional career development for PhDs who wanted to look into careers outside of academia. And I think when I presented, when I shared that linguistics department was doing a series like GPS, other folks in the focus group were absolutely shocked. They were exhilarated by the idea that this kind of series existed. And it was kind of cool that I could kind of clue them into the efforts that our department was doing. So even though we aren't like super tight with psychology and cognitive side at the moment hopefully by just getting the word out if they don't want to hook up with us maybe they want to start something similar in their own capacity. Yeah. Yeah, I have left advertising of our speakers to others in the department which probably is a mistake on my part so that it's not gone out to other units like cogsine or psych. But as Carrie said, the grad college, the grad center are very pleased that we're doing this and direct other units to follow the linguistics model. You have people from many years ago that, I mean, are the people that you're inviting in recent is that what you're doing? Are you going back further than that or if you know? A combination, a combination. So some of the people have been out for maybe, it's like 10 years or so, maybe the oldest, I'm not sure. They tend to be in the more recent years though. And one of the reasons for that is because we're trying to portray a picture of this is something you can do now. Yeah, you can do as someone with a PhD now, we don't have to have had all this experience to get there. On the other hand, you may remember Allison Carter working for U of A Press and I would still like to get her into talk even though she got her degree years and years ago because she's the only one I know that's in publishing and I think publishing is pretty cool. And so she's one I'd like to bring in just because of that. But mostly the ones we're bringing in are relatively relatively recent, like last 10 years. Janice, did you have a question then? Not a question, just a comment based on what you're talking about with like other departments. And I think that's such a good idea. At my university, some departments have this connection where they allow students from other departments to take courses in there. So one is like CogSci is very one of them because I did my undergrad in CogSci. But in grad school, you can like take courses in digital humanities or computer science and like it's all like approved easier than if you're not in the approved department. So I'm hoping that the linguistics department will do that soon. I know the applied linguistics department has done that already. But allowing students to also just like branch out a little bit to at least test some things out before actually going into industry would be really helpful. Yeah. So we're coming up on 415, which is supposed to be when this session ends. We could stick around a little bit longer if people want to. Alternately, we can go to gather if people want to gather in gather in the plenary room to continue our discussion. I just didn't want us to go too far over time in case people had things to do. So are there any last questions that folks want to ask either in the chat or with their mics on? Or last comments. Or last comments, yeah. Just want to say thank you for the presentation. It's very good to hear that more schools are doing this. So hopefully it'll spread around more. Yeah. Okay. Well, we can wrap things up. Thank you so much for this presentation. I think everybody found it super enlightening. There were lots of great ideas here. It's evangelizing, isn't it? That's what needs to happen is evangelizing. So we thank you for sharing how you've been leading the way at University of Arizona. It's just great. So I think we're going to wrap this up and stop the recording. And thank you all for attending. This was just great. Well, thank you all for your participation. This is really fun to do.