 As we said before, this deck is available for you guys to look at. This is gonna be a really deep dive into the event that we put on last summer, which was the Linguistics Career Launch LCL 2021, which we'll get into the structure and how it worked out. We felt it was extremely successful. The output of this was mainly in terms of videos that we recorded just like this of all the sessions, which are available on our YouTube channel. So we'll talk about that as well. So we're gonna do the journalistic who, what, where, why, when, et cetera. And first, very briefly, go through some of the nice accolades that we got because we applied for, we nominated ourselves for the service award and we got the service award for doing this thing. Some of you may have seen Alison's talk yesterday where she actually featured some of the work that we'd done and we were very pleased about that. Some of the people who are quoted here are in this room right now. I think I saw Don here a minute ago. So generally speaking, it was really successful. Sorry, I skipped over Janice's. I'm just trying to save a little time because we need to get going. But we felt like it was worth all the time that we put into it. We got an amazing response and we did have some actual measurable outcomes, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So let me just get through this. All these people who got jobs, it's fantastic. Yeah. And this is that last one is somebody who actually didn't come to the summer event, but she made contact with us at the annual meeting in 2020 and felt like that was pivotal for her to be able to start her non-academic career search. So Nancy's gonna start off in them. We'll just kind of bat it back and forth. That sounds good. So what was the Linguistics Career Launch this past summer? And I will share as you read along, it's the first of its kind intensive international career boot camp for linguists. Have people heard the phrase boot camp? Is that familiar to all the bunches of you? We did it in a way that's slightly non-standard. Boot camps often are like semester long things, but put on by either nonprofits or for-profit organizations that are interested in teaching people coding in a hurry. And we did the focus on teaching linguists how to think of their skills in a broader context in 19 days over the four weeks of four business, 19 business days over four weeks in July, roughly 120 hours and all those different things that you've already read ahead. Let's go on. We had early bird registration at $100 and as we got closer to the start date on the 6th of July, we went up to $150. And we were trying to encourage people to take a course and general registration or just the general registration. We were discouraging people and you can see from the fee structure that we really wanted to say it's not that much take the general registration, learn more than what this one course is gonna teach you. Go ahead. I just wanted to clarify it that what we were offering were two separate courses, actual real courses that you had to take and attend every week, twice a week with assignments and a project that you had to finish. We had two different instructors who were doing that and we'll say it what it is in a second. In addition to those two courses, we had under the general registration umbrella, all these other things, career development, one-on-ones with people talking about their careers advice about resumes and how to do interviews. And that was all covered under general registration. So you could sign up for general registration only and just do all of the career stuff and different sessions or you could sign up for a course without the general registration or you could do both. We wanted to give people options there. We'll talk about the money here in a second but note how low these prices are. If you've ever signed up for online boot camps or courses, you will know that these prices are ridiculously low for the amount of content that we were producing. So here's another answer to what the Linguistics career launch it was. And we already talked about some of these 59 hours of content and in our YouTube channel which Emily has kindly reposted to the chat, you can find out what the topics were, many, many kinds of different topics related to career management as well as selection of varieties of careers. 64 hours or more of networking and guidance events, 250 hours participation from other career linguists than the organizers and so on. So that there were lots of people, both 250 hours that I'm showing here and were completed by more than 100 different people who are working outside of academia. We had 175 people registered. I would say not everybody was simultaneously in all of the sessions but the people who had registered could go in and watch asynchronously. And when we say international, we weren't really fully international but we couldn't prevent people from signing up even though we advantaged people from the US time zones by the way that we organized the schedule. And of course that famous 1500 hours of organizer time which was all volunteer hours. This is just a couple of slides that where you can see the titles of the sessions. So we went from, and somebody I think in the chat was talking about speech path. We went all the way from speech path and language pathologies to human language technology and natural language processing, how-to's, being black and successful beyond the academy. We did a workshop on writing great error messages, storytelling and so on. And the two courses that were offered, both of these people were trained in linguistics although they have different levels of expertise. Brielle is very active in the conversation design space. She had done this course I believe once before for Alex's students but this was her first chance to try it out on another audience. And Naim has got a PhD, I think also from Georgetown and he has been working in software development. And we talked to him about what he was developing this course anyway for computer scientists and we said how about tweaking it for linguists and giving it a try in a shorter form than what your next version will be. And he was kind enough to do that with us. So it was a chance for both of us to experiment together and give each other platform to do that. Note for each one of these, we had multiple people generally on each panel. So I was just reviewing one of the consulting panels and we had people who had been in consulting for 40 years and somebody who started her consulting business three years ago. So we were really trying to go for as broad a spectrum as people as possible who have experience in these areas, who are experts in these areas, who have worked in industry in all of these areas. So the speech path people, that's what they do. They're linguists who do speech path for a living. The error messages person, that's what she does. The nonprofit people, they work in nonprofits. So they're speaking from their experience and in each one we had a moderator who was asking questions and then there was time for Q&A at the end. So what do we mean by networking and guidance events? So we chose several different formats that you'll see we had weekly office hours which might be one on one or might be one on small group conversations about specific documents or here's a job posting I don't understand, am I qualified for it? Is this something I'm gonna be interested in? What do they mean by this? And we had weekly cohort meetings which we learned from some other remote only conferences that we have been attending where we group people by their career stage rather than their physical location or any of their other descriptors. So we had people who were in undergraduate programs or just recently graduated from undergraduate in a couple of those cohort groups and people in master's programs who had just gotten masters, terminal masters intentionally and they were in a cohort, people who were working on PhDs or in a separate group for postdocs and a separate group for people who were in non-academic careers but wanted to think about switching it up. So that was another way to have the, lots of different threads to follow there on how to think about mixing people up. Career mixers such as the one we held earlier today we did weekly and we did one career expo where we offered an opportunity to our corporate sponsors to talk to our audience one on one, one on several. Laurel, take it. Crowded calendar. This is just a sample of what it might look like. So we did not run sessions against each other. So theoretically you would be able to attend everything if you wanted to. I don't know if anybody actually did that. And we tried to space things out during the day so that it wasn't too onerous. You can see for example on Wednesday though things are just back to back to back. So we allowed some passing time at the end of each session you'll see it goes from say 11 a.m. to 11 45 and then there was a 15 minute break in there so people would have time. This is week three but every week pretty much looked like this, there was just a lot going on. We had a goal of 10 to 12 hours of content a week. And I think we ended up over that for every single week. So that was good. Now let's think about the costs involved because we did get some pushback when we opened registration at $100 a pop. And well, for example, if people had attended the Summer Institute in 2019 or if there had been a Summer Institute for 2021 those fees are $2,200 for undergraduates and $2,600 for non-affiliated people. That's a lot of money for four weeks of but it's not that expensive on the other hand. Look at the Berkeley Extension Bootcamp which was $13,000. Now that's a part-time program, right? And you can sort of be flexible with it. You may be familiar with General Assembly and it's one of several for-profit intensive code camp kinds of places. They have a program called UX Design Immersive and they also have one called Data Science. Those are full-time for 12 weeks, $16,000. And similarly, they have self-paced course that you have to complete within six months and those are only $1,000. But we were offering four weeks of intensive in gathering together in shared spaces, a little different. So this was sort of our joking way saying given all that you've just seen, why the hell did we even do this? So the first part is in response to the LSA's long-range strategic plan. We were sort of curious to know if people knew that this existed because it's not something the LSA puts front and center. It's a little bit hard to find on the website but we were delighted when we saw it because 1A, 1, ensure that the LSA increases access and participation of linguists whose primary focus is beyond academia. And that's us and that's the people that we work to serve. Also foster the development and maintenance of networks among linguists by using the special interest groups and that's what we are, we're a special interest group. So all along we've been doing this work, our SIG has been around for close to 10 years now, right, is that correct? 15, something like that. Oh, it's more like that, yeah. And we've been working. 2015, 2015. So we've been working slowly gaining traction, putting on events, getting support and this was the culmination of all that. And we felt like it really worked together with this long-range strategic plan. So that was reason number one. Reason number two, as Nancy was just saying, the summer institute was postponed. So we had originally thought that we would run some of this in conjunction with the summer institute and we had a few preliminary meetings about that, not clear how that was going to shake out in the end, but since that wasn't gonna happen at all, we thought we should do something. Point three, sorry, as Alex was just talking about, I don't think we need to belabor that anymore. Except that there may be some people here who weren't there. So let's just say it fast, you know. The data, actual data shows that there are too many linguists being graduated and there are no academic positions. There really aren't. And this is especially true at the BA and master's levels, but true at the PhD levels as well. And along with that is the supporting guidance for linguists who seek employment beyond academia. And that was what Alex and Emily just presented was how can we stop that? How can we turn that around and provide that sort of support and guidance for linguists who will not find jobs and for some who don't want to find jobs that they really would prefer to go into industry. What can we do to support all of these things? So let's look at a quick timeline. I'll just talk through this very briefly. If you've ever put on a conference, you know it takes a long time to do coordination and something of this size where it's four weeks and 50 hours of content might normally take 18 months, two years to put together. So we started in February. We had our meetings. We proposed this to the LSA. They accepted it in March. And then in April, we really started preparing. We recruited people to work with us, PAs that we paid for their time. All those career linguists we talked about before, sponsors scheduled all that content. We got the technical stuff set up. We'll talk more about that in a minute. We got our sponsors on board in June the month before it started. We opened registration and then we just did it in July. So in a remarkably short amount of time, we put this together, it went off. I'm not gonna say flawlessly, but I will say pretty darn close to flawlessly. The Zoom rooms worked. There was chat. People were able to log in, all of that. Just not mentioning anything in specific as a contrast. I'm just saying, that's how it went. Okay, infrastructure. So here's some numbers. We are very big on transparency. And we want people to know how it all worked. So on the one hand, we had funding. Corporate sponsorships from six companies and we raised $17,000. The registration fees, as you saw on that previous slide showing how that worked out, came to about 25K. And then we had a few individual donations. The LSA didn't give us any money for this. This is something people have thought was the case, but they didn't. So they let us use their logo. As you can see, there it is on our slide right here because we were doing this under their brand. And they gave us a little bit of publicity in terms of tweeting this out and putting it in newsletters, but really we got no money and no support from them. They did not assign us people to work on this. There were no interns from the LSA we're helping. On the expenses side, you can see where our money went. We paid the course instructors. We gave all of the career linguists on our area. We paid the students who helped us. We had some technical expenses. A large chunk of the money that's left now is going towards the video editing and captioning because we have to pay for that. And there are some other ongoing post-production expenses. Example, we had to pay for the gather room for the career mixer today and that money came out of this fund. And finally, we had to pay admin fees to the LSA. This was for them to handle the money. We sold all of our registrations through Eventbrite and because the LSA is a nonprofit, it was easier for them to handle it than for us to set up a separate nonprofit organization just to handle the money. And we had to pay them a fee for handling our money. So that's how the expenses worked out. Okay, just leaving that up there for a second, all right. Well, and wait a minute, you didn't go back once because let's say this again, I think we come up with, we are gonna get there very soon, right? This fact that there's no money to the organizers. So this was all out of love so far. Yeah, yeah, you'll see that. Zero organizer money being paid out all along still. Still true. Okay. So I'll do this and then I'm gonna hand it back over to Nancy for the next part of the discussion. The infrastructure part was as bare bones as possible, but still enough to handle what we needed it to handle. So we had our own domain, we set up a website, we'd built that ourselves, we got a paid Zoom account, we set up the gather space, Eventbrite handled the registration for all the materials we produced PDF. The instructors did some of that, but we did a lot ourselves, including things like those posters that Emily was talking about. We had our own Slack and then we as the organizers met weekly before it started. And during the LCL, we met daily every single morning to make sure that we were on track with this. So again, this was all unpaid work that we did. And we kept the cost to a minimum by using these services like Zoom and Gather that we basically have to administer. There was no technology platform company that handled it for us. We were the technology platform. Right, and we had in our original budget, money for a tech support person who would help to handle all that, but we didn't hit all the budget goals. So we didn't hire such a person. So we did it ourselves. We did it ourselves. Hey kids, let's put on a show. I wanna talk about this business of output and outcomes because I think those are overlapping but not identical. And often we don't draw the distinction. So let's go on and talk about this a little bit. It's obvious that our, some of the output is the YouTube channel and the many videos that are every day getting released there. Thank you, Laurel, for doing fabulous project management on that. What are we doing for those? What we are doing is adding an intro and an outro, a little titling, and we are making sure that we can eliminate as many as possible of those Nancy, you're on mute sequences so that it runs more smoothly. And then thirdly, we are going through and correcting the captions because we know that even though this is a phenomenal technology to have instant captioning and even self-correction by the captions, it's still not accurate enough for our deaf colleagues and it's not accurate enough when we realize that people who are native speakers of ESL as we like to say rely on the captions. So we want this to be at a professional level and that is as accurate as we can. And also the captions that are being automatically produced don't tell you which speaker is talking. And so we've started making that distinction clear. Okay, next item. So that's an output and an outcome. When you think about what we've been doing since the end of July, we did take a break. Everybody went off with their families and hunkered down for a while. In September and October and November, we developed this whole process for the post production and what were our goals and what were our quality line. And by December, we had released a dozen videos but I think it's two more since the new year and we expect there to be more coming up. So that's another kind of output. Okay, but here are further outcomes that you will be interested in. And I think some of the people who are represented in these numbers are present in the room today. At least 11 people have been hired as a direct result of their attendance at the LCL. That's pretty good. 11 out of 175 who registered, that was pretty good. We've got the 45 videos coming of which we've already released whatever, 14 or 15. We had an amazing satisfaction response and I'm gonna let Laurel or somebody talk about our one participant who was willing to express negative feelings in the evaluation form. But hold on one second. Those sponsors were happy and those who came to hire were able to hire. We have made great connections to some other efforts that exist in specific departments. Not only Georgetown has this specific masters program but also we learned things about the University of Arizona's Garden Path series where they invite alumni back as we've been mentioning but they've got some other great connections to local industry and their career office. The upskills program from the EU presented to us and they're a multi-campus, multi-country effort to talk about what kinds of skills will fit with what kinds of professions. And we are learning about more efforts that we wanna be able to refer to and as modeling great behavior at other institutions as well. And so if you know of examples that we haven't brought up, please do bring them to our attention, introduce yourselves or your colleagues. And of course we're always doing lots of networking and that's how we've been staying in touch with everybody and we'd love to be in touch with the rest of you who are not yet in touch and that's through LinkedIn. And if you don't know about LinkedIn, now I said I was gonna do this here. You may know this artifact. This is what's called a Rolodex. This is my Rolodex. I don't know if anybody on this call, Sue Steele is probably in here but I don't know which address. Anyway, the point being LinkedIn is my Rolodex. And it should be yours too. And we recommend that it become yours as well. Yeah. We wanted to be very thorough in our documentation. So we collected a lot of information about the people who attended about the career linguists and then we wanted to get a lot of information from the people who did attend about what was most effective for them and where they thought we could have improvement. So doing satisfaction surveys which is what you do with your customers. The story of the 1%, Alex might be able to help me out with this but we did have one attendee who was really unhappy and we were very concerned about it because it seemed from the things that he was saying he really didn't get the value out of it and felt like it had been a waste of his money. So we dug a little further into his situation and it turned out that it wasn't just that the LCL wasn't helpful. He had other issues going on. And we wanted to make sure that he was gonna be okay. I think that was our main concern was that he was gonna find some help and some guidance. We referred him to another program. We had offered him some, we basically offered to refund his money to say, look guy, you didn't get out of this what you should. And he's on a better path now. So I bring this up only to say that we were very personally involved with the people who attended. This wasn't just putting it on and not talking with people and not caring about people. We wanted to make sure that everybody felt like they were listened to, they were seen, their issues were addressed, that we were making contact that we were learning and figuring out what people actually needed. And that in this post LCL world, we are following up with people to see what we can do. One of the things that we've also done is, well, I personally, and I know the rest of the organizers have, we've stayed in touch with lots of people via LinkedIn. I've looked at people's resumes. I've talked with them about interviews. I've connected people with somebody that I knew when it looked like there might be a job available. We've continued to post a lot of job opportunities to the Slack and to our Facebook group. So it continues. It wasn't just a one and done. It's something that we continue to do right until today. Here's some feedback. This was gleaned from those customer satisfaction surveys that we got and we were really pleased to see that people responded in a number of different ways and that they really felt uplifted and optimistic that they did the things that we said were important to do. As you can see, I'm not going to read through all these and it built their confidence. And that was something that we felt was super important. At times we felt like part of the LCL was just providing validation and therapy for people because it's very traumatic to come through academic programs, especially when you're a PhD. And then at the end of it to realize that going into academia actually isn't going to be your path. It's something that you can't keep to yourself. It really helps to talk about it. So part of what Nancy was talking about earlier with these networking and mentoring and guidance sessions that we had was just talking about this stuff and reassuring people that it's okay and it's normal. And even if your department isn't supporting you, we are supporting you. There is support out there that's happening. And you shouldn't feel like you failed because you're not going into academia. Despite people perhaps verbatim in your department saying, hey, you failed. Not true. It's not true. They may say it to you, but it's not true. They're not in industry, they don't know. All right, besides all this post-production and keeping in touch with our networking, we've been tracking outcomes and we are also developing a communications, oh my goodness, communication strategy about the LCL. We wanna be able to tell more people about all these great things that we've got available and to make sure that everybody who's interested in this stuff can come and find it on our YouTube channel in the drive, whatever. And we're also in the midst of presenting these ideas to the LSA to encourage more focus on careers beyond academia. And I did hear from our contact on the executive committee today that he wants to have more conversations with us too. So that's great. We are eager to see the LSA embrace these ideas. And if it means changing direction a little bit, maybe that'll be a good thing. Yes, I do wanna talk about this. I wanna recognize that there were some important ideas that we can't keep silent about. And I think I've already said this in the presentation once or twice. This would not have been possible if we had been paid at our normal consulting rates. I mean, even at $100 an hour, which is my nonprofit rate, that's $150,000 that we did not get in the two and a half months that we did recruiting for sponsors. However, an ordinary two-year timeline, we might be able to do that. Faculty attendance at the event was very disappointing. We had hoped to have at least a quarter of the attendance be from faculty, but I think we were way low on that. If people didn't show up for synchronous sessions, they may have gotten lost. I don't think that was really true. I mean, if anybody reached out to any one of us, we would have responded, but I wasn't able to keep track of all 150 or 175 people. I was very aware of who was in the course that I was auditing and supporting. I was very aware of who showed up at the sessions that I was hosting, but I also was aware that after the first week that I wasn't myself paying attention to all of them. We, because we chose to work in US business hours, we actively discouraged participation from Asia and Europe. Nonetheless, we got people there who were from Asia and Europe and participating, so more power to them. We didn't have the resources to give anybody a scholarship this time, but we encouraged departments to do that, and we did get a cooperation from several departments. Alex is gonna remember which ones, but we would say if we were to do this again or a similar thing, then we would definitely encourage departments to underwrite their students and figure out what's the right way for that particular group to make a decision among competing, a scarce resource if it turns out to be that. Anything I left out? We didn't put this in the slide, but I will also say that the attendance from members of the LSA was also disappointing in that I don't think we saw any of them. So. No, no, no, no, no, no. There were a couple at. A couple? Yeah. Okay. At certain, Sanjay Leenhardt showed up at least two sessions that I'm aware of, and I think there was somebody else at another one, but given that there's 10 members on the EC and so on, that was not so many. Yeah. Alisha also, right? Thank you. Right, right, yeah. So people have been asking us, you gonna do it again this summer? No. The answer is no, we're not doing it again this summer. What are we gonna do? Well, we're thinking about it. We have some recommendations and you've heard some of them in the previous session for the faculty and departments. What can people do with the materials and the outputs that we have now without putting on another event? We've got this YouTube channel. We are encouraging people to do watch parties, to look at those videos, to look at them together, to discuss them or to assign them and to say, how does this impact your career path? What does it mean to you? Creating those opportunities to introduce alum to careers beyond academia, the ones who are out there in the department have those meetings, partner with those career offices. We've got these materials, posters, videos, supplemental materials, figure out where your grads are working now, all the things that Emily and Alex were saying before. And also to encourage course projects that use these real-world skills or challenges, Arizona's doing this, they talked about that in their video for Garden Path, which you can go and watch, that they've got projects that happen within the courses that actually have real-world applications so research that people can do. That would be really helpful to people to see what that actually looks like. For the LCL, we're thinking about whether we want to put on another event like the one that we've just done. Not this summer, maybe the year after. Maybe we could partner with someone else to do it. We've looked at similar efforts that the AAA is doing, the Anthropological Association. We've looked at other events that happen to see whether we could do something. Maybe it gets split up into smaller sessions across a longer period of time. That might be something useful. We're just not sure, and we are definitely open to taking suggestions from people as to what we could do. That first point that we looked at before, what about the organizers? We're not getting paid for it. That's still a sticking point because we all have careers and lots of things that we're doing and we can't contribute another 1,500 hours of unpaid labor to make this happen. It's just not humanly possible. So we wanted to end, and I'm glad to see we've got plenty of time at the end both to answer questions and to talk about this, is to flip it back on our audience. What could your department do? What could your alum do? What could you do to make this happen locally rather than relying on the LCL to always make it happen? We want to encourage people to lift themselves up as much as they can from a grassroots perspective, make the change happen at the department level with some of these tools that we've already given everybody. We want to see people engaging, coming up with ideas. You know, we had ideas, but you guys have better ideas, right? You're on the ground, you're in the middle of it. We want your better ideas and we want to share those around with everybody. And maybe it's also appropriate to say here, we do recognize there are barriers to your doing this if you are faculty and if you are a department head because what are the rewards for you in those roles? The rewards to faculty are as always tenure and promotion, but the reward to the department comes because you've placed students in prestigious university jobs. And so somehow we need to flip that switch at universities and find a way for the administration to acknowledge that you are placing students in jobs, in careers that they can continue to make a living at and recommend your institution and recommend their colleagues come back and get a graduate degree later, you know? So there is a marketing part of this back to the institution, this being helping students find jobs that are satisfying to them, use their linguistic skills and earn them a living. So if we can, I think this would be a great time for you all listening and sitting there in the chat to think about this a little bit and let's do some brainstorming. Again, like I said, we'd love to get some suggestions from you as to what your department could do, what your alum could do, what you could do, but also what we could do as the LCL and also to hear how you feel maybe the LSA could additionally provide some support. As we said earlier, we've made some suggestions to them about what they could do to help further our work, but if you have new fresh ideas, we would love to hear that as well. Oh, hey, it's Monica. Hi, Monica. She says, I like your idea of organizing watch parties for our grad students. My one worry would be that there would be questions at the end that I couldn't answer. That's entirely possible. If you collected questions, we could field them, but I think more than answering questions, it would be more of a discussion to see what they think and maybe how they feel about what the information is that they've just reviewed. Seeing career paths presented in this way or overviews or advice, all of those things, I think could be incredibly helpful to students. Maybe not focusing so much on how does this work, but how do you feel about it and how could you use this going forward? And relatedly, some of the questions that you might come up with about how do we do this could be answered by the career, somebody, a career officer from your campus. Yeah, absolutely, or an alum. I mean, just for example, I keep coming back to the speech path one. If you have an alum who is in speech path, watch the video and have them come and then they could talk about their own experiences and answer questions. And as I said to Laurel privately a couple of days ago, the speech path one was one I realized we had to have because it's been a career option for linguists for many, many years. And given our short recruiting timeline, we had five or six people, but the only two who were available during our summer program were two who were actually in the same work situation sort of. One that is in a school support setting. Whereas I know that there are hospital or doctor's office or private practice or speech and hearing societies, the all kinds of different employers for people in speech path and communication disorders. And so I'd love to be able to feature that another time or even a department choosing one of their alumni who represents a different sector would give much more richness to that particular presentation. And I wanted to add to Monica's great question. I'm so glad that you raised this. I think too that if we get, we've experienced getting questions we don't answer in our content areas as faculty and we know what to do with that. We're pedagogues, we know how to handle that. We know how to find out the information and we also know how to model a response when we need to figure something out. So we, I think there are a couple of ways that we could handle questions that come up when we're watching these kinds of videos or that students have about careers beyond academia. We can show them how to find out. So we can point them towards other resources. We can show how important it is to reach out to people and broaden professional networks. So all the people who appear in our video are real live people, just like the people who publish in peer reviewed journals and we see as a byline. These are people who are out there in the professional world and we can model this kind of networking and reaching out to pose those questions to our colleagues in these different fields. And in our next session, Chris and I are gonna talk about productive networking pathways and how to reach out to people. So you can guide your students to actually connecting with people to get their questions answered to do informational interviewing, which we'll also talk about. And you can also model finding that information from, well, from Google, from LinkedIn. So there are a lot of ways that we can transfer our skills and pedagogy to those kinds of questions that put us on the spot when it comes to careers. None of us know all of this stuff. We just have to know how to find out. So Oya Tayo asked a question and I'm not sure I understand it, but it's a nice idea, I think. Is it possible to collaborate with LSA to get first timers sign up or contribute a little toward LCL during registration? And I guess what you're talking about is make a contribution for the annual meeting during the time of the annual meeting to support the activities of LCL. Nice thought, hadn't thought of it before. We can certainly pursue that and see whether that's gonna help a little bit. But at the same time, I wanna say, it's not gonna be $150,000 from contributions, right? I think this is a good time to maybe elaborate a little on the career expo and the sponsorship part of it since that was a pretty big chunk of money. We asked a lot of people, but it was all through networking. We did try some cold calling and that really didn't work. So all of the money that we got from those six sponsors was basically through, we know somebody at that company. And so in exchange for the money that we got from them, they got certain perks. So one was being present and having a table at the career expo so that they could talk to people who would be potential new hires for them. There was branding that was put on the website. We set up one-on-one sessions for the company with some people who wanted to come and ask about it. They were featured at the Mixers. So they got something in return for it. Yeah, we had a virtual booth at the Virtual Career Expo. So for them, it was an investment, right? They were giving us money to have access to people who would be good employees for them for linguists to learn about their company and for them to learn about linguists. And in fact, some hires did happen post LCL, which we were thrilled about. If we'd had more time, we could have had a lot more money. If we'd just had more energy to go and canvas people, because as you probably know, just from hearing people talk, a lot of companies don't understand what linguists do or what their skills are, some of them do, but we are working to educate employers about why linguists are great hires for certain positions. So in things like computational linguistics, it's kind of obvious. If you have those skills, you're a computational linguist, you get a job as a computational linguist, not so everywhere else. Example from my own field, so I have been in marketing for the past 20 plus years, specifically in naming and branding. There are other linguists who do the same sort of thing. And I think that linguists are a great fit for marketing because we have such skill and expertise with a language. And that's what marketing is all about. It's language used in many, many different ways. But if you go to Interbrand, a marketing company, and you say, hey, I'm a linguist, I think I'd be good. They're gonna look at you like, what do you do? How many languages do you speak? They're not as knowledgeable about why linguists would make a really good hire. And that's something that we want to continue to do. And we think having these expos and contacting people and explaining to them why linguists make great hires would be terrific and it would really benefit them. So that's an ongoing process. The ones that we got, those six companies either knew about linguists, wanted to hire linguists, were willing to invest that money to get access to linguists. So it's a challenge that we continue to face but we want to keep working on that so that eventually industry as a whole understands linguists are not just polyglots, right? Linguists are people who understand about language and have a specific special place in the hierarchy. You have great training and you can use it not just to translate, not just to do computational stuff but in all aspects of language. What question, I'm just gonna ask some questions. You know, what are you doing currently in your departments or what is your department doing for you depending on your role that has started to open up the career ideas? Or what do you feel you could ask of your department from the ideas you've heard today? Brendan, please. If anyone else wants to go, feel free. I have a pretty big mouth so I'm here in silence. I'm like, well, I don't know what we're doing and maybe it'll get some conversation going. So here at Texas Tech the last two years, I sympathize with all other faculty members who are like, okay, I specialize in this. I wanna know more about that. I'm not an expert in this. So in the last two years, I've just brought in contacts and friends of mine who are in industry and we've brought them right through Zoom, quote unquote to campus virtually for really informal chats with our students. And I love the part that you all said every time when you invite someone, give them an honorarium because nobody should work for free and that's their time and they need to be paid for that. So we've been doing that at Texas Tech the last two years. This fall, we had a speaker series of linguists in industry and so we had one individual from Amazon, another from Duolingo, another from Monkey Learn and then a freelancer. And so I think, cause I know there's lots of things where we could watch videos and I think it's been really useful kind of the more personal touch of, hey, these are my colleagues. I studied with some of them. I know them through this and it was, I think it was really good for our faculty as well as our students to be able to see, right, basically we had set questions for them, open up the students, but I think what was great about it and I framed it to our students of, hey, I'm learning just as much as you are. The expert is not me in this room, the expert is our invited guest. And I think it had a lot of dialogue going on. I've said a million times over, please get LinkedIn, please get LinkedIn. And now all the students are like, wow, did you know about LinkedIn? I'm like, yes, I did, but I'm glad you heard it from my friends in industry. And I think it's been something that's really good that it's now challenging us, the faculty at Texas Tech to talk about how do we want our program to look like and what skills are they using the industry that we could also incorporate in our graduate seminar. So again, I claim to know nothing about this, but it seems like it's working. It seems like there's now, there's a changing narrative happening in our department where it's no longer, oh, plan B is not academic. It's like, no, no, no, they're equal plans and actually there are no jobs in academia or very, very, very few. So I think that helps. It makes it a lot more personal. Like I studied with this person or I know this person and look what they're doing. So I don't know if that could help spur more dialogue, but that seems to be something that worked this year and I'm all in for hearing anyone else's ideas and on what's worked there. Good stuff. That's great. I mean, when you said, I don't know anything about this. You know a lot about this. You've been doing a ton of work already. I mean, that's an excellent start. It's what we heard from the University of Arizona people. They have the same thing where they have somebody come in and it's not cash, you say casual, but it's a planned thing, right? It's part of the program. It's not just, oh, we might do this as a social hour. Like, no, no, no, this is something that's important to the students. So making it more formal on a regular basis, getting people lined up and getting people excited about it, that's incredibly important. And Dora. Yeah, hi everyone. I'm a grad student. I'm at MIT, which I feel like is very well known for being very theory and academia oriented. I feel like there has been some, but like this is my fifth year. So I've been here for a while and there has been some positive change in the last year and a half. In particular, two alums have been invited to give a talk plus one other person from industry to give a talk about their experience. They all do different kinds of industry jobs. So all of you mentioned that and I think that was great because that was for us students the first time that we would actually hear about non-academic jobs and would just have an idea about what is out there what are the particular options because mainly I think we know like, oh, there is tech but like what is beyond tech and what is intact, like what kind of positions. And then the, I think the greatest improvement that happened was this year where Hadas Kotek is now back in Boston and she's affiliated with MIT, which is amazing for us because she's emailed out in August asking like, oh, isn't anyone interested in sort of a non-academic job workshop for internships? And every year there's a tradition of academic job workshop for graduating grad students but it's never like it's always about CVs not the word about how to write a resume or anything of the sort. And Hadas didn't have like a clear plan in terms of like she had some ideas what we would discuss but everyone was allowed to bring in what they wanted to hear about we did specific sessions on interviews practice interviews, resumes, criticizing each other's resumes and it turned out to be a whole semester long workshop which was great and like, I mean to me personally like I got an internship and I really don't think that I would have been able to do that without this just because well, I had no idea about how to write a resume or how to apply to things or how to use LinkedIn or anything of the sort. So like that's my super positive experience which comes sort of outside of the regular faculty. So, but I do think that reaching out to Adams even if your faculty is not doing it you can personally do it. Like I did email personally people who I know who have graduated a couple of years ago some I know personally some I don't and everyone was super happy to help. So yeah, that's just my experience. So I'm hearing you say I'm hearing you say that you are appreciative of the career alternative career supports including the semester long course and you learned a lot about networking. Yes, yes. And that's not something that so this is something that the students have discussed at various student meetings a lot but the faculty was not doing anything up until I think like it was like a year or year and a half ago and there was the first time that there was a talk by an alum about even though people have been going into industry for years and years. So I feel like students need to push sometimes sometimes hard to sort of get their needs met. And it's hard because sometimes you know you just feel like people are not listening to what you want or what you need but my experience is like if you don't shut up then eventually they will get something done. I'd like to address Monica's question in the chat about I know what we would give as an honorarium for an academic talk what would you offer someone in industry? Just wouldn't want to offend them but on the other hand we're not a wealthy program. Any honorarium offer is better than nothing kind of the theme of what we're saying. So at least make it equal to what you can give to your academic research talks. We have that model at Georgetown of giving $300 to our academic research speakers. And in my program, I also offer that. And especially if it's going to be a talk that is highly researched and put together. Some people are thrilled to be offered that by an academic institution because often we ask our alumni to speak for free and we're used to being asked to speak for free as alumni as well and as academics. So just offer what you can and that effort will be appreciated. And also, you know, many people in industry in some areas are not allowed to accept honorarium as well. So that's true for government. It is also true for certain large organizations where you are not allowed to accept money for outside gigs. So some people will refuse and turn it back or say, please consider it a donation to your program. So don't feel bad if it's $100, $200, $250 anything is better than nothing. I think we should say thank you to everybody for sticking with us for this part of the presentation. And if you need to take a break, give yourself a break, come back soon and we're gonna start on the third hour of our careers for linguists, linguists for careers. And that's gonna be Chris and Alex next up. Mm-hmm. And you can continue to put comments in the chat and questions in the chat and anybody who has to leave to fill their coffee, please go ahead and come right back. Thank you all. Good questions. Thank you, yay. Thank you for sticking with it, yay. And Dan, I saw you had your hand up earlier if you want to chat now or offline or put it in the chat, whatever you like. Your choice. Maybe I could just say what I was gonna say if people are still around. So I'm a fourth year postdoc at the University of Maryland and I wanted to say that in my experience, I think at this point, a lot of the faculty that I've known are positive about, you know, the possibility of alternative academic careers or non-academic careers, but there is sort of an issue where oftentimes people just aren't aware of what's out there, right? And, you know, we were talking, as you were talking before about how important it is to not sort of view that as like a negative path at the same time, I feel certain, like, you know, I guess I would grieve sort of leaving my academic career at this point, right? And part of that is because to me, it's still not 100% clear what else is out there. So this kind of event that you're putting on, I think is extremely helpful and, you know, I was a little sad as you got to the end of the talk to find out that you're not able to do these career launch events every summer, right? So yeah, thank you so much for putting this on. And, you know, it seems like maybe the next part of this is gonna be about what is out there. So I look forward to that, but from my perspective, that's sort of the bottleneck, you know, for those of us who have sort of been firmly on the academic track, just to like, yeah, get a sense of really what's out there and to talk to people who are not just in academia. So I wanna plug another resource that I'm about to add to that Google Drive folder. I'm putting it in. To your point of what's out there, thank you. So Nancy's just added the link to the Google Drive folder to the chat. This resource is not in there yet. But a few years ago, 2019, I wanna say, we did a survey actually of linguists outside of academia. This was a very small survey and very limited in some ways. But one of the things that it has, one of the things that was produced from it is a spreadsheet with information about, you know, like what's your current job? What was your first job out of academia? What's your degree in? What was your linguistic specialty? We are, of course, by no means saying that this is like the end all be all list of what linguists can do. This is the data that we were able to capture. But if you're in that phase of trying to figure out what roles are even out there, I would just plug that resource. In addition, of course, to the talk that's about to happen, that spreadsheet may support your search as well. And, you know, Dan, you raise a lot of really great points. One of which is, you know, the identity work that is necessary as you grieve. As you grieve change or adjusted expectations. So within our collection of YouTube videos from the career launch, we do have a video that speaks to that identity work and acknowledges how difficult it can be to shift your expectations about the type of job that would fulfill you and would make use of your training. So we'll put a link to that as well in the chat. And, you know, you're also meeting a lot of people here who can be part of your support group and community. Please connect with us on LinkedIn. Reading our profiles, seeing who we're connected with and starting some conversation as the way to find out about some of those pathways and roles and how people write about those roles. And in our next hour, we are also going to just give a broad overview, very broad. And thank you, Nancy, for posting Charlotte Lindy's video about navigating that inner journey. So I think if we feel ready, we are recording and we are ready to go. Chris, I don't see you on, there you are, Chris. Hi. Hi. So again, I'll just remind the new people who've come. We're recording this session. We're going to engage in post-production later to separate out these hours and we'll post the recordings on our YouTube channel. We are posting resources in the chat which include all of our slides and other links and resources to get you started and reassure you that you have a community and you have some starter kits about careers beyond academia.