Linguistics Careercast

“You don’t need to find your lifetime career the first time you apply for a job.” Alicia Chatten works in Technical Communications at Kargo, where she focuses on company-internal communication across teams. This consists of technical writing, intranet management, and the development of learning and training materials. She holds a BA in linguistics from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MA...

“Sometimes it’s just one word that makes all the difference.” This episode is a recording of a special live episode of the Linguistics Careercast podcast. Our show features interviews with linguists who have made the transition from academia to industry, at all stages of their careers, and in a wide variety of businesses, from tech to marketing to education and more. The panel was held on February...

“Learn how to negotiate a salary.” Ezra Wyschogrod is a Language Engineer at Amazon Alexa, focusing on entertainment, including music, video, and sports requests from customers. His work spans Natural Language Understanding and Automatic Speech Recognition. He holds a BA in linguistics from Columbia University, and an MS in Linguistics from Georgetown. Ezra Wyschogrod on LinkedIn Georgetown MLC Pr...

“Stand your ground, don’t be intimidated: Never think that you can’t do the job.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021. The title of the panel is National Language Processing and the moderator is Christopher Phipps . Natural Language Processing or NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with automated interpret...

“There are jobs that you could never have imagined – and they’re possible.” David Peterson received a master’s degree in Linguistics from UC San Diego in 2005 and he’s been creating languages since 2000. He served as a cofounder and original board member of the Language Creation Society, and served as its president from 2011 to 2014. He has worked as a language creator on numerous television shows...

“The real technology behind technology is language.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021, and the moderator is Sue Lindner . The title of the panel is Linguists in Technical Communication. Technical Communication includes not only writing, but editing, training, UX design, and other tasks related to communication. We’ll he...

“Be patient with yourself.” Eva-María Suárez Büdenbender holds a Ph. D. in Spanish from Pennsylvania State University and received her Master’s Degree from the same institution. She also holds a Master’s Degree in History. She was as Assistant Professor of Spanish at Shepherd University for 12 years before moving to industry. Today she designs, creates, and delivers a wide variety of language cont...

“Your network is your net worth.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021; the moderator is Minnie Quartey Annan (Georgetown/Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington DC). From #BlackInTheIvory and beyond: The panelists discuss their experiences in and out of academia as they navigate success. the importance of networks, and...

“Why am I doing all this free labor?” Joseph Tyler is is a conversational designer at Uber, where he designs, builds, and delivers multi-modal conversational interactions for mobile, web and chat interfaces. He finished his PhD in linguistics in 2012 at the University of Michigan. He then did a psycholinguistics postdoc in Kentucky and was an assistant professor in Qatar before leaving academia, m...

“User experience is a team sport.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021; the presenter is Nancy Frishberg, one of the LCL organizers. In this session, Nancy provides a historical perspective on the intersection of linguistics and user experience and design. She addresses questions such as: What is design? Who is a designer?...

“Closed mouths don’t get fed.” Victoria Hamilton is a computational linguist with an interest in language learning technology. She earned her Master’s in Computational Linguistics at Stony Brook University . Over the years she’s had a number of jobs, including as a graduate career coach and graduate coordinator at Stony Brook. She is now working as an analytical linguist at Grammarly . Victoria Ha...

“Once you know what to search for in job titles, the jobs will come.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021; the moderator is Alexandra Johnston. In this session, Kelsey Kraus of Cisco presents an overview of selected jobs in HLT industry, many of which make use of skills in NLP, data science, and coding. She covers how to f...

“I’m in the middle of my journey from coursework to career.” Aine McAlinden is a recent graduate from Georgetown University’s Master’s in Language and Communication who is currently transitioning to a career in conversational design. She has experience in discourse analysis, professional communications, and social justice work, and she is also the host and creator of the podcast Language • n • Jus...

“The career you have in 20 years may not exist today.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021, and the moderator is Nancy Frishberg. Our guest is Janice (Ginny) Redish, who has had an exciting and fulfilling career applying her love of linguistics to making written materials easy for the people who must use them. Over the dec...

“Learning how to present your linguistic experience in a way that a hiring manager can understand is really important.” Wendy Kempsell Jacinto was an exchange student in Germany during high school, which deepened her interest in languages. She went on to study linguistics and graduated with a PhD in Sociolinguistics from the University of Washington in 2015. Her research was on language mixing, pa...

“Networking is actually just having quick conversations with people about what they do at work.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021. The moderator is Emily Pace. In this discussion, we’ll talk with linguists who are in their first career role after graduating. We’ll talk about the transition from school to work, what they...

“When you’re looking for a job, you have to get used to things not working out – it’s a numbers game.” Marc Ettlinger is a linguist who is currently employed as a Linguistic Engineering Manager at Meta in California. He received a BA in Mechanical Engineering from Rutgers University and a PhD in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 2008. Since then he’s been employed in the public and private sector as...

“Find a champion. Find someone who smiles, but is ruthless.” This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2021, and the moderator is Nancy Frishberg. Our guest is Anne Krook: She is a former academic who transitioned successfully to the corporate and nonprofit workplaces: she helps graduate students and postdocs transition to non-academ...