Greetings and happy new year from Salt Lake City! I’m out here this week for a couple reasons. First and foremost, my new employer has offices in the area and I’ve got a series of meetings over the next few days. Even though I grew up just across the mountains in Colorado, I haven’t been to Salt Lake in over a decade, and so I figured I’d come out a day or two early and have a look around. That turned out to be an amazing decision, because though I didn’t realize it, this weekend has also been the conclusion of the *the* big linguistics conference of the year, the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.
Now, as I’ve said before, I don’t really consider myself a linguist anymore despite having studied it for so long. Clearly I’m not much of one if I don’t even keep track of where the biggest events in the field take place! But I still have lots of friends from those days and I was excited to see who would be around. Then, as it turns out, my friend Anna Trester was organizing an event at the conference on careers outside of academia — just a couple hours after I landed! Anna has a great blog called Career Linguist focused on how to put linguistics training to work outside of academia, and organizes lots of in-person and online events on the topic as well. I’ve been a guest in one of her regular interview segments, and I was more than happy to crash the conference event and once again piggyback on her good work.
Ph.Deli. 