Dr. Hadas Kotek 🦄🎗️
@HadasKotek
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Linguist in tech | NLP, data, safety | former academic | AltAc advocate | cat lover | feminist | she | greyspec | 🏳️⚧️ ally | BLM | powered by coffee & spite
Cambridge, MA
Joined September 2014
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Hello new followers! Time for an intro thread: I am a former academic linguist currently working in tech. I post about
#AltAc
careers for academics, linguistics, AI/ML/NLP, gender bias, cooking, cats, and occasional random thoughts. I write a blog with altac content, links in 🧵
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When I proofread my own writing, I can repeatedly read what I intended to write and not what's actually on the screen in front of me. Just this hour I probably read "high unusual" as "highly unusual" at least 4-5 times, not noticing the error. Does this happen to anyone else?
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A common convo I have with PhD students who are about to graduate:
Them: I haven't done anything useful/good/impressive
Me: You got good grades in undergrad
Them: right, but
Me: and got admitted into this grad program
Them: ..
Me: and got a fellowship / other financial support
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Academia is such a weird place. You are excellent at specialized, complex, difficult things that are highly valuable; but you live in a bubble where everyone does it too, so you don't realize it's rare and valuable, and no one tells you. So you graduate believing you know nothing
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Become unbutterable!
Ah, here I am again. In the very place where you claim I am “not allowed”
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tl;dr being in the academic cocoon it's easy to forget that getting through a PhD program is one heck of an accomplishment. It teaches skills and develops expertise most people don't have. It's a valuable and valued experience. Stop underestimating yourself!
#AltAcChats
#phdchat
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@katiedimartin
Semantics talk, can’t remember what about anymore. Student who is on the job market. The talk is fine but the first question points out a fatal problem with the analysis. Student replied “Oh. You’re right. Yeah, this approach can’t work.” There were no more questions after that
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Academics: the results of your research are less relevant to getting an
#AltAc
job than the skills you used to obtain them!
Here's a 🧵 on transferable skills translated into corporatespeak, including resume bullet points that describe my own academic career:
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@queenjulesverne
IMO there are only two reasons to get a PhD:
(a) you want one
(b) you want a job that requires one AND you want one
Doing a PhD without absolutely wanting to, even if it's for a dream job (but without the passion to sustain you for the duration) is a nonstarter
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Tip of the day: If you're a linguist looking for a job in tech, a job with a title that includes the word "linguist" (esp. "computational linguist") may **not** what you should be looking for. It is most certainly not the **only** job title you should be looking for
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At an NLP conference, having to tell a senior person describing a new idea “linguists have a name for that, it’s called a conversational implicature and there are decades of research on it”, which is kind of depressing but I’m glad I get to be at the table and say such things
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I don't know who needs to hear this (well, actually I know one person, but now you all get to hear it): NO ONE does all of the assigned class readings. It is both not humanly possible and not a good use of time. Triage, prioritize, skim!
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Hot take: linguistics is one of the best fields for learning basic common sense
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My mom is learning Spanish, French, German, Russian, Swahili, and Japanese on
@duolingo
. Like, actively, truly making progress on all 6. She is an inspiration for how to do retirement 💜
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It's only
#NationalGrammarDay
if you celebrate the beauty and complexity of non-standard grammars. Otherwise it's just sparkling racism
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Interestingly this problem the model has in the third answer isn't also flagged in the second answer, which has the same type of structure and reasoning pattern 🤔
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Him: the brain works like ML models
Me: I disagree
Him: maybe if you knew how models work
Me: I deal w large ML models at work
Him: deep models!
Me: yes those too
Him: …and knew more cognitive science
Me: I have published papers in neuroling
Him: … and language!
Me: ACTUALLY
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Me: and you completed PhD level coursework
Them: ..
Me: as well as multiple projects and papers of varying lengths
Them: ..
Me: and you compiled research insights into written form and presented them to others
Them: ..
Me: and you're currently working on a multi-year innovative >
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And a similar example apparently reproducing stereotypes in the music world. Coming in with no priors, I would have had a hard time guessing the gender distribution but apparently GPT-4 knows:
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@katiedimartin
The question wasn’t asked in a mean way and yes it was the right response but also I’m pretty sure it was a big part of the student’s dissertation and 😬😭😱
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PSA: The US is switching to Daylight Saving Time this weekend but it'll be another two weeks before Europe does. Just in case you needed additional timezone confusion for your multi-participant meetings 😱
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Hello linguists and other social scientists outside academia! I am collecting as many diverse titles of
#AltAc
jobs as I can find. Please share yours! Bonus if you have a link to a job ad with a description of this job, or if you can add a brief description of your own
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> project that's advancing the scientific community's understanding of X
Them: ..
Me: I'm going to guess you organized some reading groups or conferences or other multi-participant, multi-speaker events
Them: ..
Me: and you've taught complex material to diverse audiences
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This is your periodic reminder that if you got an academic job, you're part of a substantial pool of individuals who are good enough and part of a very small pool of individuals who got very lucky. Maybe keep that in mind when you give others advice about the job market
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Steven Pinker is featured on the LSA lists of media experts and distinguished fellows. He has a history of downplaying sexism and racism, often misrepresenting facts. He shouldn’t be allowed to represent linguists and Linguistics. Sign the letter:
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Are you a linguist or other social scientists thinking about an
#AltAc
job? It can sometimes be hard to find the right job titles and know what the job is actually about.
Here's a 🧵 on types of job that don't require a lot of coding or technical skills:
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New kiki-bouba variant just dropped
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Me: you probably put together teaching materials, designed assessments, provided detailed feedback to learners
Them: ..
Me: you probably also collaborated with others on your work
Them: ..
Me: I bet you recruited participants for your studies and wrangled all aspects of that
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Me: I bet you taught yourself some complex research techniques, be it quantitative or qualitative or both
Them: ..
Me: you can persevere and overcome ambiguity and challenges
Them: ..
Me: you're one of the foremost experts in the world on The Thing That Your PhD Is On
Them: ..
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Me: You've read and digested some highly specialized, dense, hard-to-read text
Them: ..
Me: and distilled insights, figured out how some ideas connect to others, support or challenge them
Them: ..
Me: and how to test the limits and limitations of those ideas and insights
Them: ..
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Ling distraction: what the biggest language misconception that you'd like to correct in people with no ling background?
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Unpopular opinion, but I sort of admire very young children who at some point(s) in the day just decide they've had enough and physically flop to the floor. That's very good self-awareness there 🙃
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I am a linguist in a film. I speak the obscure language of the terrorists in the film, as well as every major European language, obvs. I have strong opinions about the "right way" to speak and comment on others' speech. I use the IPA incorrectly and have never heard of semantics
I’m a biologist in a film: No matter what I’m looking at, it’ll be through a low-power light microscope. The sample will also be on a sealed slide but moving. I work for a super villain at a private company, never an academic lab. I don’t struggle calculating moles or dilutions.
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@NateSilver538
I dunno, if it were me I want to think I’d be more careful about advertising so loudly that I’d never heard of the entire field of linguistics… maybe be less proud about my extremely obvious epiphany that there’s a whole field of study around. But apparently that’s just me
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Calling all linguists: what would you like tech folks working on natural language to know about language? (Keep in mind, people hired for these roles are often engineers, or have degrees in CS and other STEM fields, and don't have a background in linguistics.)
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Holy raciolinguistics batman. That is how students from certain countries are taught to write (Asia/Africa, in particular), and this is a particularly dumb reason to filter them all out. On the other hand, this whole post is a big red flag, so it's probably better for them anyway
In your application letter for
#PhD
/ postdoc, NEVER ever say:
"Hi prof"
"Hello"
"Dear Professor"
"Greetings of the day"
If you do, your email will be immediately deleted by 99% of professors.
▫️
Only start your applications with “Dear Prof. [second_name],”
And don’t
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I am happy to announce that I've been elected to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America for a 3-year term, starting in 2024! Here's hoping that it'll be a meaningful and productive service experience. I already have so many ideas!
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@katiedimartin
As a speaker of a Semitic language, a linguist, and generally a person on this planet, I can’t abide “seat” and “sitting” not immediately counting as circular right there, but also🐴
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man goes to professor. says everyone misunderstands him when he talks or writes, no matter how unambiguous his sentences are. prof says "treatment is simple. great linguist chomsky is in town. go ask him how to structure your sentences." man bursts into tears. "but professor,"
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Absolutely batshit crazy to attribute the decline in number of speakers of Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic to Zionism and the revival of Hebrew rather than the fucking Holocaust and the expulsion of Jews from their homes in Arab countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Syria, etc., respectively
has effectively destroyed centuries of unique diaspora languages. for every jewish community in every part of the world, there exists a unique language that is both reflective of the region and the jews speaking it. yiddish (approx. 600k native speakers) and judeo-arabic (3/6)
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Tech bro: Everyone talks about AI bias but I'm sure you never though about this one
Every single person working on speech recognition, studying socio-phonetics, or who has taken even one (1) linguistics class: 😬🙃🫠😱
Everyone talks about AI biais but I'm sure you never though about this one:
At
@gladia_io
, we've tackled a major challenge that often goes under-discussed: language detection in the presence of strong accents.
A common issue in speech recognition is misinterpretation caused by
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This is beyond garden path 😲
"Running as a plague spreading racist polls terribly."
@NicolleDWallace
discusses President Trump's declining poll numbers.
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PSA: you can believe that what Israel does in Gaza is wrong and reprehensible and at the same time believe that murdering civilians, raping women, kidnapping children and elderly people, is also wrong and reprehensible. If you celebrate war crimes, something is wrong with you
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The
@LingSocAm
invited me to a panel at the Annual Meeting. I tentatively accepted and went through a long process to get it approved and funded by my employer because they couldn’t pay. Today they disinvited in a personal email from the LSA President because I took too long??? >
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@LifeAfterMyPhD
I enjoyed where I lived, what I studied, my friends, my colleagues, my mentors. I made friends for life. I traveled. I got skills that got me the job I have now, the background to apply for a green card that lets me live where I want to. They were pretty good years
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Cannot stress enough how common, visible, depressing, and actually harmful this is to young scholars who are entering the field and are just looking around to see who is welcome and what is acceptable behavior
@katiedimartin
When I was in grad school pretty much every single prof (all male) was married to a former student. With whom they had co-authored an influential article and then he became famous and she became a wife.
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Linguistics 🫠
I think one of my weird takeaways from looking at LLMs is that language is more strategic than was generally assumed and extremely rich in implicit information.
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Today's linguist twitter discourse is triggering for me so I'll sit this one out, except to say: if you're a junior person or a minority being targeted by a senior person for any reason, I am here to support you and will go to great lengths to fight for you. My DMs are open.
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You all came up with SO MANY excellent ideas! I've put them all in one place, tried to consolidate similar ideas, and added some structure. I'm sure it's not perfect but here it is, for anyone who's about to teach an intro or just wants to share w/friends
Ling distraction: what the biggest language misconception that you'd like to correct in people with no ling background?
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Apropos of nothing. Professors! Don't date your students; don't sexually harass them; don't intimidate them; don't gaslight them; don't dismiss them when they share that their mental health is suffering. Just –– be decent humans. This shouldn't be hard 😠
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As of this month I’ve had my green card for 5 years, which means I can apply for citizenship. Becoming a permanent resident gave me so much freedom—to make long term plans, to make career changes, to buy a house. Immigration status is a privilege people don’t think about enough
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✨New✨: Hadas Kotek, Rikker Dockum, David Q. Sun. 2023. Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models. In ACM Collective Intelligence--refining the experiment in a controlled setting
Bonus: Grammatical hallucinations, for the linguists 🤖
@thai101
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@matt_boot_
Do you know the Tibetan numerals problem set we sometimes give as a challenge in into to ling? The idea of the solution is that there are silent sounds at the beginning of the words that you can detect in compounds of the right shape
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When I started researching non-ac jobs, a friend told me I had to figure out the answer to 3 questions:
1. What do you want to do?
2. Where do you want to live?
3. How much do you want to make?
As an academic, there wasn't any choice: you wanted a TT job anywhere, paying anything
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@MBisiada
@kellyswails
But we also have clear comparisons with states and countries that delayed social distancing measures. So it’s not like the insecticide example at all. We *know* infection and mortality rates go up when measures aren’t implemented.
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You guys. I ran A MILE. It wasn't fast (14 minutes) and it's just ONE mile. BUT. I did the whole thing with no pauses or walking and I could have kept going. Today, my muscles are totally fine and not killing me. Please clap and send pictures of pets or small humans as a reward
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Guess who just got an off-cycle promotion and a big ass salary bump?
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Name change news: the committee formerly known as COSWL is now **the Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics** (COGEL, read: kʌgl)! We hope this name better reflects our goals of promoting and advocating for gender minorities in our field 🥳Come join us!
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Hagit Borer's thoughtful critique of the discourse surrounding the Steven Pinker letter and resulting uproar in the linguistics community, eloquently expressing concerns about the emerging junior/senior divide and the
@LingSocAm
response. A must read.
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It's academic interview season!
I have recently published on my blog 25 distinct lists of questions I was asked on longlist and shortlist interviews when I was on the market.
Here is a summary of some of the most common questions 🧵
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I can't believe you cowards had drafts. I've put every single thought I've had in here for 8 straight years like a warrior
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@joshraclaw
Ableism aside, subtitles are super helpful to international students as well. There’s an extra processing load just keeping track of words and accents, plus trying to digest content at the same time. They actually *help* “understand different spoken varieties”. Such a bad take
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Some job apps are due this weekend and I think this is a good time to say again that the academic job market is atrocious and creating the materials can be soul-crushing. It is common to feel anxious. Please take care of yourselves
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@queenjulesverne
If you know you want something else, I generally think you should do that something else because a PhD is a huge investment in every way -- it's a full time job at very low pay and a high mental load, plus lost wages, retirement, etc. -- but if that's what you want, then do it!
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@CSSW4Palestine
You’ve misspelled “rape, torture, mutilation, murder, and kidnapping”. At least have the courage to be clear about the atrocities you glorify
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Yesterday I stayed up until 2am because I couldn't put down the book I'm reading. Today I'm resisting picking it up because if I do I'll finish it and I don't want it to be over so soon.
Going back to reading for fun has been one of the best parts of leaving academia for me 🙌
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Honestly this level of sweetness should be outlawed. It’s an absolute miracle that any work gets done in this house, given the views I have to endure
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Just so you know, your Palestinian and Israeli friends are not ok right now
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Job titles vary by company so this is a bit of a moving target, and obviously also depends on what you're looking for. Some useful keywords and titles would include: "conversation design", "voice user interface", "annotation", "localization", "internationalization", 1/
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Exactly two years ago I got my last shortlist rejection email and officially decided to leave academia. I may forever mourn what could have been, but I also recognize that I escaped an abusive relationship. I am so much happier now than I was at any point as an academic linguist
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People on here telling me I’m making industry sound too rosy: I have no illusions. Every job and industry has good sides and bad. I’m just here to make sure everyone knows their options so they can get _a_ job, preferably one they like and that pays the bills
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Is there a slack/discord/Twitter DM/whatev support group for live-complaining about Chomsky talks? I need one, esp today
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Ooh just got word that my course proposal has been approved! Looking forward to teaching a condensed "careers for linguists" class at the LSA Summer Institute at UMass). It'll be my first summer institute as student or teacher 🥳
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Some thoughts I've had:
- There is no such thing as a 'standard' or neutral dialect
- Dialects are complex socially-informed constructs
- Written text is vastly different from spoken language
- Prosody matters; phonology matters; lexical choices matter
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Settle a dispute for me. I was out earlier and my mom texted for me to pick up strawberries and peppers. I asked what color and she said “red and green”. Now she’s upset that I bought red peppers 😂
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What to say:
❌ you’ll get a job
❌ you deserve to get a job
❌ just hold on
❌ don’t worry, it’ll work out
✅ you’re more than good enough
✅ you’d make a great professor
✅ I know hiring decisions involve a lot of extraneous considerations
✅ I’ll support whatever you do next
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New blog post: Job application materials! in which I share two versions of my academic job application materials--one from my first post-PhD cycle, the other from my last cycle. Also the resume that got me my alt-ac job at the end of that last jobs cycle
I'm thinking of making a copy of my academic job application materials available online with an associate blog post. Any reason why I should think twice or not do it?
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Nothing sums up my personality better than these two facts:
1. I grind my own fresh coffee beans, heat my water to 200-205F (depending on beans), and make a pour over using my Chemex
2. Once I have a batch of coffee for the day, I'll heat it up in the microwave if it gets cold
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@focusfronting
Big lecture and you’re in the back? Fine. Smaller one and you’re clearly visible? Just ask the instructor. Personally I would be totally fine with it but out of respect it’s best to make sure. Some people may find it distracting or disrespectful
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But they are still “looking forward to seeing [me] in Denver!”
I am often the one defending them to others but well and truly fuck all the way off.
The amount of abuse of good will the LSA engages in is absolutely enraging
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Today is my birthday! (Yes, for real.)
Please celebrate with me by sharing pics of your pets or tiny humans 🐈🦮
I’ll start: here are Bugsy and Doobie sharing a bed earlier this week
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"ontologist/ontology", "UX/UI research/design", "interaction design", "human factors", "knowledge engineer", "information architect", "content management", "analytical linguist", "computational linguist" (some companies), "language engineer" (some companies), 2/
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This is your periodic reminder that if you're a precariously employed academic: (a) seeing others celebrating can be hard, even if you are simultaneously very happy for them, (b) constantly feeling like you're being pushed out of your chosen career is hard emotional labor, 1/
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I just took 90 minutes to do a thing I've been putting off for 3 months. Please clap.
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I'm filling out a form that has a "Language" field, with "Sign language" as an option, with a footnote comment: "Sign language represents any dialect of sign language" and I just absolutely 🤯
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I forgot about this for years but I still have my native speaker card and I think that should qualify me to participate in as many English language surveys as I want no questions asked 😎
@DrBlinguist
Many years ago a then-partner gave me a "native speaker card", like an actual physical card that says "native speaker", and so as an official card-carrying member, you're welcome
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It’s my first
#NationalComingOut
day. I’m some variant of gray/demi/ace, still fuzzy on the deets. I’ve told close friends but not my family bc I don’t want to do it over zoom (unless they secretly follow me here, in which case, hi). Coming out is weird, do I get to participate?
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For a fun evening activity, I wrote down 25 lolsob anecdotes from my academic campus visit days, in no particular order 🧵
#phdchat
#academia
@academic_exit
@AcademicChatter
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One question I’ve asked every speaker in my “careers for linguists” workshop is about the expected salary range for a first job. (I include it in the list of questions I send ahead of time so there are no surprises.) Some people get so flustered. But we should talk about it more
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I would say I'm experiencing pretty intense anger right now
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