COURSE 2: Career Discernment
- See the CALENDAR for the timetable of this Course.
- View or download the current COURSE PLAN.
“Let me show you what I’m going to do with my degree in linguistics!”
Learn how to demonstrate how your unique set of skills – from critical thinking to cross-cultural competency – make you invaluable in any professional setting.
Every linguist wants to find meaningful expression of their research and analytical skills and training. Fortunately, navigating the professional realm with purpose and discernment requires both research and analysis. This course is designed to help participants prepare for what’s next by first noticing how they have already been expressing themselves professionally (through choices in coursework, research projects, previous professional experiences, volunteer work, etc.). This grounding is helpful for 1) identifying the challenge(s) you want to tackle next 2) identifying others who are confronting these challenges (organizations of interest for example) and then 3) finding ways to contribute and collaborate as a linguist. Ultimately, you will design ways of talking about your work that will enable potential colleagues to experience the benefit of bringing you on board – why hiring a linguist would be a great decision!
Through interactive sessions and practical exercises, participants will gain valuable experience in talking about themselves, and specifically how they work. We will focus on how to frame skills effectively in job searches and networking endeavors to enable “would-be collaborators” to easily see how linguists think, work, and solve challenges. The course is designed not only to yield a set of “Grab-and-Go” language to be used in written and verbal career conversations, but ultimately to empower and equip career linguists with a sense of “choicefulness” and abundance when it comes to thinking about career next steps (where they might currently be sitting with overwhelm and scarcity).
This course will not be a repeat of the content in the general LCL program. Rather, it serves as an additional space for attendees to explore and apply LCL themes through in-depth peer collaboration. If you are someone who thrives in hands-on group settings, this course will provide an environment where you can immediately build on the main LCL program as you “try on” new ways of communicating about yourself and the ways that you can meaningfully contribute to the challenges that speak to you.
Instructor Bio:
The Career Discernment course is taught by Dr. Anna Marie Trester.
Anna is the founder of Career Linguist and is a career readiness instructor at Boise State University. As the author of Bringing Linguistics to Work and Employing Linguistics for Bloomsbury Press, she speaks and gives workshops as Career Linguist and with organizational partners PIER Consulting Group, The FrameWorks Institute, and Anecdote International.
Prior to joining FrameWorks, she served as the director of the MA in Language and Communication (MLC) program for the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where she worked with students to apply their sociolinguistic training to professional contexts. In addition to her work at Boise State, she has taught courses at Georgetown University, Howard University, and University of Maryland, University College. Her courses have covered cross-cultural communication, language and social media, and the ethnography of communication.
As an applied sociolinguist, Anna has research interests in improvisation, performance, narrative, intertextuality, professional self-presentation, language and identity, language in social media, and the language of business. She is the co-editor (with renowned linguistics professor Deborah Tannen) of Discourse 2.0, published in 2013 by Georgetown University Press. Anna was profiled by the Linguistics Society of America in its December, 2014, member spotlight. She received her MA from New York University and her PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University.
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