Why did you choose to study Linguistics?

I initially came to UVM as a Chemistry major and remained in the Chem department for the first year. However, when I took LING 80 as a ‘fun’ class, because I was interested in phonetics and enjoyed my French language courses, I fell in love. The same minute details and structures that I was learning about in Chemistry applied to Linguistics, except instead of the periodic table, atoms, molecules, and compounds, I was looking at sounds, sentence constituents and morphemes. I switched majors the next semester and never looked back!

What was your favorite LING course at UVM?

My favorite course was either Phonetics or Syntax. As I said, my brain tends to like looking at very structured and mathematical problems.

Do you have any advice for current or prospective students?

Take all the core classes–syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics and semantics–these help you dive deeper in all the other classes!

What are your hopes/plans for the future?

I will be working in Boston next year at Amazon as a Data Associate within the Alexa Skills team. This work involves processing language data from Alexa. I also hope to return to school later in my career for either a Masters or PhD!

While these questions are tailored toward graduating seniors, they also apply to very recent graduates who are still in the process of making the post-graduation transition to the next chapter of their lives. 

If you are senior or recent graduate of the Linguistics Program at UVM, and would like to share information about your undergraduate experience, send your answers to these questions to uvmlinguistics@gmail.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2018 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Senior Spotlights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.